Piracy and books

I spend a lot of time talking to writers.

I spend a lot of time specifically talking to indie writers who make all their own publishing decisions.

It's pretty great!

But one frustrating part of it are some of the myths that get perpetuated, like that free stuff hurts sales. This can take the form of distrust of and unhappiness with Creative Commons licensing, but on the whole tends to take the form of aggressive anti-piracy stances.

And, hey, I'm not super enthusiastic about piracy, because intellectual property is important and it's important to respect it and the people who create the things one likes. But the thing about piracy is that it's not actually lost sales.

You heard me right.

The people who are pirating your books either never would have bought them or are going to like it and either buy a copy or consider buying future works of yours.

Okay, let me talk about examples from my own life. Four books I have pirated are the 50 Shades trilogy by E L James and Sunshine by Robin McKinley.

50 Shades I wrote about here: to say I was unimpressed is a dramatic understatement. I also knew, going in, that it was going to be probably-enraging Twilight fanfiction, and made a deliberate decision to not support the author. That was never going to be a sale. I was never going to purchase anything written by her. It does not affect her sales numbers in the least.

Sunshine* was the opposite story: I love it, and have purchased two paperback copies of the novel, both of which have gone missing. It's also not available as an ebook through legitimate channels. So nor was that a lost sale: I'd already purchased it, and was unlikely to purchase it a third time in the same form.

Piracy can actually increase sales, but hey, if you don't want in on that, the best way to discourage piracy of your particular works is to make legal downloads ubiquitous. Make DRM-free purchase of your works for multiple platforms easy, and I can guarantee at least some people will find hitting the 'buy' button more appealing than piracy.

*Ms. McKinley, if you happen to see this and be unhappy with someone pirating your work, I'd be more than happy to Paypal you your royalties.

Changes

I've taken down my non-fiction book on epublishing from Smashwords.

It wasn't an easy decision: I'm proud of what went into it, and it was a decent introduction.

But the verb tense is important, there, as are the incredible shifts epublishing has undergone since February 2011, when I put it out. One of the websites I recommended, a fledgling then, has now become a haven for episodic teen fiction. It is the Pandemonium of werewolf love triangles and poorly-edited tragic orphans. It is not something I highly recommend anymore.

Blogging has changed somewhat, and Twitter is now a place where groups discuss writing and publishing.

Navigating the Ebook Jungle is still something I want to revisit and update. I want to have that basic primer and list of resources available for anyone just getting into self-publishing, because it's a big wide world full of conflicting opinions and at the very least summaries of approaches and links to more detailed sources are valuable for anyone just starting out.

It's not something I can do right now, though, and I feel better about pulling it than I do about leaving up information that I don't consider as up-to-date and thorough as it could, and should, be.

In the meantime, if you have a question, shoot me an email. I'll probably at least have a link to recommend.

Hey, look, antitrust

When the US Department of Justice is investigating accusations of collusion among big publishers and Apple, it's a sign that people still care about reading.

Agency pricing is what self-publishers traditionally have no recourse from: you set your price, the seller takes a cut, and you get the rest. Wholesale pricing is a matter of selling the book to the seller, and then they sell it to the customer for whatever price they choose. That's kind of neat, because while self-publishers in particular don't traditionally have access to reams of statistics about the best price to sell something for, booksellers do. Letting the sellers set the price means that they'll optimize it to sell as much as possible, and takes some of the worry from you (under wholesale model pricing, you get paid the same not matter what, so you can quite gleefully cease to agonize over pricing). Amazon traditionally sold ebooks for very little over their wholesale cost. A lot of the shift to agency pricing as opposed to wholesale boils down to 'wah, Amazon's willing to make less money on this than me.'

This does raise some concerns: if ebooks are absurdly cheap, that makes printed books less attractive.

And then we take a break from numbers and theory and talk to real people. Jesse Hajicek and Cory Doctorow both have their books available for free, in their entirety, online. They both have many people who read them for free, in their entirety, online. They both also sell hardcopies. People buy the hardcopies. It's a miracle!

But this post is not about the benefits of one's work being available free. This is about colluding to make the work of the people one represents more expensive. The publishers accused of course have experience hiding collusion, so it's possible nothing may come of the accusations. But lawsuits and expensive settlements and the possibility that the people who are handling your work are doing morally reprehensible things while not notably increasing what they pay you sure do make self-publishing more attractive right now.

Author Interview: Adam Schreckenberger

Adam, in addition to being the technological heart of Theory Train, is an author in his own right. I interview him about his series, McCallister Chronicles.

Eileen Young: So, what's McCallister Chronicles about?

Adam P. Schreckenberger: Hmm, that’s a good question. Sometimes, I don’t even know the answer to that one myself. Upfront, it’s about a knight’s duty when it comes to his princess, but that seemed a little boring on its own. To some extent, it is about the endless insanity that lurks in my imagination and a mythology I created to pass the time. I can do whatever I want in those pages. I want a sword that talks? Fine. I want people that can wield fire? Fantastic! It also keeps my girlfriend happy, which carries a lot of benefits.

EY: Was she part of what inspired you to write it?

APS: Oh yes, she was. We had been thinking about writing a story together for a long time, but it just never worked out. One day, she really needed an upbeat, new tale. I sat down and wrote the five pages that became Episode 1. Like always, I posted it on my site for kicks. What I did not expect was the response.

EY: There was a lot of interest?

APS: That day still holds the record for most hits, and I got a few emails with messages asking if I was planning to write new chapters.

EY: Wow, that's impressive. And you've continued to release the chapters as free downloads. What was the thought behind that?

APS: Well, I am a physicist. Writing is my hobby, and that is how it is going to stay. It just has never felt right forcing my readers to purchase my works. Originally, it was motivated by the fact that most of my fans, if you want to call them that, were in high school and had no fixed income. In that sense, it became a simple choice. Either I’d charge for my stuff and no one would read the pieces, or I’d have them available free of charge. Old habits are hard to break.

EY: And now you have the first several episodes available in print. What made you decide to make it available that way, too?

APS: Some of my friends are diehard supporters of MC. When they asked me to make a printed copy available, I obliged. Plus, let’s face it. It is awesome to hold a physical copy of something you wrote. It certainly brings me some joy.

EY: It really is. So, you never considered publishing traditionally?

APS: Once upon a time, I did. I was in talks with a publishing house, but there were terms of the deal that I just did not like. For starters, everyone could kiss the free copies goodbye. They also wanted to put me on a timetable for the remainder of the series, which is not acceptable when one factors in my job. I guess it would be nice to have it released in the traditional sense. It would certainly make it more capable of receiving some recognition, but I am proud of what the book has accomplished.

EY: Is there anything else you'd like to say?

APS: I am grateful that I had the opportunity and the motivation to write MC. It brought me new friends, and pushed my old friends even closer. There is also something worth mentioning to those out there that are on the fence about writing a book or self-publishing. Just do it. Whether you put it on a blog, dA or some website, getting your work out there is worth the effort. We are all extremely fortunate to live in a time when these tools are available to us. Do not let them go unused.

Keitai Shousetsu

The word literally means 'cell phone novel,' and it's a particularly Japanese phenomenon that's spread west slower than the Japanese trends Gwen Stefani espouses.

The first one on record came from Tokyo in 2003, but probably the most notable early work was Koizora (Love Sky), published in 2005. A semi-autobiographical romance, it spawned a film, a television drama, and a manga series, as well as being picked up by a traditional publisher to be put out as a two-part paperback and earning a long article in that most prestigious of cultural bastions, The New Yorker.

Like most of its genre, Koizora was originally published to a website that aggregates them, posted from the author's cell phone, received by readers in SMS messages. Chapters were generally 70-100 words, to fit within character limits.

It was also free, as are most. Keitai Shousetsu are about sharing your story and getting it read - connecting with fans, which is one of the motivating factors behind Creative Commons. Using free media to connect to readers worked well for a lot of Japanese authors of cell phone novels: in 2007, 5 of the 10 bestselling novels in Japan started life as cell phone novels.

Part of the reason for the popularity of them is that the authors knew how to connect to their audience: their target readers are cell phone-savvy teenagers interested in upcoming trends and romance. There was also a shared culture of anonymity: most authors of Japanese cell phone novels go by handles and are never known by their real names.

The mobile culture in Japan and other parts of East Asia is one of the reasons cell phone novels have taken off there. In contrast, the highest-viewed cell phone novel in the US has had a mere 30000 views.

Part of the difference is that we're used to longer chunks in Western culture: fans of George R. R. Martin were utterly outraged when his latest novel was delayed. Some of the serial stories I read publish only in several-thousand-word chapters. Cell phone novels or Twitter novels require a shift in thinking, a willingness to let things unfold at precisely the author's pace.

But RSS feeds for continuing stories and places like Wattpad are making serial fiction more viable in the Western world, or at least to Western writers: polylingual East Asian readers are still a huge portion of the audience on Wattpad.

The literary and cultural scene continues to evolve rapidly, making this an exciting time to be in writing and publishing.

It's a Complicated New World

Having just read the Globe and Mail article bashing freelance editors, I felt the need to respond.

The publishing industry is changing, and I live in the Mecca of indie publishing. The idea of Editor as arbiter or taste is a limited one, a little old-fashioned. Editors exist to make written work better.

That can take a variety of forms, from structural editing to proofreading. And not just for what we typically think of - a novel going through traditional press, to be issued in dead tree format. Academic papers require people to look them over to make sure a coherent point is being made, proposals for books require proofing, limited runs of guidebooks for use by museum staff at a tiny museum need to be edited for clarity and flow. Then we get into the indies: people eschewing traditional publishing in favor of epublishing and print on demand and retaining control over the entire process of their book. They need editors, too, ones who will work with them to make sure they walk away, happily, with the best their book can be.

I like to think I help with that, as well as aiding in epublishing. Like most freelancers, I'm willing to provide samples: I will go over the first five pages of your manuscript for no charge, to see if we can work together.