Judging by the number of recent stories out there regarding ebook piracy, illegal copies of ebooks are being shared around the internet in even greater volumes than LOL Cats pics. Even I, a lowly indie author who’s never tickled the upper reaches of the Amazon best-seller lists for long, have, in recent weeks, had a couple of folks point out that my ebooks are out there in places that I didn’t put them.
So, for those of you in the same boat (with sleek yachts bearing down on you, waving their skull-and-crossbones flags), what do you do? I figure we have two options:
Option 1
Grab your pitchfork and crossbow and hunt down those pirates. Send cease-and-desist emails to the sites housing your illegal ebooks. Climb up on the highest soapbox you can find and pontificate on the evils of fans stealing your work.
Of course, you must bow to the idea of living with your panties in a permanent twist, because none of this will change anything in the long run. You may even turn some fans into non-fans because nobody likes to be lectured to. (Yes, I believe someone can be a fan without paying for my work; I’ve enjoyed many a book from the library, and, especially when I was younger and more cash-strapped, it sometimes took a lot of good books in a series to turn an author from library-only status to buy-as-soon-as-the-book-comes-out status.)
Option 2
Realize that piracy is going to happen (the music business has been dealing with this for over a decade, and they, with a whole lot of collective power and money, haven’t put a dent in digital piracy) and either learn to embrace it (it might just help you sell more books) or to accept it as a pitfall of doing e-business, one you have to learn to work around. There are worse things to deal with as an author. Like the obscurity that plagues us all before we become popular enough to tempt pirates.
But I’m losing money!
This may or may not be true. In the above link, Neil Gaimon said that his sales increased in the countries where he was most pirated. Others have pointed out that the people downloading illegal copies of your books weren’t going to pay for them anyway.
But, let’s say, for the sake of argument that piracy is in fact costing you money and that this problem will only continue to grow in the coming years. How can you make a living, or at least a decent part-time income, as an author living in such a world?
The main thing is to establish a fan-base or, as Seth Godin calls it, a tribe of people who love your work and will pay for it. You don’t need to be a bestseller. You just need a core group of “true fans” (I’ve linked to it before, but here’s the Kevin Kelly article on 1,000 True Fans one more time).
Once you have that “tribe” established, you will always be able to monetize your work in ways that go beyond selling ebooks. Making a living shouldn’t be a problem, and piracy shouldn’t matter.
How, you ask?
Here, again, it may be worth looking to the music business for ideas, as they’ve been dealing with piracy longer than we have. A model a lot of musicians, indie and otherwise, are using goes like this:
Give away the music for free (or accept that it’s being shared up the wazoo and getting people to pay for digital copies is tough) to build a loyal following, then make money on concerts and by selling premium products to those who love the work enough to plunk down money for exclusive goodies.
Is that ideal? Probably not, but people make it work because they love to create music and they can’t imagine not finding a way to make it work.
Okay, authors, I know what you’re thinking: concerts? Lindsay, are you planning to sing your next Emperor’s Edge novel for us? Nah, someone already sang a book review for me, and I can’t possibly top that.
My point here is that most of us, like it or not, will need to not only be authors but authorpreneurs if we want to make money from our work in the years ahead. Marketing and being creative about how we sell our stories is going to have to be a part of the plan.
Ways to make money that go beyond ebook sales
Even if you’re doing well right now, it’s worth thinking about the what-ifs. What if piracy becomes so popular that fewer and fewer people are actually buying ebooks from the stores? What if those same stores react by dropping royalty rates (I know I wouldn’t be making a living on ebook sales alone if Amazon suddenly decided to give indie authors 20% instead of 70%)? We hope these things won’t pass any time soon, but let’s think ahead in case ebooks go the way of digital music.
Here are a few ways I’ve seen authors making money that go beyond ebook sales (note: this all requires having at least a small tribe out there — I’ve covered the how-to on finding/keeping fans in a few previous posts so please surf through old entries for ideas):
Kickstarter
I recently interviewed an up-and-coming steampunk author who raised over $90,000 to fund the production costs of his book (his original goal was $4,000, so, even after he produces and ships all those books, he ought to have come out of the deal with a year’s salary in addition to whatever he makes on sales once the book goes live). While Kickstarter is traditionally used to fund start-up costs, I’ve seen a few authors make enough to pay the bills while they’re writing the book as well.
The Freemium Model
Game designers have been using “freemium” for a while. Offer a free version of your work (maybe your ebook?) and then have a premium version with more features (interviews, bonus extras, commentary?) that’s not free. Maybe make it a hard-copy so the e-pirates can’t go after it.
Another option is to do some sort of membership site where die-hard fans can pay to get early access to your work. Bestselling fantasy author Tracy Hickman has done an “exclusive subscription novel series” where fans get to come into a special membership area and see the chapters as they’re written, and even offer feedback along the way.
Advertising / Affiliate sales
While I’ve seen a few authors kick around the idea of selling advertising in their ebooks, I’m thinking more about making money from one’s blog here. You’re blogging anyway, as you “build your platform.” There’s nothing in the rules that says you can’t earn money from the content you’re putting up on the web every day (that was my day job — with a home improvement blog — before I quit to write fantasy full time).
I don’t sell any advertising here right now because I don’t need to, but I’ve had a couple of people ask about it, so I know it’d be a possibility. I do make an extra $100 or so a month as an Amazon affiliate (I link to my own books and other people’s books with affiliate links). If I wanted to, I could also become an affiliate for various businesses offering self-publishing services (since I talk about that sort of thing here).
I also have 1,000-odd fantasy fans as newsletter subscribers and, if I needed to, I could do some discreet advertising there (i.e. promote another fantasy author’s work for $XX) in addition to providing updates about my own work.
Merchandising
I’ll admit that this would be unlikely to account for more than take-the-family-out-to-dinner earnings, but there’s no reason you can’t put together some t-shirts, coffee mugs, calendars, or other goodies once you have a series that people enjoy. I know I’m thinking of running a contest to see if I can get some of the awesome folks drawing fan art to come up with a cool design that I could use. I just have to decide on some prizes.
Sites like CafePress take most of the hassle out of creating and selling merchandise, and, at the very least, these goodies can be used for giveaways. Every t-shirt someone wears is a little bit of free advertising for you.
Final thoughts
If you read through this list and thought, “Are you freaking kidding me? I just want to write books and have people go to Amazon and buy them,” I won’t tell you that’s not going to happen. It’s absolutely doable as I write this in the summer of 2012.
I’d guess that ebook piracy is a much smaller issue than people make it out to be right now. (Finding your tribe is a much bigger challenge.) But, if we do end up going the way of the music industry, that might not always be the case. I offer these ideas for authors who want to plan for the what-ifs or who are looking for ways to make more than they’re currently earning from book sales alone.
Thoughts?
Thank you for not whining about piracy. You’re right that it’s going to happen no matter what and it’s a lot less stressful to go with the flow.
The ideas sound plausible. I used to run a membership site for a teaching program and you can make a lot of money doing that if you charge a recurring monthly fee like Netflix. I don’t know how many people would pay monthly for access to an author’s stories (maybe if the fee was fairly low like the cost of a latte) but even a one-time payment could add up if you got a couple hundred people into it.
I first heard of Tracy Hickman’s subscription book on a podcast interview (I wish I could remember which one so I could provide the link), and I want to say he charged $75 and that included a limited edition signed hardback of the book. I don’t know how many people joined but even if it was just 100, that’s more than most authors get for an advance these days.
I think this is it?
http://www.adventuresinscifipublishing.com/2010/06/aisfp-91-tracy-hickman/
I love the term “authorpreneur”! 🙂 I’ve read so many articles and blogs about how authors need to market themselves, no matter their publishing format–but this blog entry not only makes it clearer than most, but adds in the little-discussed concept of what to do about piracy. And you have some great ideas about what to do for marketing, too.
Even though I don’t have anything published yet (unless you count the blog I just started), the idea of basically ignoring piracy and/or making it work for me instead of trying to fight it totally makes sense. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and if someone someday likes my stuff enough to put my ebook on some pirate site, then someone else will like it enough to pay a few bucks for it. 🙂
I’ve already been pirated a little — and not really directly, but it’s a long story — and at first I rushed to correct the leak. I’ll freely admit that I correlated a drop in sales with the leak and kind of panicked. “How am I ever going to build a momentum if everyone can just read my stuff in Google Docs?!” I said to my fiancé one night. I did correct the source of the leak but knew I couldn’t really do anything about what was on Google. After some ruminating and strategizing, I decided to let it be. I realized a couple of things:
If people want to read my stuff badly enough that they will look for free ways, that’s a GOOD thing. It means that people are reading it. Maybe they’ll like the stories they found on Google and will buy the first issue of my series. Maybe they won’t, but will give it a rating on Goodreads or Amazon. Maybe they won’t do either, but maybe, just maybe, they enjoyed the story and will mention it to a friend. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool.
I also realized that you look like a dork when you try to fight windmills. Like you said, piracy isn’t going away; as long as we produce digital content — be it music, movies, books, whatever — someone will find a way to get it for free. People like free things. You can either let them have free things or you can look like a jerk while you try to keep it all locked up under dollar signs.
I don’t mean that anyone bothered by piracy is a jerk, to be clear. I’m still slightly bothered by the fact that people purposely steal things. However, once it’s been pirated, you can’t really do much about it. I’ve chosen to look at it in a positive way: people now have another avenue to find my work.
I’ve actually come across a few indie authors who deliberately put their stuff up on the torrent sites, hoping more people would check out their work. One guy even bundled his book with some other popular authors in his genre (pirated ebooks that were already floating around out there). I don’t know if it earned him any more book sales, but a couple of blogs and newspapers covered the story, so it least it got him some publicity. 😀
That actually might not be that bad of an idea. I’m just a little intimidated by the torrent sites, so I’m not sure I’d set digital foot in there. Heh.
I do like the idea of giving books away via your website or email newsletter. I’ve done it a couple of times but maybe I need to be doing it more.
Re piracy, I fall into Option 3 – when I notice a book of mine on a free download site, I send a polite take-down notice, but don’t waste time and energy fretting about it.
I believe most people who use torrents sites wouldn’t buy my books on Amazon – also, most likely they don’t have the money, cheap as my books are. If they enjoy one, they may buy another later when they are not so young and poor.
My mentality, too, Lexi.
I’ve not been pirated yet, and I sell few copies—but my book that sells the most copies is the one that’s readily available for free.
Interesting, that. ^_^
Oh, and I meant to clarify: My one novel is free as a web serial. I mention it and link to it even in the e-book’s sample pages.
A lot of people reach a point where time is more valuable than money. I always buy stuff from Amazon since it means one-click shopping and automatic delivery to my ipad or kindle, so it doesn’t surprise me that people pay for an ebook there that’s available for free on the web or at Smashwords. It’s easier and more efficient for them to read it on their kindles. It’d probably have to be $10 difference in price for me to bother with the extra steps.
It sounds like you’re fairly accepting of the inevitable, even if you send those letters, so I’m putting you in category 2. So there! 😀
I used to write letters but they were either ignored (most of these pirate sites operate outside of countries that enforce copyright laws) or the books simply showed up again later.
I always look forward to your posts, Lindsay! They’re so helpful and fresh! So many other sites seem to recycle ideas, but you really do come up with new stuff. These ideas a great, and you have a great perspective on piracy. I thought the exclusive subscription is genius and unique.
A couple of tidbits…
Going to hardback may not prevent piracy. Within days of the latest releases of the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons, scanners in the Philippines and Hong Kong will have turned out digital copies. The more popular one becomes, the more one is stolen.
In another media, the popular band Nine Inch Nails had numerous troubles with their music publishers—which sounded a lot like the troubles that authors have had recently with book publishers. NIN took one to court, and even won a three million dollar verdict. Solution? Go independent (long live the digital revolution!), release the first half of an album for free, then charge $300 for a limited edition deluxe album. The 2,500 units of the deluxe sold out within three days. The power of the tribe grossed $750,000 for the band within 72 hours. Release another album for free, generate 1.4 million downloads, yet still sell 250,000 to the loyal fans. Letting fans have free copies of your work can make one a millionaire.
Cheers.
Reznor once wrote up a post in a forum on his strategy. I always thought it was good advice and could be applied to any solopreneur, whether you’re selling novels or albums. Even though he wrote it in 2009, I still find it inspiring.
PS: I might adopt you as my friend for dropping NIN into this conversation. 😀
There was also a “Pay what you feel it is worth” button. Often I’ll get the free version to see if I like it and then go give the artist money. Artists actually make more from me this way than if I bought the item traditionally.
I feel like with the low cost of e-books, piracy just isn’t going to be a huge deal. I’ve noticed that when I do free coupons for my book on Smashwords, I see an uptick in purchased copies on Amazon. My theory is that people follow the link, decide they want to get the book, and think, “Well, do I want to go to the trouble of registering on this site and side-loading the file? Or do I want to pay the whopping $3 she’s asking for on Amazon and get it on all my Kindle-enabled devices with one click?” Then they decide that the convenience is worth a couple of bucks.
I mean, at first I thought it was crazy, because here I am trying to give them the book for free! No theft or piracy involved! But you know, it’s their time. And if you think about the dollar value of the time it takes to actually read a full-length novel (I figured that, with my book, it costs the average wage-earner/reader roughly $150), the $3 savings from a free coupon is pretty insignificant.
I don’t see marketing to pirate sites though, only because it seems like a lot of those people aren’t actual readers–they just like to collect pirated stuff because it makes them feel clever.
This is an interesting approach to tackle piracy. The big publishing houses tend to favor the “Army of Lawyers” approach and DRM, but they should take note of Lindsay’s post. Of course they’re not particularly innovative, so they probably won’t. DRM also hampers improvements in eBook technology, since geeks are hampered trying to support the requirements from the Big 6 (cf. Baldur Bjarnason).
I think that the indie community will be the ones to provide alternatives to piracy, which is a problem (especially in my area of the world – Southeast Asia). This post has real legs. Thanks, Lindsay.
Thanks for commenting, Paul!
Yeah, I just finished Chris Anderson’s Free, and he talked about all the piracy in China. I saw tons when I was stationed in S. Korea. You’d walk off base and be able to buy the latest Windows OS and computer games for $7, ripped cds of course. It seems that it’s just a part of the culture in a lot of places.
I was in China for 3.5 years, and it’s harder to find a legit copy than a ripped one. There’s a BIG difference in how IP rights are enforced, but it all comes back to pricing again. Foreign corps usually ask people in these countries to pay a pretty high price for their product. 20 RMB in China has roughly the purchasing power of 20 USD in America, but the median income for Chinese people is a lot lower. It would be more like asking the average person here to pay $40-50 for a DVD.
What government is going to spend time chasing people who don’t have any money just because they wanted to watch a movie they couldn’t afford and so pirated it? It’s illegal, but not time or cost effective.
This is an interesting subject. I don’t think piracy is worth losing any sleep over. It’s going to happen. The file size of an ebook is less than 1 MB. If someone wants to share your book without paying for it – so be it. It’s never going to stop unless someone is monitoring everyone’s internet connection 24×7.
I believe Neil Gaiman had some positive things to say about piracy i.e. it can lead to extra sales.
I agree that chasing down pirates is a waste of precious time and energy. It wasn’t until I’d started giving some of my books away for free that I started to see serious sales, and even before that, I was always careful to opt out of DRM wherever possible. It was always more important to me that my books be easy to read than hard to steal. Have I been pirated? Yes. I’ve seen my full trilogy show up on torrent sites, and hilariously, the comment threads associated were some of the most active and interesting discussions of the books I’ve seen. Go figure.
I don’t worry about piracy. My beliefs are along the same lines as those of webcartoonist Rich Stevens (Diesel Sweeties) He said, “The only copy protection I need is the fact that tomorrow’s comic doesn’t exist yet and my brain’s the only place that bakes that cookie.”
As has been mentioned, I think growing a fan base and finding a way for them to send you money (donations, book purchases, whatever) is the way to make piracy a non-issue for you.
Awesome quote, Bryce. Thanks for sharing! I saw Rich’s Kickstarter campaign earlier this year. He’s definitely doing OK for himself!
I’m not too worried about piracy now but agree that it could become more widespread in the future. Who here remembers when Napster was in its heyday? Who here will confess that they used it? Napster made it so easy to find and download music that even people who wouldn’t normally touch pirate sites jumped on board, just to “try” new songs of course.
I don’t think the price of ebooks matters either. Songs are 99 cents on iTunes and get pirated all the time.
As a reader (I’m not an author, just a fan), I would say that to avoid the mistakes of the music industry (when going electronic) the following three is important:
1) Pricing: Charge less than for a “physical” copy. First-book-for-free schemes, or discounts, are also good (as you already discussed).
2) Availability: Make sure the ebook is available in as many ebook stores as possible. And don’t forget Europe! Don’t only stick to American stores. 😉
3) Compatibility: Try to sell the book in many different (file) formats, to suit all devices. It’s a bugger when an ebook you want is only available in some format locked to a device sold by one company, which you don’t have. That could turn people to piracy.
Note; Lindsay I think you are already succeeding with these, and I shouldn’t worry too much about piracy affecting sales rates.
For 3) I am not entirely sure though, since I “turned Kindle” after struggling with finding ebook stores for my old Cybook Gen3 from Bookeen. 🙂
Keep up the good work, ebooks are the future 🙂
//You most newborn fan..
I just had to reply to your comment, Sara. This blog post has been one of the most interesting and insightful I’ve read in a while, and I love all of the comments.
Sara, your 3-point list of pricing, availability, and compatibility deserve a blog post of their own! This is so true, for music, ebooks, movies, or any other digital medium.
I, for one, must confess to having downloaded the occasional pirated song, primarily because I couldn’t find a legitimate copy anywhere else. I love European folk music, and many of the European sites I find the music on aren’t compatible with English/US dollars/shipping to North America, etc. I want to buy their music, but if their site won’t take a Visa card drawn on a US bank and won’t convert the dollars into Euros, then what am I supposed to do? Just sayin’.
Oh, yeah. And put your stuff somewhere besides just iTunes. Some of us are those snarky anti-Mac people who use only Amazon or Google Play. 😛
Pricing, Availability, Compatibility. What wonderful tips to keep in mind as I get ready to launch my book into the print and digital world.
Thanks for this blog post, Lindsay, and thanks for your comment, Sara! 🙂
Great list of tips! Thanks for taking the time to write them up, Sara!
For #2, it’s amazing how many indie authors I see only publishing on Amazon and in .mobi. Sure, Amazon is a huge player, but that definitely limits the audience.
Count me as a “true” fan….if you right it I will pay for it
Write it…..sheesh….sorry for the typo….I’ve been at work far too long
Thank you, Jodie!
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Piracy will always exist as long as the internet is free, which hopefully it always will be.
Joe Konrath makes a good point when he says that price is a big factor in piracy. People started pirating music because the only format they were allowed to pay for was $15+ for a 10-15 track album on CD, even when they only wanted one or two of those tracks for their digital library. I do think book piracy will grow as ereading does, but the main victims will be publishing houses that charge $15 (there’s that number again… creepy) for the electronic form of a book. Anything from $2.99-$5.99 is coffee money in the eyes of likely customers.
As for fighting piracy, I agree with Lexi that a polite letter is the best you can do. It won’t work, most likely, but lawsuits are already proven failures.
As far as merchandising goes, don’t forget about audio books.
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