Posts Tagged ‘piracy’

I know this topic has been covered many, many times by people far more eloquent than I am but sometimes you just have to chime in on a subject, you know? The other day one of my google alerts caught a question on Yahoo answers of all places asking where they could find a free downlod of Playing with Fyre, one of my Lyrical releases. Luckily someone was quick off the mark answering and replied with something along the lines of ‘what you’re asking is illegal, Mina writes for a living and, as such, doesn’t give her work away for free’. (whoever this person was, I couldn’t find an email to thank you, so…well, thank you )

Now technically this isn’t piracy, this person was just asking a question but it highlights (to me anyway) a basic lack of understanding about eBooks. Ie – that they’re free just because they’re available on the internet and this leads into a far more disturbing arguement from the diehard pirates that everything on the internet is theirs for nothing, by right.

Huh? Right? I don’t get this part. I and other authors work long and hard to produce a product (yes, stories are a product when you  get down to the nitty gritty of publishing). We spend long hours in front of a screen, hammering away at keys to create something entertaining, beautiful, wonderous and all that…Those are hours we could be spending with family, going to see a movie, hell reading books instead of writing them. Enjoyable things instead of the sometimes painful process of creating a story (although, don’t get me wrong, sometimes writing is the best feeling in the world! And sometimes it sucks). But we do it, we write, we edit, we polish the story and then we proudly announce it’s for sale.

And then find a pirate copy on Astatalk within 24 hours. Which people are downloading for nothing, free, zip, nada.

Sorry, correction. These people are not downloading, they are stealing. Each download steals from the publisher, the editor, the cover artist…basically anyone who had anything to do with prepping the book for release…and last but not least, the author.

It gets worse. These people actually request books from others, who then go and buy them with the intent of pirating them. They’re proud of what they do, they boast about it. They hold little competitions about avoiding detection (which then triggers an author or publisher takedown request).

You know what the end result is? Authors stop writing. Yeah, you heard me. Authors will stop writing the stories these people (and other, legitimate fans) claim to love and wait with baited breath for.

Why?

Simple math really. You spend X hours doing something that brings you in $20 a month, then the pirates start up and that $20 dwindles to 15, or 10 or less. You need to pay bills, or even you could have all those hours as quality family time…well, it’s a no-brainer, ain’t it?

So what do we do about it?

Not much we as authors can do, except send multitudes of take down orders to all these ratty little sites and wait for a) abuse from the pirates b) spam and c) spam. Did I mention spam? I did, good.

The other part is up to you guys, the readers. All we authors ask is you support us by buying our books, not downloading them from torrent sites. We’re not talking a lot, a couple of quid or bucks…it’s not gonna break the bank. Buy from the publisher, hell go and buy from Fictionwise or Amazon if it’s cheaper. I normally don’t say that as they take a HUGE cut and us authors get less but, as long as you’re getting a legal download, it doesn’t matter.

You might not think that you doing that makes a difference but every journey is made up of small steps and, believe me, you’ll be making a huge difference to the authors whose work you love to read!! And, by helping, you’ll probably be keeping some of them writing…