Pirated Books
Pirate Books – No not a children’s story sadly, like with music they are books stolen from the author. We tend to know why – The reader is to poor (cough, choke cough) and can’t afford a cup of coffee let alone our books. They should be free, after all the author only writes them so we can read them.
Like another blog I read this morning, said, they seem to forget all those businesses we contract out to, those who make our book covers, book trailers, editing, formatting and all the other things need doing to give the book (you only wrote) a fair chance.
I heard about a program called Blasty the other week. Apparently it find your priate books and you can blast them – whatever that means. After much thought, I decided to try it, expecally after seeing more pirate sites and having recommendations from other authors. Bloody unbelieveable what Blasty came up with. It’s no wonder I’m not doing many sales. The worst part is one of my stolen books is a book raising money for charity – that stinks, I want to go and smack a few people.
They buy a coffee, they pay your plumber, they buy their groceries…Yet they won’t buy our books. The entitlement is with us to protect our sales, not to give them books for free. We need to live too and so do those small businesses we support during the creative process.
What all this is about?
I wanted to ask authors about when they upload their books. DO YOU TICK THE BOX FOR DRM (Digital rights management is a systematic approach to copyright protection for digital media. The purpose of DRM is to prevent unauthorized redistribution of digital media and restrict the ways consumers can copy content they’ve purchased.) searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/digital-rights-management If you don’t, then anyone can take your book, sell it, give it away as a free download. You have to make sure you tick the boxes to say you own full rights to the work you are uploading or that you are the legal representative. PLEASE CHECK!!
Another idea came to me while I was working on the SCAM/ERROR blog. Do you tick all six channels on Createspace? Even the one giving you the smallest royality? Maybe it’s time we all looked into that and choose more carefully.
You can, if you wish, Upload books directly to the KOBO site and BARNES & NOBLE site. I know I will be suggesting this in future for my own clients at Plaisted Publishing. Here is hoing BLASTY works and we can dislodge these sites as quickly as they make them.
Had to laugh at one though ‘Come Soon, ‘Joseph’s Story’ by Claire Plaisted. This story is not even for sale anymore, it was unpublished. Just goes to show some of these pirate sites only have the book covers and are after readers credit cards. In some ways I’d love a reader who is happy to steal a book get bitten by some of these sharks…Oh sorry Pirates…
18 Responses
Reblogged this on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog and commented:
Further to my reblog regarding registering your copyright, (see my reblog post before this one) Claire gives advice regarding copyright infringement/ piracy and gives a link to a program to help authors find said infringements…
Its so messed up. I hope books dont become the next things to be pirated en masse like Piratebay did for music and film.
With books it seems like even more of a gut wrenching situation due to the laborious process by a solo author (before covers etc). One good thing is books arent like music, they require hours of time whereas music and film are 2hrs or less, theres an accesibility to them.
I may be wrong but I always thought of book buyers as honest people, hopefully the pirates and the downloaders are in the minority.
I have seen comments even on Facebook of people who go out of their way to find a Pirate site so they can steal. It is getting really bad. As one site goes down several more open. 🙁
Dam. Hopefully it’s contained to some extent.
Give Blasty a go. You can then see how affected you are as an author.
Thank you for this informative post. I do use DRM and have seen several of my books (apparently) available on pirate sites. However, in the case of my work I think the sites in question are phishing scams and anyone foolish enough to register would have their personal data harvested for criminal purposes. As an aside, the KDP Select Amazon programme insists that books enrolled are exclusive to it, consequently if Amazon find works available elsewhere they may construe this as a breech of Amazon’s terms (despite the author not being responsible for the presence of his (or her) work on a site other than Amazon). Kevin
Reblogged this on newauthoronline and commented:
Hope none of my author/poet friends have their work pirated. However, if it does happen to you this is an informative post. Kevin
One thing that also really got at me, was a book selling site which had ALL my book covers on there, but “not available” next to the books. They were taking the details from the ISBN site and using this as a hook to try and get writers to sell through them. They got a very pointed email from me telling them that book covers are also copyright and they had NO right to take them. They took the covers down. All my books are now up on the Internet Archive so anyone can access them free. At the end of the day, I am here to help writers and it just wasn’t worth it.
So sad when this happens…Wish we could stop them more easily. x
When we learn to value people above profit, then it will happen. Stay safe.
It would be good if laws were a bit less complicated to understand as well…lol. Thanks for your comment
It’s very different here in Australia, but tough when you sell internationally. The very best of luck.
The problem for those of us in New Zealand is that it’s expensive and difficult to enforce copyrights internationally (via, for instance, the provisions of the Berne Convention). I’ve so far only had some of my back-list published online as e-books, not my primary forward-list which is still being issued through the mainstream publishers in Auckland. But even then, several of those back-list titles were scraped by scammers, purely as click-bait. I managed to get one lot taken down, but it’s like playing a game of whack-a-rat to stop them.
I like the Whack-a-rat term 🙂 Sounds very Kiwi, a bit like ‘Weed Whacker’ as my husband calls Line Strimmers. Meanwhile I am trialling Blasty, see how it goes.
Reblogged this on Writer's Treasure Chest and commented:
Plaisted Publishing House published an enormously important blog post for authors concerning copyrights and pirated books!! If possible, spread word about this for as many authors as possible to read it!
Reblogged this on Claire Plaisted – Indie Author and commented:
Don’t you just hate pirated books 🙁
Claire, Ive had the worst experience with Blasty I cant remove my credit card from their system, their support never replies to my e-mails or tickets and I was forced to go to my bank and have them issue a fraud claim against them to stop the recurring billing!
What I did was I switched from Blasty to https://www.Pirat.io/ after learning about them at the Boston writers convention! I’m very pleased with their service so far A+
Wow that is really bad customer service and I’m glad you laid a complaint. I never used their paid version and don’t have them on my latest laptop. Glad your bank sorted it out. I may look at the new site you mention… Thank you Isobel.