I'm just not cool with this

[naomi_jay]

I feel like I'm constantly blogging about JA Konrath at the moment. I haven't become obsessed, I swear. But, let's face it, the guy is doing interesting, if controversial stuff, and as a writer, I want to keep up with it all.

Anyway. This post is the latest in Konrath's self-publishing adventure, in which he posits that ebook piracy doesn't harm sales, and offers to prove it by letting people download an ebook of his for free, and encouraging them to post it to torrent sites (or whatever? This is where I admit I know nothing about the terminology of file-sharing), and so forth. He'll watch his sales and see if this impacts on them negatively or positively.*

Now, I find this fundamentally flawed to begin with. Konrath has offered this book for free. This is not the same as me going to a torrent site and taking a copy that somebody uploaded without his permission. If you throw open the doors of your house and tell people your possessions are up for grabs, you can't then say it's theft. The circumstances are completely different. All this experiment will really prove is people like free stuff, and that's kind of a given anyway.

Will it affect his sales? I don't know. I imagine probably not to any great extent. I imagine a few people who weren't Konrath fans before will probably become fans and thus pay for his other books. Great. Good for him. Again, I don't think that proves anything either way - there are too many variables. And I don't buy into the argument that "If a free option is available right next to a paid option, and people take the freebie, that PROVES they wouldn't have bought the one for sale because they took the freebie." I just can't get behind that logic. If Konrath charged for the book, people who wanted it badly enough would pay for it. If you give them the choice of not paying for it, they'll more than likely take the freebie. Again, all this proves is that people like freebies.

But that's all kind of minor stuff compared to my main niggle: the idea that piracy isn't a problem, or at least that, if it is a problem, we should all just shut up and ignore it because it's going to happen anyway. Either that, or jump on the boat and hoist our flags alongside the pirates. No. Sorry. I'm not okay with that.

Authors are providing a service, same as anyone else in a job. You can argue the merits of that service, you can argue that some books are crappy and you wish you hadn't paid for them. Of course you can. Same way you can eat a horrible meal in a restaurant and wish you hadn't paid for that. But writing a book is a job, and if you do a job, you get paid for it. That's just a basic rule in life. I wouldn't come to the office every day and work for free. I wouldn't expect anyone else to. So why should I write a book and give it out to people for free?** Why shouldn't I get paid for that?*** Why should anyone who makes a living from their writing accept theft as an unavoidable aspect of their career?

And why would Konrath encourage that theft? Because that's what he's doing, when I boil it down. He's saying, no, ebook piracy doesn't matter. It doesn't affect anything. Well, I disagree. I think it does matter. I think encouraging ebook piracy devalues the author's job, and the product they produce. I think authors deserve to be paid for doing their job. I think if my boss at my day job refused to pay me because somebody was stealing pens from my desk, I'd be pretty pissed off.

Okay, I'm not pretending to have answers here. As I said, I'm sure Konrath's sales won't suffer because of his experiment. But then again, I don't think his experiment has as much to do with piracy as he thinks, so that's another matter. I'm not pretending there's necessarily any effective way to stop piracy. But why be complicit in it? Maybe you agree it's okay, or not a big deal or whatever, but for those who don't agree, why make them complicit in it by stating out loud that it's not a big deal?

I honestly think the phrase that sums all this up best is "controversy creates cash." I expect Konrath ultimately will benefit from this experiment because people are talking about his books and drawing attention to them from sources that might not have paid attention before. I guess the adage about no such thing as bad publicity works here too. It just makes me sad that so many people seem to think this is okay. As usual, I'm interested in what other people think, mostly because, as said, I really don't know a whole lot about digital piracy, torrents, etc. Shout at me, people.

*I wonder how many people go ahead and download the freebie just to prove that Konrath's right and traditional publishing is broken, rather than because they want to read the book? I see a lot of commentors on his blog in general doing the whole This Will Show Them All song and dance, and I suspect people who want validation of their decision to self-publish will support Konrath's experiment just to gain that validation.

**I'm not against authors giving out freebies by any means; there are lots of good reasons to do so. But this isn't the same situation in my opinion.

***I say "I" in a purely hypoethetical sense because I don't yet make enough money from my writing to afford the bus trip into town to cash my royalty checks. But you know, I one day hope to make enough money from writing to live on, and if I go around encouraging people to pirate my books, I'm kind of shooting myself in the foot with that one.



Comments

[crystalwaid.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Yeah. I'm with u. I don't get it either unless all this author is looking for is to stir the pot so people will start looking into what he's writing/selling and buy into it. Now that I have discovered ebooks that's all I buy. Of coarse, I am new to it and don't know hardly anything about the piracy. But, like with anything people can steel it if there's a way to. Sad really, that. And one day u will make enough off ur royalty checks that u'll tour the US and come to Texas:)

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Lol, you wait! I'll make it to Texas one of these days!

[dwg.livejournal.com]

The Q&A is illuminating where Konrath says he doesn't actually care about the file sharing aspect, just whether free books on offer will effect sales. Which is something else entirely from the piracy issue, at least as far as I'm concerned. Because to use your analogy, it's like having a cup that says "FREE PENS" and people can either take a pen from it, or replace it with one they found/bought elsewhere, and then you'd be keeping an eye on the stationery cupboard to see if that somehow effects your pen supply.

Which is similar to this project from Bookmooch.

The massive flaw in Konrath's plan is that...other writers offer stories, even entire books, for free all the time to promote their work. Because people love a freebie. So what he's doing isn't so much an "experiment" or even an investigation to see how piracy can hurt an author's royalties, as just a regular promotion to get new readers. It's just that he's dressing it up as something else, which doesn't sit right with me.

Also, way to ignore libraries. Surely they're the biggest file sharing pirate network ever to exist.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

I think this is a massive circular argument. From reading his original post and the replies to it, it seems everyone involved is convinced their opinion is the absolute one, and you can't have absolutes in situations like this.

Which is why the "you prove me wrong" stance irritates me. Konrath is a well-known, outspoken author with a big backlist and a lot of fans. His results for this experiment would differ wildly from say a newbie fighting to get their first publishing contract.

[nathreee.livejournal.com]

I remain unimpressed by what Konrath is doing, exactly because of what dwg says. And also because Konrath is an established author. He has a fanbase who are going to buy his next book, just because they want to have all of his books, or because they know and like his style.

I also believe piracy is unavoidable. But I think the best weapon against piracy is to make books and ebooks easy to buy and not too expensive. No DRM, no fuss, just straightforward click here and buy the book. Because going to a pirate site and weeding out all the possible trojans is more hassle than just click and buy. And I think a lot of people actually care about paying for the book so the writer gets paid. So if you make that easy to do, I think piracy becomes a minor issue.

Of course, we as writers don't have a lot to say about where our books are sold. I don think we actually get to influence our own sales a lot. Not by offering our work up for free on some website, and not by frantically trying to avoid piracy. Our sales are up to the people who market out books. That feeling of powerlessness is not nice, but there it is.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

I think the best weapon against piracy is to make books and ebooks easy to buy and not too expensive. No DRM, no fuss, just straightforward click here and buy the book

Yes to that! And yes to your first paragraph too, which seems to be a fact Konrath has chosen not to factor into his experiment.

I don think we actually get to influence our own sales a lot. Not by offering our work up for free on some website, and not by frantically trying to avoid piracy

Agreed, with some regret! Art is subjective, so you can never please everyone. I'd like to think, though, that you can push back a little here and there.

[nathreee.livejournal.com]

Well, of course we got influence our sales a bit by WRITING AN AWESOME BOOK, but hey between you and me, I don't think we'd be comfortable sending a book to a publisher if it wasn't polished.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Lol, hell no! I'll take my chances writing awesome books and hope the damn public recognises my genius!

[(Anonymous)]

I don't normally reply on other people's blogs because I spend waaaaay too much time on my own, but I do think some things here require clarification.

My ebooks and audiobooks are being stolen, in large numbers. I addressed this with a recent blog entry. But I'm not bothered buy it, because I'm still making a decent profit.

To show how unbothered I am, I encouraged people to freely take an ebook that (to my knowledge) hasn't been pirated yet. Not it is being pirated--it's on at least a dozen torrent and file locker sites, and people have shared it over 1000 times.

The goal of this experiment is to see if those 1000 (or 5000, or 10000) freebies hurt the steady sales this title has been getting on Kindle.

While people on my blog are taking it knowing I'm offering it, the pirate sites likely aren't. They're sharing it like they share my other ebooks (which I haven't given approval for.)

If you truly believe piracy is a problem, perhaps you need to show some proof that it actually is harmful. It's very easy to knee-jerk react to being stolen. I've done it myself. "Hey! Someone has my book and didn't pay for it!" Outrage is an honest response.

But does someone stealing an ebook really represent a loss? Or is that someone who wouldn't have bought it anyway?

Or perhaps it is someone who wants to read it for free, and then buy a copy. Or someone who then becomes a fan and buys other books.

Truthfully, I don't know. And I think it's impossible to truly know if piracy hurts or helps or does nothing at all.

But I don't come out for or against things until I've gathered data and experimented.

If at the end of six months, the sales for this ebook are consistent, that's pretty good evidence that free copies of the book being available haven't hurt my profits.

If you don't believe that is valid, I challenge you to devise a better experiment. But please keep an open mind, and don't base opinions on gut reactions. If you hate piracy, show facts that support your claim.

JAK

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Hi Joe, thanks for taking the time to respond; I appreciate your comments. I read your blog when it was originally posted, followed the comment thread, and re-read it again before posting my own blog. So I don't consider my response a knee-jerk one, not do I think I'm close-minded on the subject.

I know from working with the police that there are always shades of grey when it comes to moral and legal matters. I don't think that means I can't form an opinion and stand by it.

I don't think that ebook piracy is ever going to leave an author (or musician) hungry or homeless. I don't think it's going to break down society and turn us all into monsters. I also don't think there are any absolute ways to deal with it - you can't police the internet.

I do think that ultimately you will benefit from your experiment, as I said. But that doesn't make your example the rule. There are a lot of variables that go into any experiment, and you can't account for them all (not without plunging to stochastics, statistics, and random numbers, which is an area I'm rather undereducated on). But saying there's no evidence to support either side of the argument, then telling me to devise a better experiment than yours seems ... odd.

I think authors have the right to be annoyed, upset, and angry about ebook piracy. Whether or not they can do anything effective is another issue, and I certainly don't have an answer for that. I wouldn't pretend to. But just because there isn't an easy answer, doesn't mean I have to agree that your opinion is therefore the correct one.

I'm not going to re-hash all the arguments made by commentors on your original post; I imagine your inbox is overflowing with them, and I'm really not interested in a "no YOU prove it" back and forth. I've read your post, I've read other authors' opinions and experiences, and I've made my mind up. I wish you every success in your career, and I'm sure you will continue to do well.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Thankyou for taking the time to respond to Naomi's blog -- but I have to disagree with your throwing down the gauntlet to show some facts. Buy your own admission, it's impossible to say if piracy will be detrimental to an author, so trying to get someone to produce data to prove or disprove the effect of piracy on sales is ridiculous at best. It also means that your experiment is a moot point, no matter how long you run it.

What would have been better is for you to upload the book to a torrent/file sharing site and keep track of it that way, while also offering it on your site/Amazon for a reasonable price. Then keep track of both, and don't tell anyone about it until the experiment is over. That you've advertised this challenge on your blog and exposed it to the wider audience on the internet means it's going to generate discussion and attract new visitors, who are likely to pick your options of free vs paid vs donation. And this will ultimately skew whatever results you get. But none of this matters because in the end, the whole thing is still moot.

Ultimately, that you're confident in maintaining and growing your readership is a good thing, but I question your methods in trying to achieve this.

Wandering in from Google

[tourniquette.livejournal.com]

Just a stranger's opinions, take with a grain of salt.

I wouldn't come to the office every day and work for free. I wouldn't expect anyone else to.

I get your point and agree that artists should be paid for services rendered in some form, but there are a ton of exceptions to the money rule. Plenty of jobs are non-paying jobs: volunteer work and internships. Internships are the foundations of the publishing industry, ironically.

Maybe you agree it's okay, or not a big deal or whatever, but for those who don't agree, why make them complicit in it by stating out loud that it's not a big deal?

I could flip that around and say that by complaining about piracy all of the time, other authors are making me complicit in an enforcement of copyright that I do not wholly support or believe in. It cuts both ways. I take this issue seriously. I do NOT want people confusing those who share my work illicitly with those who steal and resell for profit (which is what the definition of commercial piracy actually is).

Regardless of my own ethical/moral stance on file sharing, as an author IRL, I have to set aside moral rights and look at the issue from a business perspective. Some consumers who buy also steal; in the music industry, consumers who steal buy the most. Consumers who buy but do not steal resent authors who act like they believe most consumers steal. Authors who rant about "stealing" create many resentful consumers. Combine this trend with the advent of a digital generation that consumes information in paragraphs and not pages, multilaterally and not linearly, usually for free and not by subscription, and it spells a bleak future for strict moralists.

I prefer to focus on the positive instead of spending my energy on the negative and wasting my time.

If you think JAK's stance negatively affects your bottom line, you should take steps to counter it. I emphatically disagree with anyone who claims file sharing is a black-and-white issue and that they hold the unimpeachable moral high ground in this morass that we call the technological revolution.

Re: Wandering in from Google

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for taking the time to comment. Please forgive me for what will probably be a very rambly answer.

Plenty of jobs are non-paying jobs: volunteer work and internships.

I actually wrote a long paragraph about this, then deleted it because I was getting too off-topic. I do write a monthly magazine column for which I don't get any monetary reward, but do get my name and a website link every month, and get a bottle of wine or two here and there. So yes, of course I acknowledge not all jobs are paid in money, but usually there is some kind of reward, whether it's personal satisfaction or alcohol or whatever. Anyway, my point (probably not articulated very concisely) was that if you're writing for a living, you would expect to make money from that, same as I expect to make money by coming to the office every day.

I emphatically disagree with anyone who claims file sharing is a black-and-white issue

I emphatically agree that this is not a black-and-white issue. I really do. I believe there are rarely moral or legal absolutes. To use a rather sketchy example - smoking weed is illegal. It has long term bad effects on your mental health. I don't do it. But I don't shop my friends who do it to the police either, because smoking weed doesn't make them scummy wife-beating maniacs.

I feel the same way about ebook piracy. I don't think it's going to lead to social and economic armageddon, nor do I think everyone who downloads books illegally is a nasty, sneaky, amoral bastard.

I'm not a digital naysayer: I don't believe we're heading into some grim future where technology will reduce all writers to homeless hobos or anything. At the same time, I reserve my right not to agree with ebook piracy. I'm not going to spend my life crying over it, nor am I going to support it.

Can I do anything to counter it? I honestly don't know. But I don't think that means I have to like it.

[etaknosnhoj.livejournal.com]

You know what? I wish LJ would remember my bloody password.

Anyway, that was a bit off-topic, wasn't it? Right. Piracy, and free books. I had two thoughts while reading your entry and the comments on it. They're kind of rambling, so stay with it.

Thought The First: I've had a couple of my books offered for free on Amazon Kindle for a limited time. This boosted sales massively for all the books in that series, which was of course the aim: get one for free and maybe you'll like it enough to buy the rest. But what confused me, and still does, is that when I got the royalty statement for that month, the book that had been offered for free had the most gigantic leap in sales.

Why had sales gone up? You could get the book for free--why was anyone paying for it? Had they missed out on the free offer and not realised it? No; I'm sure someone would have complained if they'd been charged for something they thought was free. Had they heard about this book, missed the free offer, and decided to get it anyway? Was word-of-mouth that good?

That's the best conclusion I've come to. It was a boost in exposure, and it worked.

Thought The Second: For a long while I thought I was lucky not getting pirated. Lucky, and also a bit sad in a perverse way: were my books so bad no one even wanted them for free? And then something happened with the tidal flow of my Google alerts. They stopped telling me about reviews, and started telling me about pirate sites. With the last few, there have been requests for the book before it's even been published.

I even saw one pirate request that said something like: I read her other books and loved them. Can someone upload her next one for free please?

And with these books? Sales have gone down. Massively. Most of my pirated books are my Cat Marsters erotic books; the mystery series I write as Kate Johnson hasn't been badly hit. Kate's books are the ones offered for free on Amazon, and the ones whose sales have increased. But it's Cat's titles that have been pirated, and Cat's titles that have seen a big drop in sales.

My conclusion therefore is this: if a book is legitimately offered for free, it's probably going to be downloaded by someone who doesn't mind paying for books. If a book is being illegally offered for free, it's probably going to be downloaded by someone who doesn't want to pay for books.

And to that kind of person I'd like to explain a home truth about publishing: that you might love Susie Author's books, but if you don't pay for them, she won't make any money. And neither will her publisher. And publishers don't like not making money. So they'll probably tell Susie Author to beat it as she's being so unprofitable. So no matter how much you love Susie's books, if you get the next one for free, it might well be the last.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting! I admit, I thought of you whilst writing this because I recalled you mentioning pirate copies of Mad, Bad, and Dangerous. Your figures are interesting - and saddening :( This is why I get annoyed by the people who say piracy doesn't matter, or that authors shouldn't worry either way.

[etaknosnhoj.livejournal.com]

Yep, MB&D got pirated. A LOT. It was even requested on a pirate site well before it was published--in fact, as soon as it was announced. I'd only just sent back the line edits. First-month sales were about half what I got on my previous book with the same house.

I still get Google alerts for pirate sites. But after three months, no reviews. Maybe all those pirates could tell me how they liked the book!

Here Here!

[(Anonymous)]

I completely agree with your conclusions. While the situation may not be completely black and white (things like DRM and availability are impediments to many sales), I find the vast majority of pirate-speak thin justification for taking the goods without payment.

I'm also a professional author, supporting myself entirely from book sales, and I'm not sure what Konrath is doing. He seems to have flunked statistics and basic logic. He claims that if his sales remain strong despite piracy, it somehow proves that piracy doesn't hurt sales. No way. Imagine a farmer measuring crop density and grasshopper counts. In January, they're both zero, and they grow together all summer long. By July, there's a moderate crop and a lot of grasshoppers happily eating away. Did the grasshoppers magically make the crops grow? Did this somehow prove that grasshoppers aren't a problem and should be embraced and encouraged? Only an idiot would draw such conclusions, and despite all evidence, I don't believe Joe is an idiot.

What he's doing is terrible science, but a good publicity stunt. Pirates want to feel good about what they do, and he's giving them approbation. "Steal what you want, you're entitled to it, and smart authors will love you anyway." He and Doctorow are basically the confidence men in a ponzi scheme. Pirates will support them in exchange for assuaging their poor battered consciences (then go rip off a bunch of other authors to make up for it). However, in twenty years, when this isn't new or novel, and readers have come to expect that ALL books SHOULD be free the whole model falls apart -- just like a long running Ponzi scheme. They'll make money, everyone else loses.

Calling this an experiment does grave injustice to anyone who actually PASSED their college science courses. Call it mercenary marketing.

Re: Here Here!

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Thanks for stopping by to comment. I think you've nailed it - above all else, this is a marketing plan.

Re: Here Here!

[(Anonymous)]

Terrible analogy. Crops are expected to grow - book sales are unpredictable. They may go up, they may go down, they may remain steady. Konrath has data to show relatively stable sales for months. Until this experiment, where sales have spiked sharply. It's as if a crop went from a seedling to full grown overnight - NOT January to July. Any farmer with a brain would realize something triggered that growth, and they'd want to determine what it was so that they could make it happen over and over again. And if they rule everything else out and find that the only new variable is grasshoppers, then a smart farmer would be willing to put up with those grasshoppers if it means significantly higher crop yield. It's called mutualism, and Konrath is making it work so far. He has said he's willing to track this project longer term and admit if sales tank down the road. I predict that they will level off but remain higher than they ever were before this.

Much of the protest against Konrath's efforts seems to be fury that he has the balls to try to work with pirates instead of sticking to the talking points that other authors are handing out - "pirates hate authors and creativity and are actively seeking to destroy both." While other authors try to stand against a flash flood and feel battered and bruised, Konrath has built a water wheel and is using it to generate profit.

Re: Here Here!

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

And Kate Johnson who commented elsewhere has data to show a sharp decrease in her sales due to pirating. There's no right or wrong, black or white here in my opinion. Konrath has done well out of this - good for him. I sincerely mean that. He's worked hard and been willing to try some risky things, and it's paid off for him. I don't think the same tactics would pay off for everyone else.