Anonymous... Believe it or not, you are nearly an author's best friend, as far as pirates go. You are the atypical pirate we don't much mind. You BUY books, if you like an author. You don't share books, which is wonderful, in my book. You don't illegally sell our books. I still dislike how you go about finding your reading material, but hey...you are better than the norm, because what you're doing is not inherently different than using library, save the fact that you could be prosecuted ala Napster.
FWIW, if authors offer a free read, feel free to pass those along on the pirate forums. Any author with half a brain gives permission to pass those along anyway, and if you want to be sure, ask for permission to pass along free reads. You might be pleasantly surprised at what authors will allow you. Unless they are tracking downloads and ask you to pass the direct link to it for that reason (and some pirate forums DO work on download links), you'll likely get permission.
Sorry...I disagree that the larger amount buy books as you do, but that's based entirely on my experiences with them. I'd love to believe that the majority are like you, but that won't fly with my experience. I see many more that are illegally selling books, that justify rampant piracy and admit they never buy a thing...or so rarely do as to be heartbreaking...and so forth. They crow about it and challenge you to stop them. Kudos on not being that type.
FWIW, many authors (including me) agree with you about the serialized book idea. If I really thought there was a market for it, I'd do it. I may try that one, just to see if I can make it work.
I know others that did it...including one fantasy author and one erom author. Neither reported that it worked better than putting the book out in a single unit. In fact, several authors who have written unrelated stories in a world or serialized worlds said they sold better when placed in a single unit, because readers complained at getting the story piecemeal and readers that like novels but dislike short stories or novelettes prefer the novel-length anthology or book, but that was also 4 years or so ago. The market may have evolved since then.
Now, this dislike isn't universal. I know that, which is why I would be willing to try a serialized novel or two and see if I can make it work. Proof in the making? The TXT serials overseas, sent to cell phones, reportedly work very well. But is that the serialization? Or the direct delivery to the cell phone? I can't say.
Tek'a... I'm not going to repeat myself again that I do not see a one to one loss on anything. You CHOOSE not to read in detail, so it's not worth it to waste my time again saying it.
I know more about what the actual losses are to me than you do, but I'll agree to disagree, because it's not your contracts on the line here. It's mine, something you obviously don't care about. That's typical "If it doesn't affect me, I don't care." non-logic, which I find more than tedious.
You guys said you wanted to understand where I'm coming from, but your response shows you want to ignore the very real problems and try to pick nits that have (in some cases) already been answered several times and in other cases, have nothing to do with the subject at hand.
My site has nothing to do with this, IMO; it's just something for you to complain about... WHERE my site is hosted is of no concern, as long as it works. The domain name makes it easy to find/remember and allows me to change where the pages are stored without problems of my readers learning a new site, the biggest hurdles many authors that choose odd names for their sites or place them on someone else's servers find they face.
I take reader input on improving the experiece for them, which means (in the last year) the nav system has been completely revamped with subpages, a site map was added, and at least six new pages readers requested were added. Are improvements in the works? Of course. I keep adding cross-linking that makes finding what you need easier. If you hate it now, you should have seen it two years ago.
With nine years of site builds, on three separate programs, as I trade up in them, yes...there is a lot of code that could be stripped, but the site is also more than 90 pages, thousands of images, covers 21 series worlds and 10-20 releases per year, and gets updated for changes at least once a week, so a complete strip-down and rebuild is not coming soon. When/if I have the time and money, I will do a full rebuild again, from the bottom up, something I haven't done in the last six years. Without paying someone $10,000+ per year (for the number of pages and updates I need) I don't have (more for the redesign year...I've just taken quotes on this for a group I sit the BoD on, so I know what it would cost me) or several thousand dollars to design it for me and let me maintain it myself (which means my programs will probably add in code again, as I maintain and add to it), it's not changing to what you envision soon. Not that I'm sure how you envision making more than 90 pages a smooth ride, in the first place.
But, this just proves you don't understand MY business. The bottom line is this... Most readers find me on Yahoogroups, on blogs, in chats, through publishers, and through resale sites and either buy direct from promos there or come to the site looking for very specific information. I have made the most requested/new release/news-related information easy for them to find. Someone doing a "I'll go from page to page and just browse" is going to find the site nearly impossible to grasp, simply because you have no set answers you want or idea of how to find them. With 21 series worlds and 90 pages, someone who comes in to browse is going to have problems with the amount of information, no matter how I organize it. The best bet for a browser is to either go to the book page and look at content types or to go to the site map and look at genre notes. But as I said, that's not the norm for someone coming to my site.
FWIW, I think your understanding of my market is not only skewed; it's completely uninformed as to the BUSINESS of being a writer. It's all well and good for you to believe what you do, but I know what I have to do legally, contractually, and realistically.
I agree that anyone trying to stop piracy is tilting at windmills, but I'm not trying to stop it entirely. I'm doing what I am required to do (which includes defending my copyright when I find pirates) and trying to find a common ground that DOES work and doesn't cause me more trouble than it's worth.
Thanks for letting me know that the trolls are not the usual on here. Being new, I was starting to think the trolls were the backbone.
nasch... First of all, there is no content that cannot be copied. If a man can make it, a man can break it. You should know that. All the idiots at NY conglomerates that really believe DRM works or that only putting books in print will stop piracy are deluding themselves and are sadly misinformed. Print-only books are pirated all the time. I had the lovely time of explaining to Stephen Zacharius at Kensington a good two or three years ago how his print-only books were being pirated as e-books, and all DRM does is punish honest readers while not slowing pirates, in the least.
But, I'm not asking people to buy things blind. This is where the argument starts circling. I offer free reads, free first in a series, excerpts, associated works, rating scales, and reviews/awards. I'm doing everything I can to make sure people buy things they will enjoy, and if that's not me, they can feel free to buy elsewhere. I even make suggestions for those that ask for them. I highly suggest other authors do the same and teach that at conventions and online, but I cannot control their business decisions, even when I disagree with them.
Anyone worth their salt buying a product should be willing to invest the time in reading up on that product first. When I want to buy anything from a book to a computer, I'm out there researching first. That's responsible buying in action. The problem, from my seat, is people that want to shortcut the process and get everything for free, at which point, a lot of them decide it's easy to get away with not paying for anything they want that's available on the web. And it all goes downhill from there.
There is no converting *some* pirates, which I why I cringe every time someone says something like that. A large number know what the laws say, but all they care about are themselves and their reasons for doing what they do.
Some feel they are playing Robin Hood or "sticking it to the man" and punishing the greedy corporate fat-cats, but the fact is that there are only 6 NY conglomerate presses (4 of which are foreign owned), a handful of black-box presses they own, and then you have 70,000+ small or medium sized presses in the US alone...as well as self-publishing authors.
Worse, a lot of these people use a blockbuster author like Nora Roberts, Stephen King, or Dan Brown as an example and talk about authors with two or three yachts and huge advances and millions of copies in sales. I hate to break it to them...and to myself, but those authors are one in 10,000 or less of the authors out there.
What is the average like? Your average NY Times bestseller may be taking home (after returns...remember that wasteful NY system?...and agent's cut and so forth) only $25,000-35,000 on a book that took a year or more to write. Several NY Times bestsellers have shared their numbers in the past year, so I'm talking about these people, in specific, who wanted to show other aspiring authors what it really means in sales.
Not to mention NY Times beseller list is NOT based on sales. It's based on ORDERS. The first three weeks or month a book is there, it's just because the bookstores ordered it. If it comes back or stays after that point, it means there was enough sales to cause reorders. It is absolutely possible for a NY conglomerate press to pour a ton of money into a book they HOPE will sell well, have huge preorders from bookstores, and have the book fail utterly. Happens more often than you might believe. I could tell you my personal plans for stopping it, but that would take an entirely new post.
Most authors do not make 5 or 6 figures in advance of a book. The average advance for a NY conglomerate publisher has fallen below $5,000. Some are below $2,000 for a new author or one that only has indie experience behind them.
In indie, you usually don't find advances, at all. Of my 7 publishers, I have one that offers advances for novel-length work...only novel length...of $100. No, I am not joking. If I write a novel for them, that's my advance against sales. The up side is that we get either monthly or quarterly royalty payments, and the only returns we deal with are on print copies of the book...not e-book.
Midlist authors usually don't make enough money to live on. Very few earn enough to quit the day job, even if they are in a two-working-parent family. I've seen more high-end indies able to quit the day job than I've seen my NY midlist compatriots able to in the last five years. Your average midlist or lower author is working a day job. If he/she is not working one, it's more often due to personal disability, dealing with a disabled relative or child, or raising several small children, which means she'll return to work when they are all school age. I stopped working when I had a back injury then went back part-time a year later.
According to the latest surveys on indie/e press, the average book sells less than 1000 copies in the first year, and we all know about diminishing returns after that. I've done better. I've done worse. I've sold 800 in a good first month, but not every book does that.
Back to pirates... Some feel they are entitled to anything not nailed down. I had one gent (I use the term loosely) tell me he believed everything in life should come with a money-back guarantee and he should have no personal responsibility in vetting purchases ahead of time or taking that chance of buying anything in life. It wasn't even enough for this guy to read one book and buy others. Nope. He is the typical pirates pirate stereotype, which I'd hoped didn't really exist for several years.
Some have been duped into believing they have purchased rights they haven't...rights to resell books.
Some don't like the laws, and rather than complaining to lawmakers and joining authors in our attempts to deal with them to get decent laws, they break them as a form of civil disobedience, which only makes the lawmakers feel more restrictive laws are needed, and that works against both authors AND readers, in the long run. It's a knee-jerk reaction that they bring on themselves, but readers blame authors, as if we wanted this to happen. Another price to piracy.
And so on...and so on...
On the other hand... Some are uneducated in what the laws say (not that I think ALL the laws make sense, and I personally tell people when I think the laws are wrong, so don't think I'm tied to that). Those can be educated. I do educate them. AWaY is a fantastic new program that lets readers ask questions of authors in a safe and intelligent discussion.
FWIW, I'm all for laws that make sense and have used Obama's call for creator comments to make that clear to them. Believe it or not, a lot of authors out there feel as I do and are not the enemy of common sense and business sense...or of readers.
Of course, you don't understand why I do the things I do, because you've already illustrated that you don't understand contract law, at least. Why are pirates dangerous, and why do I bother to take them down? There are a couple of main reasons.
One is that they provide misinformation to the subset that really don't know what cost there is to me, people that ARE potential buyers of my work. Given the right information about the whole deal, those people often choose to buy and not pirate work. Those are the pirates I have any hope of educating and eventually stopping. Those that don't care...they will just continue doing what they do. I know that.
The second is the little nit in copyright law. I have to show that I am actively trying to protet my copyright. I don't have the excuse that I don't know where to find the books and how to.
FWIW, it costs me more in frustration than it does in time. Someone here thinks I'm losing a ton of time. That's not so for me. I've got take-downs streamlined so that I just plug in associated links and such and fire off an e-mail with the notice in it that I have presaved for just such an occasion. Less than five minutes tops, and all the notifications come on lists and alerts, so I'm not out scouring sites these days, like I was two years ago. In some cases, it takes even less time, because some publishers do the actual take-down notices for the authors, and all I have to do is send the rep links.
Third reason... Simply put, if the books are that easy to find pirated all over creation, potential publishers see that as a down side and think I'm not proactive at protecting my copyright. See reason #2 above. That means to advance my career, I've got to keep the pirated copies out there to a minimum. You see, this is the part pirates don't understand. Sensical or not, I have to play the game to continue publishing outside of self-publishing, and from experience, I make 100 times as much with a publisher than I do self-publishing a book.
However, I take a different route than some authors do. I've started loading my free reads on the same pirate sites I take the pirated ones down from, with the information that this is a free read... And so forth. It's different. Will it work? Shrug. Who knows.
Fourth reason... I definitely HAVE to address anytime I find someone illegally selling my books. Perhaps you don't realize how many pirates do this. I do. I found almost 400 pirated copies of my books on eBay in a single month. All being resold by people who either lied to say they had resale rights, lied to say they were public domain, or whatever. THAT is not something I can pretend I didn't see. That's why we are actively working on a petition to make the VeRO program at eBay more author/publisher friendly.
Fifth reason... When they are selling free reads, I will NOT allow a pirate to cheat my readers. If I offer a free read, it's free. It's not just that it's against my creative commons license or anything like that. It's pure outrage that they dare cheat my readers...ever. It's a moral imperative to protect my readers. Some readers don't realize how much authors love readers. We don't take mistreatment of readers lightly...well, there are a few authors that do, but they are in the minority.
Sixth reason... And the last one for now... When it's a charity work, I will go out of my way to protect it. It's out there to do good, not to line someone's pockets.
As I said before, I'm in indie. I think NY conglomerate press are idiots in using DRM, in thinking print only protects them, in their pricing structures, in their mass market offset programs with all the attendant wastes... I could go on for hours. From my seat, indie has the middle ground with the ability to succeed.
Another thought process for those of you that want to try a book from a particular author before buying... Just an off the wall thought that could work well for everyone involved. Become a reviewer for a review site or start a review site of your own. Follow the code of ethics for reviewers, which includes not pirating the books you are sent for review. Only choose the books that sound (from blurb and past experience) as if they will appeal to you. And find your new authors that way. If you make a name for yourself, even indie reviewers can get copies sent to them. Scifiguy on Blogger is like that. Huntress Reviews is another respected small indie reviewer.
BTW, AC...I generally have between ten and twenty new releases a year. I'm fairly sure my time management is a little better than the average bear's variety. Don't you worry about me.
You can only do "special editions" of your book for higher amounts if one of two things are true: you are self-publishing or your publisher does them. Contracted to a publisher, I cannot simply choose to make special editions of my books.
What I am seeing on this group is a gross misconception about what contracts say and what return we look for in any promotion we do.
But, I will finish answering you, since I didn't get a chance to finish earlier.
Where I haven't found my books would be more accurate? Where have I? I have no clue what you consider the major sites, and yes...I take down books when I find them. Sometimes that's quickly. Sometimes that's when they've been on a site for several months, because that's when I find them.
Recently (within the last few months), I have taken down books from or asked my publishers to take down books from Demonoid, Underground Forum, Astatalk (the links to the other sites where they are shelved), fileshandler, 4shared, eBay (do NOT get me started on those creeps), Scribd, eCrater, Twitter, Blogger, LiveJournal, Yahoogroups (many of which link to a site, like the FreeBookClub site), Facebook, Mininova, zshare, uploading.com... To be honest, I don't have time to go back through and name them all. Since I get the notices of pirated work from several places, it would take me hours just to do a couple of months worth of notices I have saved.
The rest of your comment is ridiculous. Of course, I do not expect a perfect 1:1 payback on pirated works. But you cannot point to anything on my royalty statements and NOT track jumps back to one of a few things I do anyway, which would include new releases, promo events, and so forth. There is nothing unaccounted for that is conceivably piracy, and if I'm getting less than a 1% return on it (and I would be getting less than that, by the numbers I see), it's not worth my promo time and dollars.
You'll have to pardon me if I don't see being pirated more than a thousand times in a month as free promotion. I see it as sales that will never be, thanks to some selfish pirates that feel entitled to anything they are capable of grabbing off the net, because they are that unethical and someone else providing it to them are, as well. If you want to promote someone, I have already told you how to do it in a way that doesn't cause them harm.
Enough said. I've wasted enough time with people who clearly just want to pirate and have the authors say, "That's okay honey." The truth is, I'd rather have a pirate not know who I am than try to "help" me their way.
Anonymous has made it painfully clear that this group is nothing but a bunch of pirates trying to make themselves feel better about what they do. Got it. IOW, you don't give a crap about who you hurt. Have fun.
Let's start with your second question first... I fully support libraries and donate print books to them...as well as supporting legitimate e-book libraries, but libraries are not comparable to piracy. Neither are used book stores. Why? Because any print pass alongs have wear and tear inherent in the system, and short someone pirating the book, there is a single copy changing hands. Legitimate e-book library programs work in much the same way; you are only permitted a limited number of shares or reads or lends, before a new copy must be purchased.
Now, don't talk to me about 100 year old hard bound books. I have a few approaching that. But, your average book made today isn't made like those century-old books.
I personally don't consider a person lending a single copy to friends a pirate, per se. Unfettered hand-to-hand sharing has the CAPACITY to exceed 10,000 copies in 13 passes. Will it? Probably not. Is it against copyright? Yes. Is a person sharing a copy of my book with a single friend hurting me? Nope, and not only is it impossible to police, what person in his/her right mind would want to?
I do have to laugh at your "high price" statement. Sorry. I am not with NY conglomerate press. My e-books are always priced lower by far than mass market of a similar length and genre. That's a pirate's arguement, I've found. "All books are SO expensive." Baloney. Most indie presses will price a novel-length fiction e-book between $5 and $7. And I'm not asking anyone to buy without a free test run that I freely offer. I offer not only free reads and the occasional first book of a series for free, but also first chapter of books to see if it appeals...and a rating scale to help people avoid what they won't like.
I agree that word of mouth is good for you, but readers can give that other ways. You can pass along my free reads, to your hearts' content. I give blanket permission to pass my approved free reads, as far and wide as you wish, as long as you aren't changing anything or trying to profit from it. IOW, don't try to resell them (one of the types of pirates I really do loathe), but pass them for free.
In addition, they can write reviews about the books they liked...or didn't. I get some great reviews from readers not affiliated with review sites. That's always a treat for an author. We love it. You can rate the books on Amazon or someplace and post reviews there. Talk about books you like on reader lists. When someone asks: "What should I read next?", say something. Tell them what your favorites were.
Oh, and yes... A single share with one friend or even a couple friends doesn't bother me, but this is where a lot of pirates miss the boat. A share or two isn't killing me. Loading my book on a site where thousands can download at one time is. Reselling my work without permission is not only hurting me but the other readers. Reselling my free reads is downright cheating other readers, since the pirate is duping them into paying for something they could be getting for free from me.
Uh...yeah. You don't know much about the mid-list and lower author, do you? All the things you're talking about work only for a subset of authors. Problems I see here, coming from the author seat?
A) You are rarely allowed to sell things with your cover art on them. That right is kept by the publisher. You can make things for free give-aways but not to sell. That's what all my contracts read.
B) Unless you are getting a huge advance, and few are these days, you don't have the money to have art made just for you to use on sale items and to pay not only for the art but also for the license you need to do this legally. Unless you are lucky enough to be an artist, as well as an author, chances are, you don't have art to use...see A.
C) Very few authors make this sort of sale system work. Even Sherrilyn Kenyon, who has the very successful Mighty Barnacle sale site, doesn't sell book marks. She gives them free in packages of other items you get from her. And that sort of merchandising, even if you can make it work, takes years to build up. MB wasn't big until a few years ago, and Sherrilyn has been publishing since at least 1993 or 1994 and has been in NY for at least 5 years or so now and a NY Times bestseller since very early in her NY career.
In short, your arguments and thoughts on the matter might work for her, but they are highly unlikely to work for someone not at her level. I've tried selling t-shirts and other items. I think I sold three in as many years. Why? Because I'm not her, and I don't have her support network or her audience.
The whole buggy whip thing has nothing to do with free reads and piracy. You just like saying it so it sounds like you're saying something, right?
The actual analogy would be the buggy producer that clings to the old model and dies as a business, trying desperately to sell horse and buggy parts, unwilling to branch out, when he should be saying, "I'm in the transportation business." It might be argued that the NY conglomerate presses just coming into the established e-market are sabotaging themselves that way, and I would not argue a word of that comparison.
Using it [the buggy whip analogy] to mean a dead market is misleading, since saddles and whips and tack are still made today but marketed to a subset of the buyers they once were. It is now something of a niche market, not the staple market it once was.
Since I do give away free samples to sell the whole, I fail to see how I am not discussing it. I fully support the concept, but my experience says pirates pirate and readers buy. The subset of readers that overlap with pirates is very small. Just simple math and observation.
But ulike musicians, few authors can make money on public appearances. Your blockbusters (Nora Roberts, Dan Brown, Stephen King) can, and some NY Times bestsellers can. Most cannot. But that's well established.
I'd counter that you are being obtuse here. I've already said I have free content, and not just the ones people decide to heist from me; I've also already said that most pirates are not purchasing the books...ever, while I have measurable numbers of people buying based on free reads I offer.
But, I counter that free content given willingly doesn't compare to piracy in returns for me. There is no "taking advantage" of people who buy nothing...i.e. the pirates. There's no appealing to them, no stopping them, no reasonining with them, and no return from them, save in frustration. That's the facts of life, as we know it. The only ones that do me any good at all are the ones that buy something, and those are the ones downloading the copies I OFFER for free. So, from my chair...you are just trying to obscure the fact that piracy is not helping me with double talk.
You cannot compare books to music. It doesn't work well. Some differences?
It's very difficult for authors to make money from public appearances, while musicians can. In addition to how hard it is to GET a signing and get it without being hampered by the store (unless you're a NY Times bestseller or something, in which case they bend over backward to accomodate you), public readings by authors are not commonplace. The last author to do well with this was probably Sam Clements or someone not much past his time. They do shows now where actors read erotic work or horror work or something similar, but not the authors very often. If we do public readings, they are free readings to spur the sales of actual books. Few people have the love of books to sit and listen to someone else read to them, though poets sometimes manage it and I've read short stories to crowds...up to about 4000 words in length. Not to mention that there are hundreds of thousands of authors competing for public appearance, of some sort.
Another nit with your mindset... No, fiction books are NOT just information. They are a creative endeavor. They aren't just facts thrown at the reader, and even if we were talking about non-fiction books, I would counter that the research, organizing, money put into producing the book (which is true of e-books just as it is for paper books), distribution (ditto), and marketing (ditto) is done for a reason. That reason is the return on investment. If you just want to write and give it away for free, you can do that. I do that with some stories. The ones I publish for pay are there with an expectation of return, even if I do choose to give an older title away for free to spur the sale of the newer ones.
MS, I fully agree that readers fall into two categories, but the reasons to use handheld readers and/or e-books may be more complex than you realize, whether they read to read or love the words inside the books. Some reasons to consider e-books you didn't adress...
1) Vision impaired... Either increasing font size or text to speech programs aid readers, and both are available for any unsecured or DRM broken e-book. In addition, some doctors suggest e-reading to vision impaired because they claim the readers are easier on some people's eyes than bright white book pages are...as long as you're not using a backlit screen in a completely darkened room, which they curse. But others find reading from a screen harder. That one is very individual.
2) Expat or business traveler... e-Books allow even avid readers to purchase and carry hundreds of books while nowhere near an English-language bookstore and eliminates the need to either dispose of the books (oh the horror of that) or ship them home.
3) Space saving... Likewise, some people don't have the space to keep all the books they'd like to reread around, but they can store e-books.
4) Search features... Depending on the format of the book, you can search entire hard drives of books you own to find a single phrase or subject.
5) Prior paper book losses... I know from experience how painful it is to lose all of your beloved paper books in fire or flood. With e-books, you can backup books off site and/or in several places to protect your investment in your books. I'm still replacing books I lost in a house fire 11 years ago, for instance.
I'm sure I'm missing some, but all are valid reasons and have nothing to do with whether someone reads to read or immerses in the book. Whether or not you can immerse in an e-book is completely personal. I can. You seem to be saying you can't.
After nearly 8 years of watching my own efforts, I thought you were doing well with the fact that free first books or free reads help sales. I teach the same thing myself and offer more than a dozen free reads daily and periodic free first book in a series.
I heartily disagree with the 20 times thing. IMO, that's hyperbole or at least non-repeatable with any certainty; it's one person's experience with a very specific audience and cannot be counted upon to work that way for everyone. My experiments with giving a free first book of a series for a week or so show 4-6 times increase in sales of the books for several months and a diminishing increase after that fact. Offering a free read (short story through novella-length) in perpetuity shows a lesser increase over time and nothing as easily qualifiable, since it's not a limited time period that can have a single shockwave aftereffect to test.
Another complaint... 20 to 1 over what period of time? And at what rate does that decrease? Without that information, these are useless data bits tossed into the ether for me.
But when you really lost me was when you compared this to piracy. That's where it fails for me. I've tracked initial downloads of free reads and books given for free and been able to quantify a return on them. By comparison, I can pull down more than a thousand illegal copies of books in a month (from a site that was clean the month before, so I have a time frame on the downloads) and see no spike in sales whatsoever.
Further, this line of thinking doesn't take into account that I can see whole series being pirated, which means they aren't pirating number 1 and buying 2-5. They are pirating them all. How does that increase sales? It doesn't. The pirates taking #1 and buying 2-5 are the exception...not the rule, in my experience.
BL
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thanks for writing in, new Anonymous
FWIW, if authors offer a free read, feel free to pass those along on the pirate forums. Any author with half a brain gives permission to pass those along anyway, and if you want to be sure, ask for permission to pass along free reads. You might be pleasantly surprised at what authors will allow you. Unless they are tracking downloads and ask you to pass the direct link to it for that reason (and some pirate forums DO work on download links), you'll likely get permission.
Sorry...I disagree that the larger amount buy books as you do, but that's based entirely on my experiences with them. I'd love to believe that the majority are like you, but that won't fly with my experience. I see many more that are illegally selling books, that justify rampant piracy and admit they never buy a thing...or so rarely do as to be heartbreaking...and so forth. They crow about it and challenge you to stop them. Kudos on not being that type.
FWIW, many authors (including me) agree with you about the serialized book idea. If I really thought there was a market for it, I'd do it. I may try that one, just to see if I can make it work.
I know others that did it...including one fantasy author and one erom author. Neither reported that it worked better than putting the book out in a single unit. In fact, several authors who have written unrelated stories in a world or serialized worlds said they sold better when placed in a single unit, because readers complained at getting the story piecemeal and readers that like novels but dislike short stories or novelettes prefer the novel-length anthology or book, but that was also 4 years or so ago. The market may have evolved since then.
Now, this dislike isn't universal. I know that, which is why I would be willing to try a serialized novel or two and see if I can make it work. Proof in the making? The TXT serials overseas, sent to cell phones, reportedly work very well. But is that the serialization? Or the direct delivery to the cell phone? I can't say.
sigh...yet another person that only reads things halfway
I know more about what the actual losses are to me than you do, but I'll agree to disagree, because it's not your contracts on the line here. It's mine, something you obviously don't care about. That's typical "If it doesn't affect me, I don't care." non-logic, which I find more than tedious.
You guys said you wanted to understand where I'm coming from, but your response shows you want to ignore the very real problems and try to pick nits that have (in some cases) already been answered several times and in other cases, have nothing to do with the subject at hand.
My site has nothing to do with this, IMO; it's just something for you to complain about... WHERE my site is hosted is of no concern, as long as it works. The domain name makes it easy to find/remember and allows me to change where the pages are stored without problems of my readers learning a new site, the biggest hurdles many authors that choose odd names for their sites or place them on someone else's servers find they face.
I take reader input on improving the experiece for them, which means (in the last year) the nav system has been completely revamped with subpages, a site map was added, and at least six new pages readers requested were added. Are improvements in the works? Of course. I keep adding cross-linking that makes finding what you need easier. If you hate it now, you should have seen it two years ago.
With nine years of site builds, on three separate programs, as I trade up in them, yes...there is a lot of code that could be stripped, but the site is also more than 90 pages, thousands of images, covers 21 series worlds and 10-20 releases per year, and gets updated for changes at least once a week, so a complete strip-down and rebuild is not coming soon. When/if I have the time and money, I will do a full rebuild again, from the bottom up, something I haven't done in the last six years. Without paying someone $10,000+ per year (for the number of pages and updates I need) I don't have (more for the redesign year...I've just taken quotes on this for a group I sit the BoD on, so I know what it would cost me) or several thousand dollars to design it for me and let me maintain it myself (which means my programs will probably add in code again, as I maintain and add to it), it's not changing to what you envision soon. Not that I'm sure how you envision making more than 90 pages a smooth ride, in the first place.
But, this just proves you don't understand MY business. The bottom line is this... Most readers find me on Yahoogroups, on blogs, in chats, through publishers, and through resale sites and either buy direct from promos there or come to the site looking for very specific information. I have made the most requested/new release/news-related information easy for them to find. Someone doing a "I'll go from page to page and just browse" is going to find the site nearly impossible to grasp, simply because you have no set answers you want or idea of how to find them. With 21 series worlds and 90 pages, someone who comes in to browse is going to have problems with the amount of information, no matter how I organize it. The best bet for a browser is to either go to the book page and look at content types or to go to the site map and look at genre notes. But as I said, that's not the norm for someone coming to my site.
FWIW, I think your understanding of my market is not only skewed; it's completely uninformed as to the BUSINESS of being a writer. It's all well and good for you to believe what you do, but I know what I have to do legally, contractually, and realistically.
I agree that anyone trying to stop piracy is tilting at windmills, but I'm not trying to stop it entirely. I'm doing what I am required to do (which includes defending my copyright when I find pirates) and trying to find a common ground that DOES work and doesn't cause me more trouble than it's worth.
answering a few questions before I DO get back to work
nasch... First of all, there is no content that cannot be copied. If a man can make it, a man can break it. You should know that. All the idiots at NY conglomerates that really believe DRM works or that only putting books in print will stop piracy are deluding themselves and are sadly misinformed. Print-only books are pirated all the time. I had the lovely time of explaining to Stephen Zacharius at Kensington a good two or three years ago how his print-only books were being pirated as e-books, and all DRM does is punish honest readers while not slowing pirates, in the least.
But, I'm not asking people to buy things blind. This is where the argument starts circling. I offer free reads, free first in a series, excerpts, associated works, rating scales, and reviews/awards. I'm doing everything I can to make sure people buy things they will enjoy, and if that's not me, they can feel free to buy elsewhere. I even make suggestions for those that ask for them. I highly suggest other authors do the same and teach that at conventions and online, but I cannot control their business decisions, even when I disagree with them.
Anyone worth their salt buying a product should be willing to invest the time in reading up on that product first. When I want to buy anything from a book to a computer, I'm out there researching first. That's responsible buying in action. The problem, from my seat, is people that want to shortcut the process and get everything for free, at which point, a lot of them decide it's easy to get away with not paying for anything they want that's available on the web. And it all goes downhill from there.
There is no converting *some* pirates, which I why I cringe every time someone says something like that. A large number know what the laws say, but all they care about are themselves and their reasons for doing what they do.
Some feel they are playing Robin Hood or "sticking it to the man" and punishing the greedy corporate fat-cats, but the fact is that there are only 6 NY conglomerate presses (4 of which are foreign owned), a handful of black-box presses they own, and then you have 70,000+ small or medium sized presses in the US alone...as well as self-publishing authors.
Worse, a lot of these people use a blockbuster author like Nora Roberts, Stephen King, or Dan Brown as an example and talk about authors with two or three yachts and huge advances and millions of copies in sales. I hate to break it to them...and to myself, but those authors are one in 10,000 or less of the authors out there.
What is the average like? Your average NY Times bestseller may be taking home (after returns...remember that wasteful NY system?...and agent's cut and so forth) only $25,000-35,000 on a book that took a year or more to write. Several NY Times bestsellers have shared their numbers in the past year, so I'm talking about these people, in specific, who wanted to show other aspiring authors what it really means in sales.
Not to mention NY Times beseller list is NOT based on sales. It's based on ORDERS. The first three weeks or month a book is there, it's just because the bookstores ordered it. If it comes back or stays after that point, it means there was enough sales to cause reorders. It is absolutely possible for a NY conglomerate press to pour a ton of money into a book they HOPE will sell well, have huge preorders from bookstores, and have the book fail utterly. Happens more often than you might believe. I could tell you my personal plans for stopping it, but that would take an entirely new post.
Most authors do not make 5 or 6 figures in advance of a book. The average advance for a NY conglomerate publisher has fallen below $5,000. Some are below $2,000 for a new author or one that only has indie experience behind them.
In indie, you usually don't find advances, at all. Of my 7 publishers, I have one that offers advances for novel-length work...only novel length...of $100. No, I am not joking. If I write a novel for them, that's my advance against sales. The up side is that we get either monthly or quarterly royalty payments, and the only returns we deal with are on print copies of the book...not e-book.
Midlist authors usually don't make enough money to live on. Very few earn enough to quit the day job, even if they are in a two-working-parent family. I've seen more high-end indies able to quit the day job than I've seen my NY midlist compatriots able to in the last five years. Your average midlist or lower author is working a day job. If he/she is not working one, it's more often due to personal disability, dealing with a disabled relative or child, or raising several small children, which means she'll return to work when they are all school age. I stopped working when I had a back injury then went back part-time a year later.
According to the latest surveys on indie/e press, the average book sells less than 1000 copies in the first year, and we all know about diminishing returns after that. I've done better. I've done worse. I've sold 800 in a good first month, but not every book does that.
Back to pirates... Some feel they are entitled to anything not nailed down. I had one gent (I use the term loosely) tell me he believed everything in life should come with a money-back guarantee and he should have no personal responsibility in vetting purchases ahead of time or taking that chance of buying anything in life. It wasn't even enough for this guy to read one book and buy others. Nope. He is the typical pirates pirate stereotype, which I'd hoped didn't really exist for several years.
Some have been duped into believing they have purchased rights they haven't...rights to resell books.
Some don't like the laws, and rather than complaining to lawmakers and joining authors in our attempts to deal with them to get decent laws, they break them as a form of civil disobedience, which only makes the lawmakers feel more restrictive laws are needed, and that works against both authors AND readers, in the long run. It's a knee-jerk reaction that they bring on themselves, but readers blame authors, as if we wanted this to happen. Another price to piracy.
And so on...and so on...
On the other hand... Some are uneducated in what the laws say (not that I think ALL the laws make sense, and I personally tell people when I think the laws are wrong, so don't think I'm tied to that). Those can be educated. I do educate them. AWaY is a fantastic new program that lets readers ask questions of authors in a safe and intelligent discussion.
FWIW, I'm all for laws that make sense and have used Obama's call for creator comments to make that clear to them. Believe it or not, a lot of authors out there feel as I do and are not the enemy of common sense and business sense...or of readers.
Of course, you don't understand why I do the things I do, because you've already illustrated that you don't understand contract law, at least. Why are pirates dangerous, and why do I bother to take them down? There are a couple of main reasons.
One is that they provide misinformation to the subset that really don't know what cost there is to me, people that ARE potential buyers of my work. Given the right information about the whole deal, those people often choose to buy and not pirate work. Those are the pirates I have any hope of educating and eventually stopping. Those that don't care...they will just continue doing what they do. I know that.
The second is the little nit in copyright law. I have to show that I am actively trying to protet my copyright. I don't have the excuse that I don't know where to find the books and how to.
FWIW, it costs me more in frustration than it does in time. Someone here thinks I'm losing a ton of time. That's not so for me. I've got take-downs streamlined so that I just plug in associated links and such and fire off an e-mail with the notice in it that I have presaved for just such an occasion. Less than five minutes tops, and all the notifications come on lists and alerts, so I'm not out scouring sites these days, like I was two years ago. In some cases, it takes even less time, because some publishers do the actual take-down notices for the authors, and all I have to do is send the rep links.
Third reason... Simply put, if the books are that easy to find pirated all over creation, potential publishers see that as a down side and think I'm not proactive at protecting my copyright. See reason #2 above. That means to advance my career, I've got to keep the pirated copies out there to a minimum. You see, this is the part pirates don't understand. Sensical or not, I have to play the game to continue publishing outside of self-publishing, and from experience, I make 100 times as much with a publisher than I do self-publishing a book.
However, I take a different route than some authors do. I've started loading my free reads on the same pirate sites I take the pirated ones down from, with the information that this is a free read... And so forth. It's different. Will it work? Shrug. Who knows.
Fourth reason... I definitely HAVE to address anytime I find someone illegally selling my books. Perhaps you don't realize how many pirates do this. I do. I found almost 400 pirated copies of my books on eBay in a single month. All being resold by people who either lied to say they had resale rights, lied to say they were public domain, or whatever. THAT is not something I can pretend I didn't see. That's why we are actively working on a petition to make the VeRO program at eBay more author/publisher friendly.
Fifth reason... When they are selling free reads, I will NOT allow a pirate to cheat my readers. If I offer a free read, it's free. It's not just that it's against my creative commons license or anything like that. It's pure outrage that they dare cheat my readers...ever. It's a moral imperative to protect my readers. Some readers don't realize how much authors love readers. We don't take mistreatment of readers lightly...well, there are a few authors that do, but they are in the minority.
Sixth reason... And the last one for now... When it's a charity work, I will go out of my way to protect it. It's out there to do good, not to line someone's pockets.
As I said before, I'm in indie. I think NY conglomerate press are idiots in using DRM, in thinking print only protects them, in their pricing structures, in their mass market offset programs with all the attendant wastes... I could go on for hours. From my seat, indie has the middle ground with the ability to succeed.
Another thought process for those of you that want to try a book from a particular author before buying... Just an off the wall thought that could work well for everyone involved. Become a reviewer for a review site or start a review site of your own. Follow the code of ethics for reviewers, which includes not pirating the books you are sent for review. Only choose the books that sound (from blurb and past experience) as if they will appeal to you. And find your new authors that way. If you make a name for yourself, even indie reviewers can get copies sent to them. Scifiguy on Blogger is like that. Huntress Reviews is another respected small indie reviewer.
BTW, AC...I generally have between ten and twenty new releases a year. I'm fairly sure my time management is a little better than the average bear's variety. Don't you worry about me.
Brenna
a couple final things I forgot to answer for you...
What I am seeing on this group is a gross misconception about what contracts say and what return we look for in any promotion we do.
Brenna
nasch
Where I haven't found my books would be more accurate? Where have I? I have no clue what you consider the major sites, and yes...I take down books when I find them. Sometimes that's quickly. Sometimes that's when they've been on a site for several months, because that's when I find them.
Recently (within the last few months), I have taken down books from or asked my publishers to take down books from Demonoid, Underground Forum, Astatalk (the links to the other sites where they are shelved), fileshandler, 4shared, eBay (do NOT get me started on those creeps), Scribd, eCrater, Twitter, Blogger, LiveJournal, Yahoogroups (many of which link to a site, like the FreeBookClub site), Facebook, Mininova, zshare, uploading.com... To be honest, I don't have time to go back through and name them all. Since I get the notices of pirated work from several places, it would take me hours just to do a couple of months worth of notices I have saved.
The rest of your comment is ridiculous. Of course, I do not expect a perfect 1:1 payback on pirated works. But you cannot point to anything on my royalty statements and NOT track jumps back to one of a few things I do anyway, which would include new releases, promo events, and so forth. There is nothing unaccounted for that is conceivably piracy, and if I'm getting less than a 1% return on it (and I would be getting less than that, by the numbers I see), it's not worth my promo time and dollars.
You'll have to pardon me if I don't see being pirated more than a thousand times in a month as free promotion. I see it as sales that will never be, thanks to some selfish pirates that feel entitled to anything they are capable of grabbing off the net, because they are that unethical and someone else providing it to them are, as well. If you want to promote someone, I have already told you how to do it in a way that doesn't cause them harm.
Enough said. I've wasted enough time with people who clearly just want to pirate and have the authors say, "That's okay honey." The truth is, I'd rather have a pirate not know who I am than try to "help" me their way.
Brenna
ah...I see...
Brenna
fianlly, someone asking real questions
Now, don't talk to me about 100 year old hard bound books. I have a few approaching that. But, your average book made today isn't made like those century-old books.
I personally don't consider a person lending a single copy to friends a pirate, per se. Unfettered hand-to-hand sharing has the CAPACITY to exceed 10,000 copies in 13 passes. Will it? Probably not. Is it against copyright? Yes. Is a person sharing a copy of my book with a single friend hurting me? Nope, and not only is it impossible to police, what person in his/her right mind would want to?
I do have to laugh at your "high price" statement. Sorry. I am not with NY conglomerate press. My e-books are always priced lower by far than mass market of a similar length and genre. That's a pirate's arguement, I've found. "All books are SO expensive." Baloney. Most indie presses will price a novel-length fiction e-book between $5 and $7. And I'm not asking anyone to buy without a free test run that I freely offer. I offer not only free reads and the occasional first book of a series for free, but also first chapter of books to see if it appeals...and a rating scale to help people avoid what they won't like.
I agree that word of mouth is good for you, but readers can give that other ways. You can pass along my free reads, to your hearts' content. I give blanket permission to pass my approved free reads, as far and wide as you wish, as long as you aren't changing anything or trying to profit from it. IOW, don't try to resell them (one of the types of pirates I really do loathe), but pass them for free.
In addition, they can write reviews about the books they liked...or didn't. I get some great reviews from readers not affiliated with review sites. That's always a treat for an author. We love it. You can rate the books on Amazon or someplace and post reviews there. Talk about books you like on reader lists. When someone asks: "What should I read next?", say something. Tell them what your favorites were.
Oh, and yes... A single share with one friend or even a couple friends doesn't bother me, but this is where a lot of pirates miss the boat. A share or two isn't killing me. Loading my book on a site where thousands can download at one time is. Reselling my work without permission is not only hurting me but the other readers. Reselling my free reads is downright cheating other readers, since the pirate is duping them into paying for something they could be getting for free from me.
Uh...yeah. You don't know much about the mid-list and lower author, do you? All the things you're talking about work only for a subset of authors. Problems I see here, coming from the author seat?
A) You are rarely allowed to sell things with your cover art on them. That right is kept by the publisher. You can make things for free give-aways but not to sell. That's what all my contracts read.
B) Unless you are getting a huge advance, and few are these days, you don't have the money to have art made just for you to use on sale items and to pay not only for the art but also for the license you need to do this legally. Unless you are lucky enough to be an artist, as well as an author, chances are, you don't have art to use...see A.
C) Very few authors make this sort of sale system work. Even Sherrilyn Kenyon, who has the very successful Mighty Barnacle sale site, doesn't sell book marks. She gives them free in packages of other items you get from her. And that sort of merchandising, even if you can make it work, takes years to build up. MB wasn't big until a few years ago, and Sherrilyn has been publishing since at least 1993 or 1994 and has been in NY for at least 5 years or so now and a NY Times bestseller since very early in her NY career.
In short, your arguments and thoughts on the matter might work for her, but they are highly unlikely to work for someone not at her level. I've tried selling t-shirts and other items. I think I sold three in as many years. Why? Because I'm not her, and I don't have her support network or her audience.
Brenna
you guys like that term but do you understand it?
The actual analogy would be the buggy producer that clings to the old model and dies as a business, trying desperately to sell horse and buggy parts, unwilling to branch out, when he should be saying, "I'm in the transportation business." It might be argued that the NY conglomerate presses just coming into the established e-market are sabotaging themselves that way, and I would not argue a word of that comparison.
Using it [the buggy whip analogy] to mean a dead market is misleading, since saddles and whips and tack are still made today but marketed to a subset of the buyers they once were. It is now something of a niche market, not the staple market it once was.
Since I do give away free samples to sell the whole, I fail to see how I am not discussing it. I fully support the concept, but my experience says pirates pirate and readers buy. The subset of readers that overlap with pirates is very small. Just simple math and observation.
But ulike musicians, few authors can make money on public appearances. Your blockbusters (Nora Roberts, Dan Brown, Stephen King) can, and some NY Times bestsellers can. Most cannot. But that's well established.
Brenna
nasch
But, I counter that free content given willingly doesn't compare to piracy in returns for me. There is no "taking advantage" of people who buy nothing...i.e. the pirates. There's no appealing to them, no stopping them, no reasonining with them, and no return from them, save in frustration. That's the facts of life, as we know it. The only ones that do me any good at all are the ones that buy something, and those are the ones downloading the copies I OFFER for free. So, from my chair...you are just trying to obscure the fact that piracy is not helping me with double talk.
Brenna
you're kidding, right?
It's very difficult for authors to make money from public appearances, while musicians can. In addition to how hard it is to GET a signing and get it without being hampered by the store (unless you're a NY Times bestseller or something, in which case they bend over backward to accomodate you), public readings by authors are not commonplace. The last author to do well with this was probably Sam Clements or someone not much past his time. They do shows now where actors read erotic work or horror work or something similar, but not the authors very often. If we do public readings, they are free readings to spur the sales of actual books. Few people have the love of books to sit and listen to someone else read to them, though poets sometimes manage it and I've read short stories to crowds...up to about 4000 words in length. Not to mention that there are hundreds of thousands of authors competing for public appearance, of some sort.
Another nit with your mindset... No, fiction books are NOT just information. They are a creative endeavor. They aren't just facts thrown at the reader, and even if we were talking about non-fiction books, I would counter that the research, organizing, money put into producing the book (which is true of e-books just as it is for paper books), distribution (ditto), and marketing (ditto) is done for a reason. That reason is the return on investment. If you just want to write and give it away for free, you can do that. I do that with some stories. The ones I publish for pay are there with an expectation of return, even if I do choose to give an older title away for free to spur the sale of the newer ones.
Brenna
using handheld readers
1) Vision impaired... Either increasing font size or text to speech programs aid readers, and both are available for any unsecured or DRM broken e-book. In addition, some doctors suggest e-reading to vision impaired because they claim the readers are easier on some people's eyes than bright white book pages are...as long as you're not using a backlit screen in a completely darkened room, which they curse. But others find reading from a screen harder. That one is very individual.
2) Expat or business traveler... e-Books allow even avid readers to purchase and carry hundreds of books while nowhere near an English-language bookstore and eliminates the need to either dispose of the books (oh the horror of that) or ship them home.
3) Space saving... Likewise, some people don't have the space to keep all the books they'd like to reread around, but they can store e-books.
4) Search features... Depending on the format of the book, you can search entire hard drives of books you own to find a single phrase or subject.
5) Prior paper book losses... I know from experience how painful it is to lose all of your beloved paper books in fire or flood. With e-books, you can backup books off site and/or in several places to protect your investment in your books. I'm still replacing books I lost in a house fire 11 years ago, for instance.
I'm sure I'm missing some, but all are valid reasons and have nothing to do with whether someone reads to read or immerses in the book. Whether or not you can immerse in an e-book is completely personal. I can. You seem to be saying you can't.
Brenna
personal experience
I heartily disagree with the 20 times thing. IMO, that's hyperbole or at least non-repeatable with any certainty; it's one person's experience with a very specific audience and cannot be counted upon to work that way for everyone. My experiments with giving a free first book of a series for a week or so show 4-6 times increase in sales of the books for several months and a diminishing increase after that fact. Offering a free read (short story through novella-length) in perpetuity shows a lesser increase over time and nothing as easily qualifiable, since it's not a limited time period that can have a single shockwave aftereffect to test.
Another complaint... 20 to 1 over what period of time? And at what rate does that decrease? Without that information, these are useless data bits tossed into the ether for me.
But when you really lost me was when you compared this to piracy. That's where it fails for me. I've tracked initial downloads of free reads and books given for free and been able to quantify a return on them. By comparison, I can pull down more than a thousand illegal copies of books in a month (from a site that was clean the month before, so I have a time frame on the downloads) and see no spike in sales whatsoever.
Further, this line of thinking doesn't take into account that I can see whole series being pirated, which means they aren't pirating number 1 and buying 2-5. They are pirating them all. How does that increase sales? It doesn't. The pirates taking #1 and buying 2-5 are the exception...not the rule, in my experience.
BL
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