Stop Stealing Our Stuff

It's bad.  So bad that I am complaining.  I'm not much for complaints.  I'm a fixer.  I take the problem and break it down into composite parts.  So here it is.  I write books.  I love to write.  I wrote them well enough to get published.  It took me three books and ten years of my life.  Granted, I went to college to study English Lit so I could write better and I wallered through until I got published.  I suffered doubts, I hated my writing, I strove to overcome so you all could read my stuff—so you could see yourselves, ourselves, in art—not as a side player, not as an afterthought but as a central character, a protagonist with a life full of other lesbians and lesbian issues and lesbian love.

Now the business part of writing means SELLING books.  This does not mean downloading unauthorized FREE ebooks.  This is theft on the person who buys a book and then puts in on a site and advertises flagrantly that anyone can download it for free.  That is wrong.  That is stealing.  Pirating, despite being against the law, is very difficult if not impossible to prosecute. It's also virtually impossible to stop.

The only way to help is to not do it.  Don't download the pirated FREE ebook.  You, the reader, who does this is also stealing.  You didn't buy the book.  You didn't support the publishing house.  You didn't pay the author royalties.  You aren't helping to support the artistic endeavor.  All endeavors take cash.  I've seen lesbian publishers go down the toilet for lack of support.  I've known authors who no longer bother to write lesbian fiction because they don't make money at it.

You want to see yourself in books, you want to read books about lesbians, then you need to BUY them or someday there won't be any.  Or there won't be any good ones because the good writers won't write lesbian fiction because once again it doesn't pay and lesbian publishers will go down the toilet because they don't make money.

Okay, to add to the problem of not making money is buying a book and telling your friends how much you like the book and then everyone reads your copy.  I'm not saying that loaning a book is bad.  I'm saying that it's not helping to support your community artists.  You don't loan a painting that you bought to your friends so they can hang it on their wall.  You don't buy a cute T-shirt at the Pride picnic and then everyone you know wears it.  That kind of loaning I can get past because I don't think my readers really think about it in that way, but they should.  On average an ebook costs about ten dollars.  A latte costs five.  Don't have lattes for a week and you can buy a book.  Buy a book and feed an author.

Please share this blog with everyone you know.  Also check out Layce Gardner's blog on how fight this kind piracy.