Personally I believe this myth is funded and created by Google to keep their CEO and board of directors out of prison for engaging in the largest case of copyright infringement in the history of man. Yes, I get pissed about that. Copyright holders weren’t paid for the use of their content nor were they allowed to have a say in what percentage of the content would be viewable for free. Nobody would choose 20% based on search criteria because theoretically you could search via 5 different IP addresses and browsers to get 100% of the book. Here is an experiment for you. Visit the page for this book and use the “search inside” feature for the word “copyright.” Every book put out by a publisher has a copyright and trademark page.
Now, this latest iteration of this rant happened because one of my fellow authors sent out this link in an email:
This cock & bull tale gets repackaged periodically on the Internet to make pirates feel good about their piracy. You’ve all seen the FBI warnings at the front of DVDs, even many pirated DVDs if they duped the full content, and the same applies to books. I didn’t read the entire link and have no plans to. At the beginning it makes a blatant assumption without content distinction. The “I’ve already had 300 requests on where to buy the book” or however it was phrased remark completely ignores the fact there are galaxies of distance between asking where to purchase and actually making a purchase. You all know this. It’s why you find all of that candy and magazines at the supermarket check-out counter. An impulse buy only happens in the moment. You wouldn’t buy any of that stuff if there was a sign at the register and you had to walk back through the store to find the shelf it was on. Retailers know this but apparently authors are deemed to stupid to figure it out.
Back when Linked-In still had a reason to exist and I belonged to a writer’s group there, I had this exact conversation more than 100 times. Today I’m putting it in this blog post so I can stop having the conversation and just point people here.
The earth has an amazingly higher chance of being hit by a planet killer asteroid than one-off title pirated in PDF form generating a single book sale. I put this to a test when I released “Infinite Exposure” and released a free promotional version containing the first 18 chapters or something like that. I see they have reset all of their stats.
https://www.free-ebooks.net/search/roland+hughes
Less than a year after putting it up there and subscribing to a couple of their promotional pushes to customers via some daily chapter service, over 2 million people had viewed the content. There was no massive spike in sales. The vast majority of people on that site don’t even bother to rate anything. I see they now claim 394 downloads and 5 5-star ratings. ScribD appears to reset stats too.
https://www.scribd.com/uploads
Showing only 43 reads for IE but still showing north of 32K for John Smith. (I still have no idea how to find this one note it indicates.) I see Smashwords “helpd me out” by loading Lesedi up there and putting it into the 30 day free read package…nice. Since I list all of your books in the back, just how many of my fellow Intersting Authors members have seen a big sales spike?
https://www.scribd.com/book/339357545/Lesedi
I can’t even see just how many people looked at it on there.
A one-off-one-title author loses everything with pirated PDF. More than half of those pirated PDFs end up on Lulu.com or some other criminal site being sold as POD by someone else. I have had to chase two different people down for this title:
http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/xbase_book.html
Selling other people’s content without paying for it is big business. You don’t think all of those DVDs pirated in China and sold via various markets in America was a business which operated at a perpetual loss do you?
Your title may only sell 5 copies, but, to someone with one or more Lulu.com accounts who is able to snag 3000+ pirated PDFs to put up for sale, that could be 15K sales and all they had to do was upload them.
Technology and “how-to” authors lose everything with pirated PDF. People who snag that book need one single answer. They aren’t going to read the entire thing. They are going to take what they need, make money with it, and move on. This same group of people aren’t going to buy or recommend any other title you have out there. These people have the ethical threshold of MBAs, steal everything. They will never have paid for a book in their life and they honestly thing everything on the Internet should be free to steal.
There are only two groups of authors piracy helps.
1) Long running series where each new installment has a cliff hanger. When the long tail has N-dozen-books you want the very first to be pirated out the wazoo because if the hook at the end of the book is good enough you _might_ get someone to by the second or even the rest of the series.
2) Promotional stuff. Lesedi is in this category. I put a bunch of your books at the back and never planned to _ever_ see one dime return for the conversion and posting service. I didn’t even have that thing edited. The entire book rolled out the end of my fingers during a NaNoWriMo event just like these blog posts. It is a first draft which is why the price is $1. According to Smashwords it has sold a whopping 2 copies. Not surprised with those 30-day free things going on at ScribD and no way to track consumption. I wonder how many other sites Smashwords “helped me out” with?
We exist in a world where content is used to sell other things and most vendors seem to be searching for “free” content to use. By “free” I mean content they don’t have to pay the author for or those who think you will write a fully researched and professionally edited 1500 word post for $5 or less.
Don’t buy the bull.
