Pretty annoyed (mild term) to find my new book is up on a book piracy site before it has even been published! I know this happens a lot and my publishers are really good at getting stuff taken down, but WHO is downloading this stuff? I mean, my book is 99p, and free if you order it in at the library. At least with both those options I get my 10p royalties.
On Writing : Book Piracy... Can You Protect Your Work? by D.E. White
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Ouch Daisy! Book piracy? I know about film piracy but I never even thought of literature being taken, how naive of me! Is it more prevalent now books are available on line?
I hope you can get some advice about dealing with this stuff. All I can think is your work is becoming so popular they consider it a worthwhile enterprise. Very bitter sweet analogy there as this whole thing deserves an angry face emoji. Just glad your publishers are on the case for you. Best of luck and hugs and if I was as great as Ava Cole I'd track 'em down for you.
#piracy #lawyer #literature #advice
Aw thanks Sara, and yes, you are right it's all the ebook versions. I guess the same in the film and music industry? The book piracy sites pop up all the time and mostly they vanish as fast, but I've never had one up prepublication before. Hope all is good with you?
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Unfortunately there's not much you can do, since most of the piracy websites are run decentralized and even if you get one thing taken off it will pop up somewhere else.
It sucks and I'm sorry.
But I can give you a different view on things that might help you at least look at it differently and feel better about it a little.
My good friends for who we shoot music videos for made a couple of albums and at one point they found one of their albums on a piracy site.
The lead singer said that it was a good thing because that meant that at least people were listening to them. Which is true, because nobody cares about something crappy and will go trough ripping the music and sharing it if they don't like it and people won't download it if it sucks. So at least consider it as a compliment.
On the other hand I know it sucks because you're not getting your royalties but with services that offer books, movies and music getting more and more affordable people that don't know what to do will just use those services. So in the end you're only losing a small percentage of your readers and most often those are people who you'd never have as a buyer anyway.
This can be seen quite clearly in my country of Slovenia. When there were no services like AmazonPrime or Netflix or similar, movie piracy was very widespread but these days when streaming services are common, the percentage went way down.
But it is a double edged sword since with more powerful platforms the value of creators goes down again since their goal is for subscriptions and not selling content. Content is just what they need but really don't value much.
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Vital Butinar That is good advice and thank you!
Meg, I know right - bastards! A few author friends and I reported it as a copyright infringement via Google and it's now been taken down (not because of that but just because they have moved on.) Yes, must have been an ARC ;-( or someone hacked. I always delete ARCs after I have read them and like you, consider it a privilege to be offered one. Normally the piracy sites don't bother me too much, because shit happens, but I was fuming this one had it pre-pub and it was ranked 4 on the Google search for the book.