Just A Little Advice...

Hi everyone! I often receive emails from writers who are interested in self-publishing and have questions or concerns - particularly on copyright issues. It's always a pleasure to hear from other writes and avid readers, and I always aim to answer those emails as best I can. This is why I felt it necessary to write this particular post and to create awareness.

Thanks to a fan of Feral Sins, I recently discovered that someone had copied my work on an e-book community for writers and publishers to share their work. As you can imagine and understand, it was a very upsetting situation. There is a difference between FanFiction and copying someone's work, and this situation was certainly the latter.

After receiving notification of this by both myself and my publisher, the website instantly removed the copied text and apologized for the inconvenience caused - of course I would never blame the website; they're not responsible for what other people post and they trust their members to follow their terms of service. However, I felt I had to make this post to make other self-published authors or aspiring authors aware of this type of thing. I would never have thought to check any such websites for infringements, and had someone not found it, I would most likely never have known. It may be worth some of you checking for any infringements on your own work on such websites, just to be sure. Us writers should look one out for another.

I haven't named the infringer as although I'm upset and can be a bitch from time to time, I'm not bitter and cruel. I have a feeling that being contacted over this and having the text removed was shocking enough for them - after all, they clearly thought they would get away with it or never would have done it. Hopefully this discourages them from doing it in the future.

Thank you once again to the fan of Feral Sins who discovered the copyright infringement and contacted me about it. I'm your devoted friend for life...but not in a creepy way.

On a lighter note: I've finished the third book in the Phoenix Pack series. Unfortunately, it still won't be released until next year as publishing can be a long process, but it's done and I can now move on to the third book of the Deep In Your Veins series.

Take care everyone!

Suzanne