Major Rant Alert

 

I got a chirpy email from a friend in which she extols the virtues of a new ebook site she's found that she's sure I'll want to check out as soon as I have my own ereader and mentions (chirpily) in passing that she downloaded a free copy of SUNSHINE.   

            The frelling gods frelling wept.

            I will tell you this for free:  if there's a big bad nasty out there that is going to destroy the whole business of producing stuff for people to read—and the digital world is changing so fast, it seems to me even the word publishing is starting to sound a bit hoary—it's piracy.  There's masses and masses of stuff out there—in our digital universe—about piracy and its effects, and I'm not going to thrash it all out again here because among other reasons I'd burst a blood vessel.  This is the top link in a Google search for 'author blogs piracy':  http://www.the-digital-reader.com/forum/blog-posts/ebook-piracy-one-authors-opinion/ and if you need a quick brush-up you can find it here.  He doesn't even froth at the mouth.  I'm proud of him.  I'm frothing at the mouth.

            How much worse is it—how much more hopeless is it, trying to keep a lid on it, since piracy will always be with us*—if the good guys are stealing from us too?  How many of you out there have done something similar to what my friend did?  No.  Don't tell me.  I don't want to know.

            My friend said, oh, I didn't think, because it was one of your older books.  What?  How do you—any of you—think writers earn their living, supposing they're among the lucky five or ten percent of published writers who can make a living by writing?  The money we receive from publishers is absolutely and strictly tied to sales.  The 'advance' we receive, usually on signing a contract, is against sales.  If, at the end of the day or the year or the print run or when they yank your book out of print, you haven't earned back in sales as much as they paid you for your 'advance', you're in deep trouble, because they're losing money on you and unless they think you're about to morph into J K Rowling with your next book, they probably won't take your next book.  And there you are reading the want ads and wishing you'd learnt sheep-shearing when you had the chance.  Royalties?  Yes, a writer eventually receives royalties, if her book sells well enough to earn back her advance and keeps selling . . . but of that five or ten percent of writers, which includes me, who do manage to earn a living by writing, a vanishingly weeny sub-percentage ever builds up enough royalties to, you know, retire.  We live from advance to advance.  We can't afford to retire.  I can't.

            And we need those advances to earn out by sales.  Our future lives as writers depend on it.

            Yes, of course, lots of people who buy cheap or free pirate editions wouldn't pay full price for the legitimate book.  But some would.  Who doesn't like a bargain, if they don't realise what it's costing someone else?  And some of those that wouldn't buy the book would go to the library.  Libraries buy books—and a book particularly popular with librarians will sell more copies, because they'll talk it up to each other and to their clientele.  And there's the whole model thing.  There's now a model out there that says that everything on the internet is free, and everything on the internet should be free.**  We need to keep that model of money being paid for goods and services alive and healthy.  By paying for goods and services.  Because the providers of goods and services themselves need to pay mortgages and taxes and school fees and car insurance.

            So when you're out there cruising for bargains, engage your brain.  And if, brain engaged, it looks too good to be true, it probably is.  None, repeat NONE, of my books is available for free.  That includes the out of print ones—I still own the rights.  What happens to used copies of paper books is out of my hands.  But you should pay the going rate for an ebook—which I realise is a very mutable concept—and you should buy it from someone who has the right to sell it—which will also give you some clue about that going rate.  And what I say about me is pretty universally true of all living and recently dead—copyright lasts for a while after you pop your clogs—authors.  There are a few loss-leader experiments with free books—but they're the exception.  They are not the rule.  Be suspicious.  And if you find a pirate site—tell someone.  Publishers have entire departments to deal with piracy these days—they have to.  It's their livelihood too.  They want to know about pirates.

            It was only an accident—an offhand, throwaway remark—that my friend even told me about her free download of SUNSHINE.  That's the thing that completely haunts me.  And I almost didn't even notice, because it would never have occurred to me that someone I know could be this, well, daft.  The purpose of her email was to remind me of something I'd promised to do . . . ahem . . . a while ago, and I went 'aaaugh' and rushed off to do it.  It wasn't till I settled down to answer her email properly that I registered the 'free' and 'download'.  Even then I thought she must have just left a sentence out about, I don't know, for every eighty-seven ebooks you buy you get a free one or something, and she chose SUNSHINE.

            It has not been a great day.  I'm even shorter of sleep than usual for a getting-up-for-service-ring Sunday because the Bats in the Walls*** were unusually chatty last night†, it's been doing TORRENTIAL RAIN all day with occasional apparent breaks which delude you into believing you could get hounds hurtled before the next downpour and, speaking of hellhounds, Chaos took two hours to eat lunch.  That tragic look of his would melt the hearts of entire audiences of bankers, newspaper-empire owners, and politicians, if I could figure out how to deploy it.  I think he'd have trouble learning his lines for an open audition of HAMLET. 

* * * 

* If there are goods, there are pirates of those goods.  There were book pirates back in paper-book-only days too. 

** Economics is one of the many things I don't understand very well or very much of, but how anyone over the age of, say, twenty, can claim that we should shovel everything onto the internet that we possibly can and that all of it should be free, is absolutely beyond my comprehension.  

*** A little known H P Lovecraft sequel.  I hope it ends better than the original. 

† I was lying there listening to the flap-flap-flap cheep cheep cheep rustle-rustle-scritch cheep cheep CHIRRUP SQUEAK and thinking that if I were Melampus I'd know the secrets of the universe by now.  Or at least some really interesting details about the bug populations of my neighbours' gardens.