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Sounds like you are employing a reactive, defensive and antagonistic approach to eBook “piracy”. Which puts you into the very position you described - at a loss

Sounds like you are employing a reactive, defensive and antagonistic approach to eBook “piracy”. Which puts you into the very position you described - at a loss, angry, and frustrated; instead of fuelling your sales and playing a direct hand in your success. Unfortunately I don’t have the article on hand, but about a year ago I ran across a description of how an author _dramatically enhanced_ his sales by leveraging eBook “piracy” in order to drive people to official channels. Yes, he actually released his eBooks for free onto the piracy sites - with a twist: he included the entire first portion (quarter or third, cannot remember) of the book, gave info on where to buy the full copies (with zero recriminations - just the facts!), and then repeated those same early chapters to plump out a fully-sized eBook. He then flooded all the file sharing networks with this copy so as to make it difficult to find legitimately complete copies. The entire first quarter or third was used to get readers heavily enough invested into his novel to _want_ to run out and buy the official copy -- he _justified_ the effort and expenditure to his readers, and they responded (mostly) positively by actually doing so! Granted, there was a lot more to it than that, but this was the basics, and it pushed a lot of people towards not just his eBooks but also his physical sales. And there are probably many other strategies out there as well that utilizes the “piracy” platforms to your benefit instead of leaving you tilting impotently at windmills.

genghisjahn 6y ago
Where is this description that you ran across?
amp10 6y ago
With all that effort there is little time to focus on actual writing, so one can imagine the quality of that work. There is a reason real authors and musicians have agents (who are actually reachable unlike the YouTube service ...). The actual profession is a full time job.
- tasogare 6y ago
  Most fiction writers aren’t living from it. A lot of others books (educational material for instance) are written by people who have a job like researcher. So, writer is a professional job for some, but they largely don’t produce most of the work out there.
- coliveira 6y ago
  That's exactly what I thought. If you need to go through all this gimmick to sell books, when are you going to have time to write them? I much prefer to suffer the monetary loss in writing and make decent money with something else.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > The actual profession is a full time job. But the actual professional isn't 100% writing, just as being an independent software developer isn't 100% coding. Half of your time (or more!) may be spent on other aspects of the profession.
  - enitihas 6y ago
    Other aspects are communicating, researching, not a deep dive into human psychology to ensure people don't pirate your software.
- wishinghand 6y ago
  Jeez, mocking up a book to post on torrent sites is so much effort it eats a measurable chunk of time usually reserved for writing a novel? This is like an afternoon of work, compared with the months or years of writing a book.
alharith 6y ago
That's fine and dandy that author was able to go through those hoops to find success. But there are still those of us who still (maybe naively at this point in history) believe that if you do things honestly, in good faith, and play by the rules, you should be able to make money too.
- hi_im_miles 6y ago
  Money doesn't get invested into projects that 'do things honestly', it gets invested into whatever is deemed to make the most profit. There's plenty of people who provide loads of value to those around them (emotional labor, child care, etc) and go largely unpaid. Unless you can generate massive profits, there's little incentive for capitalists to care, and it's capitalists who have all the money and political influence.
  - alharith 6y ago
    That's quite the broad brush you are painting all capitalists with. There are many ways to be successful many forms of capitalism, some degenerate yes, some not so degenerate. It is up to good honest people to set the example, because yes the greedy ones will always greed away. History has shown me that it doesn't matter what economic and political system is instituted, greed will find a way to exploit the good intentions of those systems.
    - hi_im_miles 6y ago
      >It is up to good honest people to set the example, because yes the greedy ones will always greed away. A focus on 'greed' or 'honesty' is missing the mark on what I'm saying here. We currently have an economy built on a foundation of historical expropriation, enclosure, colonialism, subsidy, regulatory capture, rent-seeking, etc, and heavily biased towards the resultant monopolies/oligopolies. As a consequence, prices are set at this inflated level of profit, and those who perform labor outside of the interests of these corporations typically aren't able to afford the costs of living (especially without breaking the law). "Greed" isn't really the issue here; the issue is systemic privilege born through violence. >History has shown me that it doesn't matter what economic and political system is instituted It's pretty intuitive that a political system is generally going to be favorable towards those who instituted it, outside of happenstance benevolence from a political elite.
koheripbal 6y ago
source pls.
mkr-hn 6y ago
I remember this too, but Google is completely useless for finding it.
- RandomBacon 6y ago
  I remember the story somewhat, so I found it after searching for 'author writing series almost cancels because piracy uploads incomplete books instead' I found the answer and posted in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312970
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
If you are going to tell someone how they are doing their passion incorrectly please put in the additional effort to dig up the source you feel like justifies your opinion.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Yes. It is literally just an anecdote about shareware, not a proven system for dealing with piracy. It could lead to more sales, or you could really piss off a troll who has nothing better to do than DDOS your site and try to hack every account you own.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
    It's also the kind of shit that will def find lots of advocates on HN even if the evidence is spotty at best
  - wishinghand 6y ago
    > It could lead to more sales, or you could really piss off a troll who has nothing better to do than DDOS your site and try to hack every account you own. This seems more like FUD for nagware than a proven system for not dealing with piracy.
- drdeadringer 6y ago
  This may not be the article spoken about, but it was what came to my mind as at least being similar to what was described. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho-readers-pirate-books https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho-r...
- enumjorge 6y ago
  It’s frustrating to see people pushing the narrative that content creators should fully embrace piracy and that anything else is simply wrong. Here you have someone telling us the difficulties they faced as a content creator, and then you have responses from people who are not themselves writers, armchair-quarterbacking the parent poster on what they did wrong. If you have an anecdote that goes against the narrative the fault is apparently still yours. The grand parent commenter made it as easily as possible to buy their book, which is what you’re “supposed” to do, yet that didn’t fix the problem. And somehow the recommended solution to poison the piracy well with basically content marketing for your book is somehow less “antagonistic” than what the gp commenter did.
chrismeller 6y ago
So he spammed all the piracy sites with a version of the book that turned out, after downloading and reading a third of it, to be incomplete. As someone who has pirated things in the past and ended up being pissed that it didn’t finish/wasn’t complete/etc. I don’t think that would send me screaming to spend money on it. Quite the opposite, what this is proving is that providing an intro to your work to prove to the customer that they actually like it (like Amazon’s “try a sample”) is hugely valuable.
- carapace 6y ago
  > As someone who has pirated things in the past and ended up being pissed that it didn’t finish/wasn’t complete/etc. I don’t think that would send me screaming to spend money on it. So what? You weren't going to buy it anyway, eh? What are you going to do, pirate harder?
  - pixxel 6y ago
    Don’t be too quick to judge, perhaps he wanted digital copies of books he already owns in paper form.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      maybe, but if that was what I was doing I would write "as someone who has pirated in the past because I want digital copies of books I buy in paper form.." so their not having written that makes me think the what, are you gonna pirate harder crack is reasonable.
- mcv 6y ago
  The big criticism of the original author is that they got a better experience from a piracy site than from the legitimate product. The author referenced by GP turns that around: ensuring a better experience from the legitimate product than from pirate sites. It's entirely fair. You've got no business being pissed about something you got for free on a piracy site. Especially not when it actively points you where you can get the legitimate version. I don't understand how your last line proves the opposite: if it's hugely valuable, that shows that this is a good idea, doesn't it?
RandomBacon 6y ago
This is the story/source: https://www.facebook.com/notes/maggie-stiefvater-really-its-me/a-story-about-piracy/10154994010857036/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/maggie-stiefvater-really-its-... Non-FB: https://www.thepassivevoice.com/a-story-about-piracy/ https://www.thepassivevoice.com/a-story-about-piracy/ Author Maggie Stiefvater regarding her work The Raven King.
- x0x0 6y ago
  story about author interacting with the folks stealing his books https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/16/lloyd-shepherd-ebook-pirates-mobilism https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/16/lloyd-shepherd...
- mkr-hn 6y ago
  For those not familiar with The Passive Voice: PG is Passive Guy, not Paul Graham.
Turukawa 6y ago
I'm a mid-list author formally published by one of the world's largest publishing houses. Deliberately seeding pirate sites with my novel would place me in breach of contract. It's an interesting idea if I were entirely self-published, but not realistic for me.
- netsharc 6y ago
  What if you start a whole new story, which is similar to whatever you have published, and after a few pages just tell the reader, "actually, you're not reading "The Adventures of Foobar"...
  - Turukawa 6y ago
    The economics of mid-list writing don't really make this feasible ... very few writers get to do more than buy coffee off their work. Creating a whole dummy book just to mess with pirates isn't worth it. Not when I'm going to spend a year writing a new novel in the first place. Then, once that's done, I've somehow got to get back into industry so I can earn a living and recover the money lost while writing ... this isn't something you do because you expect to earn anything from it. Making a few dozen extra sales from pirates?
syshum 6y ago
There are more than a few books I have found this way... The first part, or first book in the series, is published for free, then a reasonable (key being reasonable) price to buy the rest of the series or book I like this model, especially for fiction works

genghisjahn 6y ago

Where is this description that you ran across?

amp10 6y ago

With all that effort there is little time to focus on actual writing, so one can imagine the quality of that work. There is a reason real authors and musicians have agents (who are actually reachable unlike the YouTube service ...). The actual profession is a full time job.

tasogare 6y ago
Most fiction writers aren’t living from it. A lot of others books (educational material for instance) are written by people who have a job like researcher. So, writer is a professional job for some, but they largely don’t produce most of the work out there.
coliveira 6y ago
That's exactly what I thought. If you need to go through all this gimmick to sell books, when are you going to have time to write them? I much prefer to suffer the monetary loss in writing and make decent money with something else.
CharlesW 6y ago
> The actual profession is a full time job. But the actual professional isn't 100% writing, just as being an independent software developer isn't 100% coding. Half of your time (or more!) may be spent on other aspects of the profession.
- enitihas 6y ago
  Other aspects are communicating, researching, not a deep dive into human psychology to ensure people don't pirate your software.
wishinghand 6y ago
Jeez, mocking up a book to post on torrent sites is so much effort it eats a measurable chunk of time usually reserved for writing a novel? This is like an afternoon of work, compared with the months or years of writing a book.

alharith 6y ago

That's fine and dandy that author was able to go through those hoops to find success. But there are still those of us who still (maybe naively at this point in history) believe that if you do things honestly, in good faith, and play by the rules, you should be able to make money too.

hi_im_miles 6y ago
Money doesn't get invested into projects that 'do things honestly', it gets invested into whatever is deemed to make the most profit. There's plenty of people who provide loads of value to those around them (emotional labor, child care, etc) and go largely unpaid. Unless you can generate massive profits, there's little incentive for capitalists to care, and it's capitalists who have all the money and political influence.
- alharith 6y ago
  That's quite the broad brush you are painting all capitalists with. There are many ways to be successful many forms of capitalism, some degenerate yes, some not so degenerate. It is up to good honest people to set the example, because yes the greedy ones will always greed away. History has shown me that it doesn't matter what economic and political system is instituted, greed will find a way to exploit the good intentions of those systems.
  - hi_im_miles 6y ago
    >It is up to good honest people to set the example, because yes the greedy ones will always greed away. A focus on 'greed' or 'honesty' is missing the mark on what I'm saying here. We currently have an economy built on a foundation of historical expropriation, enclosure, colonialism, subsidy, regulatory capture, rent-seeking, etc, and heavily biased towards the resultant monopolies/oligopolies. As a consequence, prices are set at this inflated level of profit, and those who perform labor outside of the interests of these corporations typically aren't able to afford the costs of living (especially without breaking the law). "Greed" isn't really the issue here; the issue is systemic privilege born through violence. >History has shown me that it doesn't matter what economic and political system is instituted It's pretty intuitive that a political system is generally going to be favorable towards those who instituted it, outside of happenstance benevolence from a political elite.

koheripbal 6y ago

source pls.

mkr-hn 6y ago

I remember this too, but Google is completely useless for finding it.

RandomBacon 6y ago
I remember the story somewhat, so I found it after searching for 'author writing series almost cancels because piracy uploads incomplete books instead' I found the answer and posted in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312970

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago

If you are going to tell someone how they are doing their passion incorrectly please put in the additional effort to dig up the source you feel like justifies your opinion.

oh_sigh 6y ago
Yes. It is literally just an anecdote about shareware, not a proven system for dealing with piracy. It could lead to more sales, or you could really piss off a troll who has nothing better to do than DDOS your site and try to hack every account you own.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
  It's also the kind of shit that will def find lots of advocates on HN even if the evidence is spotty at best
- wishinghand 6y ago
  > It could lead to more sales, or you could really piss off a troll who has nothing better to do than DDOS your site and try to hack every account you own. This seems more like FUD for nagware than a proven system for not dealing with piracy.
drdeadringer 6y ago
This may not be the article spoken about, but it was what came to my mind as at least being similar to what was described. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho-readers-pirate-books https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho-r...
enumjorge 6y ago
It’s frustrating to see people pushing the narrative that content creators should fully embrace piracy and that anything else is simply wrong. Here you have someone telling us the difficulties they faced as a content creator, and then you have responses from people who are not themselves writers, armchair-quarterbacking the parent poster on what they did wrong. If you have an anecdote that goes against the narrative the fault is apparently still yours. The grand parent commenter made it as easily as possible to buy their book, which is what you’re “supposed” to do, yet that didn’t fix the problem. And somehow the recommended solution to poison the piracy well with basically content marketing for your book is somehow less “antagonistic” than what the gp commenter did.

chrismeller 6y ago

So he spammed all the piracy sites with a version of the book that turned out, after downloading and reading a third of it, to be incomplete. As someone who has pirated things in the past and ended up being pissed that it didn’t finish/wasn’t complete/etc. I don’t think that would send me screaming to spend money on it. Quite the opposite, what this is proving is that providing an intro to your work to prove to the customer that they actually like it (like Amazon’s “try a sample”) is hugely valuable.

carapace 6y ago
> As someone who has pirated things in the past and ended up being pissed that it didn’t finish/wasn’t complete/etc. I don’t think that would send me screaming to spend money on it. So what? You weren't going to buy it anyway, eh? What are you going to do, pirate harder?
- pixxel 6y ago
  Don’t be too quick to judge, perhaps he wanted digital copies of books he already owns in paper form.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    maybe, but if that was what I was doing I would write "as someone who has pirated in the past because I want digital copies of books I buy in paper form.." so their not having written that makes me think the what, are you gonna pirate harder crack is reasonable.
mcv 6y ago
The big criticism of the original author is that they got a better experience from a piracy site than from the legitimate product. The author referenced by GP turns that around: ensuring a better experience from the legitimate product than from pirate sites. It's entirely fair. You've got no business being pissed about something you got for free on a piracy site. Especially not when it actively points you where you can get the legitimate version. I don't understand how your last line proves the opposite: if it's hugely valuable, that shows that this is a good idea, doesn't it?

RandomBacon 6y ago

This is the story/source: https://www.facebook.com/notes/maggie-stiefvater-really-its-me/a-story-about-piracy/10154994010857036/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/maggie-stiefvater-really-its-... Non-FB: https://www.thepassivevoice.com/a-story-about-piracy/ https://www.thepassivevoice.com/a-story-about-piracy/ Author Maggie Stiefvater regarding her work The Raven King.

x0x0 6y ago
story about author interacting with the folks stealing his books https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/16/lloyd-shepherd-ebook-pirates-mobilism https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/16/lloyd-shepherd...
mkr-hn 6y ago
For those not familiar with The Passive Voice: PG is Passive Guy, not Paul Graham.

Turukawa 6y ago

I'm a mid-list author formally published by one of the world's largest publishing houses. Deliberately seeding pirate sites with my novel would place me in breach of contract. It's an interesting idea if I were entirely self-published, but not realistic for me.

netsharc 6y ago
What if you start a whole new story, which is similar to whatever you have published, and after a few pages just tell the reader, "actually, you're not reading "The Adventures of Foobar"...
- Turukawa 6y ago
  The economics of mid-list writing don't really make this feasible ... very few writers get to do more than buy coffee off their work. Creating a whole dummy book just to mess with pirates isn't worth it. Not when I'm going to spend a year writing a new novel in the first place. Then, once that's done, I've somehow got to get back into industry so I can earn a living and recover the money lost while writing ... this isn't something you do because you expect to earn anything from it. Making a few dozen extra sales from pirates?

syshum 6y ago

There are more than a few books I have found this way... The first part, or first book in the series, is published for free, then a reasonable (key being reasonable) price to buy the rest of the series or book I like this model, especially for fiction works