The word ‘revenge’ is readily hearkened — even by the most compassionate and understanding of writers — upon finding their hard-earned prose copied and posted on a file-sharing site. In the last year or so, I’d heard of such literary tragedies happening to well-known, best-selling authors but thought that self-published independent eBook writers would likely glide underneath the Book Pirate Radar, sequestered safely in the ‘small fry’ section of Lake Literature. Not so. Self-published author Cheryl Kaye Tardif stumbled across her books on a file-sharing website called 4shared and reacted thusly: “I immediately sent a cease-and-desist notice to the member who posted my content and infringed on my copyright, plus I sent a similar message to the site owners. Many hours have passed and as of yet there has been no reply from either, and my material is still on the site. Many of my author friends have discovered today that their works are illegally posted there too. If you’re an author, check! Then report the copyright abuse and demand your work be removed.” (Copied with permission from her blog cherylktardif.blogspot.com)
Last week, my husband and I joined the sad club of looted authors; one of our paying customers emailed us a one-line warning that she’d seen our best-selling book Draw Me a Picture on 4shared, for free. Indeed it was, along with five of our other titles. Oddly, they were all Kindle Editions from The Kindle Store, a fact which rather surprised us. We immediately began a long search of popular file-sharing websites in order to wrest our hard work away from the savvy book pirates.
Fiction writer A. F. Stewart directed me to a piece she’d written on the subject: “I have been engaged in a few discussions lately on these topics and one question keeps raising its ugly head. Who is hurt by copyright violation, piracy and illegal downloads? Many people, mostly the reprobates that run the dishonest download sites, say no one. They are wrong. The artists, musicians and writers are hurt. Of course, the pirates don’t want you to think about that because they are making too much money off their website membership subscriptions and advertising.”
One of our LinkedIn contacts emailed us with his own horror story of finding his POD books on Google Books for free, posted without his permission.
The good news is that these websites are subject to the same copyright infringement laws that human violators are. Once authors have taken the time to look up their various titles on the most popular sites, copied and pasted all the links to their pirated books, they can then write up a copyright infringement abuse form, also known as a DMCA Takedown Notice, and email it to the offending website. Doing so is the digital equivalent of bawling out “Avast!” drawing sword from scabbard and sending the pirates fleeing back to the dark waters from whence they sprung. As with most legal issues, the language of this form is apparently quite important to get right in order to produce the desired result, namely having access to the pirated file(s) removed. One can view an example here: DMCA Takedown Notice. After receiving the run-around from 4shared, I emailed the proper ‘Infringement’ form; they removed all the links two days later. Scribd reacted a bit faster; they removed my pirated book a mere10 hours after I sent the form their way.
A small victory won, we soon discovered that finding our pirated novel online as a free download wasn’t the worst part; with a little research, I found that file-sharing sites profit handsomely from the files posted thereon and boast web traffic numbers that most website owners only dream of. According to Checkwebsitestats.com, 4shared earns $113,000 a day from advertising alone and gets approximately 64 million daily page views and about 1.25 million unique visitors each month. It is logical to assume that such figures would cause a writer’s blood to reach the proverbial boil.
After sending out queries to my various writer contacts on the subject of file-sharing, I received a rash of replies touting similar stories to mine, save one:
“In all honesty, I have found my sales have jumped since the pirates found me,” Indy writer Rebecca Goings wrote. “Perhaps it’s due to wanting to try out a new author before buying their books. However, I do know a lot of eBook pirates scour those sites to get books for free. Am I losing sales that way? Oh yeah. However, I take it with a grain of salt. In all likelihood, my books probably wouldn’t have reached such a vast audience so quickly.”
Inspiration struck. After making certain the full versions of our novels were taken down, we quickly put together some non-editable sample PDFs which included the first two chapters of each book. We ended each file with this line: “Like this book? Buy the full version at BelatorBooks.com – PayPal verified merchant.” Links to the sample files were then tweeted and shared liberally, along with a request that our customers and followers post comments and ‘rate’ each file.
Having satisfactorily exchanged revenge for reciprocity, I look forward to writing a follow-up piece in the near future: Indy Writers Loot Book Pirates.
Meredith Greene has been a reviewer for SBR/SFBR since April of 2009; a wife of thirteen years, mother of four and self-published novelist. She, nevertheless, finds time for poetry, blogs, home projects, and gardening.
Come on over and read what Meredith has to say about home, gardening, and other general musings in her column Greene Ink.
Visit Meredith’s website www.BelatorBooks.com.
