Just Say "NO" to E-book Piracy

I've been spending way too much time lately trying to get free versions of my books taken down from "file sharing" sites all over the Internet. No sooner do I find a stolen file, fill out the form to have it taken down and provide documentation that I hold the copyright to the work itself, when another stolen file pops up somewhere else on another site.

What absolutely amazes me is that people think it's absolutely fine to gleefully download these stolen files, never once thinking about who they're hurting (which, quite frankly, is me). In fact, some people even think they're doing me a favor by spreading my work around and making it easy for others to get them without having to pay for them. Um.. no. Not only are they stealing the royalty money from legitimate ebook sales from my pocket, they're stealing my numbers, which is far more damaging. Pirated books don't get counted toward the number of books I've sold, which is the biggest thing my publisher looks at when they decide to continue publishing me or not.

Publishing is all about the numbers. Publishers make an initial investment and print X numbers of books. Needless to say, for an author to be considered successful, those books have to sell. No, ebooks are not printed, but the demand for them is another huge indicator of an author's success - every sale of an ebook through a legitimate source like Kindle or Sony is registered and recorded, which is another way my publisher sees whether people are buying my books or not. So if hundreds or thousands of my books are being given away free through file piracy, my publisher has no way of counting them. An author may be hugely popular when it comes to free downloads out there, but that popularity does them no good in the eyes of their publisher, because all they see is the number of legitimate sales. So those people who LOVE those authors enough to download those files are actually upping the odds that those authors won't ever be able to publish another book, because their numbers will be too low.

Make any sense? Oh, and let's not forget this basic fact: downloading pirated files of any kind for free is stealing, plain and simple. So just say no, would you, and support your favorite authors in a way that helps them go on doing what they do. Books are very inexpensive forms of entertainment, after all.