Why Would An Author Pirate His/Her Own Books?
We often hear about authors and publishers speaking out against piracy and how piracy will be the death of the publishing industry. But rarely do we hear about authors pirating their own work.
Is this some kind of publishing bizzaro world? I thought so when I first read this post from Goodreader. In part, it says:
We have found through our research that certain authors have been deliberately been leaking their own books to popular Bittorrent sites such as the Pirate Bay and Demonoid. From the authors we spoke with there were two main reasons why they initially did this. The first factor was to publicly denounce the torrent site for pirating their works and then capitalizing on the ensuing television, radio or online attention that came along with it. The second reason was far more nobler, to share their books for free on sites that often have copyright infringing material.
The first reason I don’t really understand. Uploading your own book to torrent sites and then denouncing them? Seems pretty counter intuitive to me. It’s like murdering someone to make a point that murder is bad.
The second reason I find much more logical. I’ve said many times here that an author’s biggest enemy isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. If no one knows your book is out there, then how are you going to get it into the hands of readers, much less sell it?
When a book becomes “pirated” on a torrent site, anyone can download it for free. It’s a massive distribution system for ebooks that is only rivaled by Amazon’s Kindle platform.
I might be wrong, but it seems if a book is on a torrent site, then there must be something to it. It must be a good book. If not, then why would anyone pirate it? So the author is creating a fake “buzz” to get more publicity.
It might be a slimy way to go about publicity, but it sure is thinking outside the box. The article says the piracy did yield some good results:
He never got millions of downloads, but did enjoy thousands and many comments from users who downloaded the books were full of gratitude and praise. Eventually some of these users ended up purchasing the ebooks directly from the publisher.
You can take away from this what you want. I have never supported piracy. However, if the author is pirating his or her own work, then it’s pretty hard to condemn, especially when the results are so positive.
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