THIS week a 19-year-old literary sensation was due to make the journey from New Jersey to London to promote her book about a swotty girl who gets a glamorous life.

But in a plot twist she never foresaw, Kaavya Viswanathan’s appearances have been cancelled and her book withdrawn amid allegations of plagiarism.

It could have been just the latest in a series of author scandals to hit the publishing industry. But the story has also shone a harsh light on one of the publishing world’s secrets — the factory-like creation of a babe-tastic author.

Indian-born Viswanathan was just 17 when she secured a two-book deal for $500,000 (£275,000) on the strength of her first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.

The daughter of two New Jersey-based doctors, she got her break while using a $10,000-plus counselling service for her — successful — application to Harvard. The founder of the service looked over her novel and passed it on to an agent at William Morris, the famed talent agency.

From there it was farmed out to 17th Street Productions, a division of Alloy Entertainment, now probably the most famous “book packager” in America. Alloy specialises in developing young adult “chick lit” authors before passing them on to publishers.

Alloy’s team craft the proposal, shape the plot and create characters. Even the writing of the book is often farmed out to a team of authors. The process is more similar to television writing than most readers’ idea of the creation of a novel and the packaging closer to creating a boy band than promoting a new literary star.

Among Alloy’s hit series are The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, recently made into a film, and the Sweet Valley High books, which became a TV series. This weekend Alloy had three books in the New York Times children’s paperback bestseller list. It did not return calls for comment.

After Alloy’s input, Opal was picked up by Little Brown, a division of media giant Time Warner. Little Brown, too, was unavailable for comment.

The novel tells the story of Opal, a bookish teen from New Jersey who gets rejected by Harvard. A plan code-named HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life) is concocted to get her into college.

But Viswanathan’s literary life is now on hold after her college paper, The Harvard Crimson, published extracts from novels by fellow author Megan McCafferty that bear a striking resemblance to Opal.

McCafferty’s novel Sloppy Firsts contains the following passage: “He’s got dusty reddish dreads that a girl could never run her hands through. His eyes are always half-shut. His lips are usually curled in a semi-smile, like he’s in on a big joke that’s being played on you but you don’t know it yet.”

A passage from Viswanathan’s novel reads: “He had too-long shaggy brown hair that fell into his eyes, which were always half shut. His mouth was always curled into a half smile, like he knew about some big joke that was about to be played on you.”

McCafferty’s novel: “But then he tapped me on the shoulder, and said something so random that I was afraid he was back on the junk.”

Viswanathan’s novel: “... he tapped me on the shoulder and said something so random I worried that he needed more expert counseling than I could provide.”

Viswanathan has apologised and said she “internalised” parts of McCafferty’s books and that any borrowing had been unintentional. But her publisher has now pulled the books from stores. Last week McCafferty’s publisher, Crown Publishing Group, rejected her apology as “deeply troubling and disingenuous”.

Opal is the latest in a series of scandals to have rocked the publishing industry. This year bestselling author James Frey was shown to have fabricated large parts of his hard-hitting memoir of addiction, A Million Little Pieces.

Frey had become a millionaire after being endorsed by TV icon Oprah Winfrey and her powerful book club. The chat-show host later eviscerated Frey on her show for lying to her and her audience.

The Frey scandal came as underground literary sensation JT LeRoy was exposed as a hoax. The youthful and press-shy LeRoy was supposed to have spent his youth as a cross-dressing hooker but turned out to be as fictional as his characters. The books were in fact written by a 40-year-old San Francisco woman named Laura Albert.

In both cases the writers were the authors of their own demise. In the Opal case, Alloy’s collegiate approach to writing raises questions, but Viswanathan is taking full responsibility.

Plagiarism has always been an issue in the literary world. But Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of The Bookseller, the trade magazine, said that copying had become both easier to do — and to detect — thanks to the rise of the internet and computers.

“It’s easy now to cut and paste chunks of other people’s work. When you are writing a novel, you could easily forget you have done it. But then it is also easier to detect,” he said.

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