The True Cost of Piracy on Authors
Many people have fallen prey to the allure of piracy. Most keep this to a halloween costume or being a fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, but others take this much further. They turn to the piracy of media.
As an author, I’ve seen this first hand with my books. The first time I saw this was when a friend who tracks these things found one of my novella’s on a piracy website, but unfortunately this was only the beginning. My stories quickly found their way into the stories used to unwillingly train Meta’s AI. They even found their way onto fan story sites without my permission.
The worst was when I was at Dragonsteel Nexus and someone approached my booth and told me that he’d read my books on a piracy website. When I asked him if he knew what type of website it was, he was proud of the fact that he’d pirated my books. I was left stunned by the brazen confidence that he’d had and I didn’t press further at the moment.
In the green room and vendor halls I had several conversations with other authors, including several of the major names in fiction. They had experienced a lot of the same conversations like the one I mentioned earlier. Over the years, I’ve had this conversation several times and it never gets easier.
The life of a modern author is one of tight budgets and very little profits as organizations like Amazon take up to 70% of the earnings. Unless the author is one of the largest producing authors, they often are barely making enough to live on if they're in the top 25% of producing writers. That means that every single pirated book is a punch to a struggling artist, hoping to make a living through their art.
I understand the desire to get things for free, especially when books and media prices have been driven up by a lot of different factors. But the sad reality is that a lot of these pirates wouldn’t do this with any other industry. They wouldn’t likely steal a candy bar from a store and then send the wrapper back to Reese’s with a note about how good it tasted after they stole it.
That example may seem extreme, but it’s not too far off from what really happens anytime an author hears about their book being stolen. We’ll never get that copy of the book back and we’ll never see any income from it. The only difference is that it hits the author’s bottom line harder.
For many people the detached faceless nature of authors makes this much easier than stealing from a local store where they know the clerk and the owner. Some of the bigger fans of authors will find us at conventions and events, but our average reader will only see a picture of us on the back of our book or our website. This seems to make it easier, but not any better.
On top of that people see authors like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson who have teams of people working for them with millions of dollars coming in from a single book and assume this is how most of the successful authors operate. They start to see authors as major corporations that won’t be hurt much by the loss of a single book, not realizing that 75% or more of these authors make as much per year as the high school kid, flipping burgers at McDonalds.
I know that I’m likely preaching to the mega fans of authors here, the people who have shelves filled with books and a kindle that would rival libraries in quantity. For you, I have to say thank you for supporting us and sharing our journey. I would only ask that you spread the word on this and share this with your friends that may be more inclined to take to piracy.
For those of you that may be tempted by the allure of the proverbial “high seas” of the internet, please don’t do it. As authors we love to share our stories with the world, but by even buying the ebook copy, you’re helping us keep going and making it viable for us. On top of that we never see that you picked up our book, so our reporting takes a ding as well, making it look like our book is less popular then it is.
