March(ing) into April: A Look Back

As March began to wind down, The Atlantic published their article about Meta’s massive, wide-scale book piracy ring used to train their generative-AI platform, Llama 3. Just in case you don’t know, Meta is owned by Mark Zuckerberg and, under this umbrella, includes the social media sites, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. They stole the bulk of my published works to use in their bullshit AI training with the intent of feeding my writing into their little griftomatic plagarism machine to teach their generative computer software how to write like a human being. A quick Google search shows that Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is currently 201.4 BILLION dollars, making him the third-wealthiest human being on the entire planet Earth. And he’s out there fucking stealing ebooks. And let’s be clear about this right up front — it absolutely is criminal what Zuckerberg has done here. I am not throwing around words like “stealing” or calling this a “piracy ring” lightly. This is theft of intellectual property resulting in loss of income for me. As television writer and producer David Slack noted on BlueSky after news broke, “If your business model doesn’t work without stealing other people’s work and violating copyright law on a massive scale, then you’re not in business. You’re in organized crime.”

Alex Resiner writes in his article, “Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.”

Mark Zuckerberg, a man who is, again, the third richest person in the world, stole my books. He authorized his minions at Meta to steal my books. And not just mine, either. They stole a lot of books, from a lot of authors, including works that haven’t even been published yet! Maris Kreizman at LitHub writes about Meta somehow having gotten its hands on digital advanced reader copies (otherwise known as galleys or ARCs) available only on legitimate sites like NetGalley or Edelweiss (both of which I use in my work as a book reviewer, FYI), summing it up with the most evergreen subheading ever with “One of the Richest Companies in the World is Stealing From the Rest of Us,” and closing with “the work of individual artists is being used and denigrated in order to benefit a class of people who don’t care about the art and fear no consequences.” When I began writing this piece, on March 20, my BlueSky and Facebook feeds were literally filled with other authors complaining about their works being stolen and the income lost as a result of one of the richest men in the world stealing our shit, and it hasn’t let up much in the days since. The works they stole from me personally range in price from 99c to $4.99 USD. This is, apparently, too rich for the blood of Mark Zuckerberg, a billionaire. And not just a billionaire, but a billionaire more than 200 times over. Add on to that Meta’s valuation which, as Kreizman notes, “is currently $1.56 trillion, which seems like it would be more than enough to pay licensing fees.”

According to Garry Lu over at Boss Hunter, if you worked 24/7 non-stop without ever taking a break while earning $10,000 an hour, it would take 2,281 years to earn $200 billion, “Meaning to have his sort of wealth today, you’d have to start all the way back in 261 BC.” Another estimate shows that, spending $1 million per day, it would still take you 544 years to spend $200 billion. That’s how insanely wealthy Mark Zuckerberg is.

On Amazon, for each of my books that sells at $4.99, I get $3.49. I would need to sell roughly 57,142,857,142 copies of a single title to earn $200 billion. When you start looking at the number of how many copies the average book sells, let alone what your average indie sales are like (FYI not a single title of mine are even close to reaching that average), you begin to realize just how fucking laughable selling that many copies is. It’s never going to happen. Even Stephen King is only at 400 million copies sold across the entire breadth of his body of work (and Meta stole 200 of his works, by the way. You can look that up if you’re curious.). Selling 57 billion copies just ain’t ever going be a thing for me, especially when there’s only 8 billion on this planet. I’d be happy to be able to just earn a living from my writing alone, but even that possibility alone is ridiculously small and unlikely as an indie horror author, and even less so with all these dipshits stealing it instead of paying the already super-low price tag I put on my books.

But Mark Zuckerberg? That motherfucker has $200 billion lying around and he’s still stealing shit. This seems like a good time to remind you all that there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. They’re all wage thieves at the end of the day. Every fucking one of them. Mark, Elon, Bezos, Trump, the whole fucking lot of them didn’t get where they are by being honest, responsible businessmen. They got where they are because they fucked over everything and everybody in and out of their way in order to line their pockets. And then, after all that, after raking in money hand over fist and rigging the game so nobody else can ever have a shot, they then decided, you know what, let’s steal some books from these hard-working, little-paid authors, these indie motherfuckers who probably don’t even break even on their self-published works. Because we got ours, so fuck them. Fleece ‘em, rape ‘em, skin ‘em alive — that’s the philosophy of these ultra-wealthy cretins, their one and only guiding principle in life. Because that’s the one thing all these rich fucks have in common — they just take, take, take, take, take, and then once they’ve hoarded every goddamn thing they possibly can, they still manage to find something else to take, something so far beneath them, from people they’ve never heard of, who don’t make one iota of difference to them, from people so far beneath them they wouldn’t even know you’re pissing on them to tell them it’s raining because they’re so far down the piss doesn’t even hit them! It just fucking evaporates in the atmosphere, that’s how fucking far down authors like me are from Mark fucking Zuckerberg. One of the richest men on earth, stealing my fucking books, just because he can.

The one small thing about all this that gave me a chuckle was the fact that they apparently did not steal my anti-fascist, Fuck Trump splatterpunk horror book, Friday Night Massacre, to use in their training. Gee, I wonder why that might be?!

Naturally, there’s not much I can do about this in the end. He’s beyond fucking rich, while I’m roughly a missed paycheck away from becoming a hobo. The rich live in a different world from the rest of us. They exist in an entirely separate ecosystem from us. They live by completely different rules and are, in fact, above any such rules that would see any one of us condemned under the strictest penalties possible. They are, in short, the fullest and most perfect living example regarding the existence of two entirely different Americas. He stole my books, stole the money right out of pocket. The horses are out of the barn and the door is left standing wide open. All I can really do in response is to delete my Facebook and Messenger accounts, delete my Instagram account, and get rid of Threads, which I rarely used to begin with. There is absolutely no reason for me to use these products and platforms anymore. Why the fuck should I? I'm at a complete and total loss as to why I should stay on Meta platforms knowing they've pirated damn near everything I've written and published -- nearly every indie book I've put out there, along with several anthologies I've been included in. All stolen. Income lost. And that's not even getting into all the right-wing bullshit Zuckerberg has engaged in. Yes, I'm pissed off. You’re goddamn right I am. Why should I keep engaging with and using platforms that literally steal money right out of my pocket? To stay is to acquiesce, and that just reeks too much of battered person syndrome for my liking.

I’m fucking done. Leaving is all I can do, so that’s exactly what I’ve done. I can stop giving them my clicks. I can stop having their horseshit ads served to me, which is about all these sites were good for nowadays anyway, since their algorithms no longer show you the actual, real-live friends and family and assorted other people you follow, instead populating your feed with suggested accounts from brands and influencers that have paid to have themselves advertised to you. History suggests I won’t be missing out on very much. I left Twitter soon after Musk took over and turned it into a Nazi propaganda machine, and I sure as fuck haven’t missed that shit at fucking all. Facebook has been carving a similar trail, and the very few times I’ve logged into Threads show that to be a right-wing cesspool as well. All I can do now is deprive them of my information moving forward and hope that I will be included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action lawsuit filed against Meta for their copyright infringement. Zuckerberg may not be able to afford my ebooks and has to resort to petty theft to obtain them, but I can certainly damn well use some of that Meta money, so bring on the class action lawsuit, I say, and let’s make ‘em bleed.

Where’s my fucking money, Zuck?

TLDR:

Anyway, if you’re looking for me on social media, or are wondering where I’ve disappeared to, the only place you can find me nowadays is on BlueSky. This is the only social media platform I will be using and engaging with, until such time as they, too, prove themselves wholly unfit for my support as a user.

I know there’s really very little I can do to prevent my work from being pirated, by either the poor, the rich, or people who just want free shit, but there is something you can do. If you’ve ever read a pirated copy of my work, or if you have pirated my works for others to read, or have used a generative AI platform that has been trained on my stolen works, you can buy me a coffee and we’ll call it even.

And also:

FUCK AI   KINDLE UNLIMITED REMINDER!

Just a friendly reminder to Kindle Unlimited readers that all of my independently published works will be exiting Kindle Unlimited on April 16, so if you’re a KU reader you better hurry and get those borrows in quickly! Soon after this expiration date hits, all of my works will be going wide and will be available on all other ebook platforms, like Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, Smashwords, and elsewhere, including right here on this site.

My own digital store will be opening up April 18 with everything I’ve published available for you to buy direct, giving you complete control over the EPUB edition of each book for storage and safekeeping on your personal devices. Bonus, if you buy direct from my store, you won’t ever have to worry about another billionaire taking my books off your ereaders. Peace of mind is a good thing!

Two of my books have already gone wide: Borne of the Deep (The Salem Hawley Series, Book 2) and The Horror Book Review Digest Volume 3. You can grab either one via your preferred marketplace right now, or wait until April 18 to buy them from my store.

On the review front, March was a slow month for me. My wife and I took a small vacation mid-month, which I took as an opportunity to do some pleasure reading free of review commitments and to get a bit more caught up with R. Scott Bakker’s The Aspect-Emporer series by way of the third volume, The Great Ordeal. I enjoyed it, but it also felt like a lot of prologue to the fourth and final book in this series. I hope to finally get this series wrapped up this year, after taking a decade-long break between the second and third book, but I feel like I say that a lot and am never quite able to follow through… but this time I mean it! Again!

I did manage to get two reviews posted over at FanFiAddict, which I encourage you to check out.

Rhino: The Rise of a Warrior: A Hell Divers Novel by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Inhsopitable by Ali Seay

I’m expecting April to be a bit more productive, reading-wise.

Currently reading: Zombie Bigfoot by Nicholas Sullivan

Currently watching: Rebel Moon (The Director’s Cut), Jack Ryan (Season 4) and various cooking competition shows

Currently playing: Star Wars: Outlaws (PS5)

That’s it for now. See you next month, gang!