Bloody Pirates!

I’m considering retiring from writing fiction for money.

Here’s why.

About a year ago now, when I was still “in the closet” as Teal Ceagh, I wrote a post about ebook piracy and file sharing.

Wow, was that a mistake. I think the post lasted about eight hours before the venom and vitriole and toxicity that poured back at me was just too overwhelming. For the first time in my five years as a blogger, I took a post, comments and all, down.

After the last round I was going to keep my mouth shut on the whole subject, and I’ve advised other authors to do the same. The lashback, I told them, isn’t worth it.

But I’m a stubborn cuss, and I’m back. A bit wiser and calmer and more considered. And far more researched and delicate this time around.

Ebook piracy isn’t going away. File sharing, which is a different matter altogether, isn’t going to stop either.

But I’m sick of not being able to talk about either of them. They’re like the elephants in the room. We all know they go on. You have probably indulged in the odd download yourself. You’ve probably sent copies of fabulous books you’ve read to friends, because you just know your friends will love them too. Before I got wise to how I was stealing income from other authors, I did it, too.

We get to talk about everything else surrounding and about the romance novel industry on this blog — cover models, sex, romance, cover models, heroes, cover models, ebooks, cover models, publishers, cover models… We should be able to talk about piracy without tearing strips off each other, drawing blood, or pistols at a dozen paces.

Part of the problem with piracy is that everyone is a little bit guilty because it’s so bloody easy to indulge. Or even accidentally share a file. Plus, depending on where you live, the publishers can make it awfully tempting to take an illegal download just to spite them. I speak from experience. Because I’m living in Canada, Amazon won’t let me buy the eBook version of Charlaine Harris’s latest Stackhouse novel, Dead In The Family. I can buy the hardcover version (only) from my local bookstore for $30 Canadian, but I don’t have that sort of money to spare right now. I can wait another six months or so for the paperback, or …yeah, I know exactly where I can download the illegal ebook copy inside five minutes. And no, I haven’t. But you can see why some people just move right on over to the pirate sites with a mutter and a curse, these days.

So let’s agree that there’s nothing personal in these discussions. No accusations. When I talk about pirates, I’m not talking about YOU. When I talk about file sharing, I’m not slapping you personally on the wrist, I’m talking about the practice in general, because I’ve even caught myself doing it unconsciously and want to kick myself up the butt.

My Side First

Let me get my side out of the way first. I’m sure you’ve heard it all before, but I just want to get it out on the table so we can clear the mechanism.

Wanna know what my royalty cheque was last month? $186.

I’m supposed to live on that. Pay a mortgage. We just had to buy a new car. We’ve got three kids living at home with us. If I wanted to get a day job I probably couldn’t any more because I’m too a) old and b) cost too much. I could get an $8/hour basic job on the other hand, but I’d be better off sitting at my desk at home and writing books, which pay better…if the pirates weren’t stealing my income.

When I said in the first pirate post I ever wrote that I was watching my income dip each month because of pirates, I wasn’t kidding. Once upon a time, with each release at EC, you could be assured of a certain level of sales. Not anymore.

Granted, this teeny cheque is unusual, and there were some odd circumstances surrounding the size of it. But pirates certainly had an impact on it.

When Beauty’s Beasts came out on June 11, there was a request for its file up on Astatalk one hour later. The file was uploaded eight hours later.

Ellora’s Cave are very good at jumping on pirate sites and getting them to take down illegal material, but Astatalk (let’s stick with the example), will take ten to twenty days to take down Beauty’s Beasts, during which god knows how many downloads will happen. Once the file is down, another will go up in a day or two. It’s like a nightmarish whack-a-mole game that you can’t win. And Astatalk is just one site. There are dozens of others. And these are just the download sites. Then there are a bit torrent sites that can’t be tackled at all because they are a file-sharing and there is no central server, just a list of bit-torrents. I have Google alerts for all my book titles, and every day there’s at least one comes in with a bit torrent for my book titles.

Ignore it all

There are two schools of thought on what to do about e-piracy. The Ignore-It camp believes that nothing can be done anyway, that it can’t be halted, so why bother? Besides, the thinking goes, the people who dowload bootleg boots are either:

a) too poor to buy their own or

b) would never buy books in the first place and

c) usually never read the books they download, anyway. And

d) On the off chance that they do read your book, you might just win them over with your deathless prose, and they’ll buy your next book.

I’ve always been suspicious of this thinking, because if (d) is correct, why would they BUY the book? Wouldn’t they just go and download the next book?

The only comfort I get from this is that I might impress them so much they want to buy the paperback when it comes out so they have a keeper copy. But even this argument is becoming a comfortless one as time marches on. The next generation of readers will be 100% pixel readers, and the idea of a permanent paper copy will be an alien concept to them.

In summary, the psychology of Ignore-It says that all ebook pirates are a lost to me. I would never reach them via legitimate means.

This is depressing, because as I’m gradually losing sales to pirates, that means for every reader that converts to pirate copies rather than buying them, I’ve lost them forever. They’re never going to come back to legitimate reading and buying again. My readership is shrinking rather than building. An author’s paying readership is supposed to GROW the longer they publish, not the other way around.

Kill Them All

The other school of thought, of course, is the flip side to ignoring pirates. It’s the hunt-and-kill alternative. Unfortunately, in order to be effective, hunt-and-kill has to be total annihilation, not just hunt-and-peck. But at the moment, the pirates are winning the war and laughing themselves sick. The teeny cease-and-desist letters and few legal tools available are basically useless.

The problem isn’t so much the person that downloads the odd copy.

It’s the regimented, organized and militant groups who believe it is their god-given right to distribute as much free stuff as they can. They have read up on the fine print and know to within an inch of the law how much they can get away with. They’ve got the passive-aggressive behaviour so rehearsed they barely have to think about it anymore. And they train their brethren up alongside them.

If you think I’m exaggerating, cruise some of the pirate sites and read the bulletin boards and admin notices. You’ll get an education. This is what I’ve been doing since the last pirate post I put up.

Learning.

I personally think that the Kill-them-all approach will never work unless whole governments and regiments of lawyers and organizations the size of Google get together and go after them with Napalm and carpet bomb their nests. Then do it again every year after that. And then mind-roll the public into believing that piracy is the equivalent of beating your children in public.

As that’s never going to happen, piracy is here to stay.

In Summary

So what is the point of this post?

Mostly I wanted to open up the floor to discussing piracy, because, like I said, it’s like this huge taboo subject that no one can talk about openly, but everyone knows it happens.

I also wanted to have my say. After the last abortive post I went through a cycle of depression, anger, fury, then dull acceptance. Now I just don’t know what to think. If better people than I can’t come up with a solution, then it’s possible that the pirates are going to win and we all get to shut up shop and go work for $8/hour after all.

If my royalty cheques keep shrinking at this rate, I definitely will be.

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June 26 Postscript

In light of the wonderful commentary and discussion, I was led via a Facebook comment to a blog post by J.A. Konrath, “Piracy…Again“. His is much more ascerbic than mine, and at the same time much more upbeat — but he probably wasn’t writing his post the same month he got the lowest royalty cheque ever.

You should read this post, too. He’s of the “Ignore it all” camp, but he suggests a third option: Make books so cheap and convenient to buy that people won’t bother to steal them.

We had already touched on this in comments, when discussing the iTunes model.

One other point Konrath made. He said “Show me an artist bankrupted by piracy, and we’ll revisit this question.” I’m not bankrupt yet, but I’m hovering on the borders. I’m certainaly demoralized and ready to quit. He may yet get his demand fulfilled.

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Mid-February 2011 Update

I’ve lingered for a couple of weeks before updating just to see if it takes hold or not.  In the last few months, Astatalk has been taken down half a dozen times, only to pop up again, larger than ever.  I know this because each time Astatalk diasappeared, the traffic to my site boomed, as people queried on terms like “Astatalk down” or, sadly, “alternatives to Astatalk.”  Because the term “Astatalk” peppers this article, they found me.  Hopefully they read and absorbed enough to become thoughtful.

In late January Astatalk returned to normal operations — without its fiction section, and carrying huge warning signs and actively banning anyone who posted fiction links, especially romance fiction links.  So far, so good.

Yes, the pirates will find other venues.  There’s dozens of them.  But this will make them pause, put a pothole in the road.  Astatalk was particularly militant about their “rights” so the fact that they got pulled down and halted is a small moral victory for romance authors.  I wish I knew who pulled it off.  I’d like to thank them.

As for me personally, I didn’t retire from writing fiction, although I’m doing the next best thing.  I’m working full time at Starbucks for $9/hour to pay the bills.  40 hours a week at that rate and I’m still earning more than my royalties cheques, which never recovered from the vampiric draining I noticed in June, which is pathetic.  Needless to say, my production of fiction has dropped off somewhat.  I’m still writing, but only in my spare time.