The "citizen-journalist" and the e-book piracy fallacy (then turns into: patronage)

Today Publishers Weekly tweeted an article from that rather amusing, very mixed bag of a "news source", HuffPo.

It's an opinion piece by Harry Freedman, entitled "Why I'm Not Worried by E-Book Piracy".

I'd say it's worth checking out, only is isn't. The author conflates, in a tangle of derailed logical thinking, several debates: the indie vs trad. publishing debate; the pricing debate; the quality debate; and then tops it all off with the rather lurid hope that continued piracy will make authors "angry" enough so they will turn away from pricing their books at $0.99 - and because it'll make authors angry, e-book piracy isn't really harmful, so Freedman's "not worried". (How much of that is whistling in the woods is open for debate.)

Wow, talk about an intellectual fallacy, naivety and a lack of research (possibly due to a lack of data and experience. According to his blog, Freedman is a relative newcomer to e-publishing, so he might be forgiven).

This is especially lurid in the face of this news item: Piracy Drives One Noted Author to Early Retirement.

So, it's clearly working, Harry, isn't it?

I can state, knowing my own sales, that my sales have stayed essentially flat in the last 18 months. Or, to run some other numbers, I've sold something like 300-350 copies of one story, which is extremely widely pirated. I'd estimate that around 20,000 illegal downloads were made (this number doesn't include torrents, which are very hard to track, and it doesn't include what I call casual sharing, the "here, I bought this, you gotta read it, so I'm sending you the PDF" sharing between friends).

Now, not every pirated copy is a lost sale, I get that. Let's assume that 5% of those downloaders might have bought the book. That's 1,000 people - three times what I actually DID sell. And, no, the $300 total royalties I got from that story doesn't really pay for the (many) hundreds of hours of work that went into making it. And those are peak sales - after the first quarter, sales always drop dramatically - always. Chances are, those $300 are most of the money I'll ever make from the book.

That for a book that has very high ratings on Amazon and Goodreads and ranks amongst the best I've done. Am I worried?

Am I worried that in a growing genre, my sales are completely flat? Am I worried that if you type my name into a search engine, the first links are links to pirated copies of my books? Am I worried that I now have to spend prime writing time on sending takedown notes to websites?

It means less time for writing, no hope ever to be anything but full-time employed, and it also means not only fighting the Muse all the time and my own fears, but the sense of entitlement.

There's a strongly Darwinian streak in this debate, which runs like this: "If you can't make a living off writing even while being pirated, then you're clearly not good enough. If you drop out of writing, you just lost Darwin's race. It's not like there's a shortage of writers - ten more will take your place."

Yeah, at which point, art will return to the palaces of the rich. Every author will have to find himself/herself a patron. Thing is, much of that art was locked away - patrons very often didn't share it with the wider population until way after their deaths. Imagine how many paintings and sculptures we'll never get to see in our lifetimes because they are in "private collections".

Thing is, my genre isn't something that a patron would be interested in. So I'm considering every paying customer my patron, who can all pop a couple bucks into the kitty and in return, I'll do my best to be fun and entertaining (and hot. I'm not forgetting hot).

Trust issues

Following up from my piracy post, I am reporting piracy links to my publishers. And I'm only publishing with publishers who send the DMCAs on my behalf. That's why I'm giving them a big chunk of my money: for cover, editing, and maintenance of my rights (and our income streams).

I will not publish with publishers who will not take an active stance there. Which, incidentally, will see me team up with some new players this year and next, and discontinue sending submissions to others. It's as simple as that. If the publisher can't be bothered to defend its (and my) rights, I can't be bothered to submit to them and give them 75-50% of my money.

I have 3 hours or so a day to write. I know authors who spend a lot of their writing time fighting pirates. I prefer to let somebody else deal with it so I have my head free to, you know, actually put words down.

Now, I get sent a lot of piracy links from fellow authors. But one incident shocked me a little. A fellow m/m author sent me a link with a note that basically read "I thought you might be bothered to defend your work" and added "oh, and by the way, your friend X of Facebook is a known book pirate. You might want to rethink your "friendship"."

I emailed "X", asking her very factually and calmly, I think, if she was pirating books. She responded shocked and dismayed. I then didn't follow that one up, but it got me thinking.

Here's what I have arrived at: It's entirely possible that some of my friends and readers pirate my books. Basically, I can't know what people do in their bedrooms at night. Just because I send them free books or wristbands or whatever doesn't mean they are incapable of sharing my book with a few thousand of their closest friends and show their love and support by taking away my revenue and even taking the work for free that I charge for. (I'd think that more than a million words in freebies would be enough, personally.)

After thinking it all through a few times, and I admit I really struggled with writing while fighting my very emotional responses and the knee-jerk reaction of "fine, I'll stop publishing, then and write for myself and fifty or so of my own friends" (yes, that's always a possibility, and I'm not the only one who considered writing only for themselves and their friends) - I got over it. I got over my ego and hurt feeling and trust issues. In the end, nobody but me gives a fuck about my ego, and I better live with that. The stories need to come out.

Also, I simply can't live in a way that makes me automatically mistrust everybody. I can't look at my couple hundred Facebook friends, wondering who might be a pirate. There's no way for me prove who is a pirate and who isn't. Some people might pirate some books and buy others. I can't live my life in mistrust and fear - and anger, never forget the anger.

Writing is hard enough as it is, and complex enough. I can't lose sleep over pirates or fretting over people sending their PDF of one of my books to their friends. I have friends who can't afford my books. Some are frail and poor, others are students and poor, others are jobless and poor. I'm giving a lot of books away to them - because, hey, they are friends. I'm not charging a close friend, who's shared their work and life and writing with me. I'm not a penny-pinching asshole, and I can't imagine a world where I see thieves and pirates everywhere. I can't worry about it, because it would severely hurt the writing.

I can't listen to the paranoid who denounce other people, either. I can't peddle in suspicion and mistrust. It's not why I'm here. I'm here to tell the goddamned story as best as I can (and I leave the piracy issue to my publishers).

/End rant.

Not so generic thoughts on piracy

I've mentioned several times that I have fairly complex responses to the whole issue of piracy. I used to make mix tapes of music, for example. As a student, I ran a fair amount of "handed-down" software and never asked where it came from (but then, Microsoft was "uncool" and the big evil, and I guess I felt a bit cool not giving evil Bill Gates money I didn't have). Hey, we're talking early to mid-nineties here.

My appetite for music certainly exceeded my budget - I still spent more money on music and books than on food, which, BTW, is pretty much a pattern of my life. Granted, my music expenses have gone down since I subscribed to Spotify... I was one of those very heavy users that was "cannibalised" into the subscription model. Basically, the music industry is losing money because I'm on an "all you can eat" plan via Spotify that costs about the amount of one CD a month.

In terms of software, once I had regular paychecks, I went strictly legal. In terms of music, I've bought a lot of CDs I had "ripped" files of, and I'm still buying my favourites. You could call me a reformed pirate, but I grew up in a day and age where the actual industries creating the content I wanted weren't threatened.

Now, true, the demise of the music industry is a lot more complex. One reason why their sales are down is because they were calculating from the very high levels of the years when everybody replaced their vinyl with CDs. It was, basically, unsustainable levels that then went back to normal. We "know" that a lot of musicians were treated badly by those who sell their music. Thankfully, all that is changing. Indie musicians and indie authors are increasingly taking the stage...build "fan bases" and thrive.

Well, "thrive" in the author space being a relative term. As an "insider", I know how many m/m authors have holiday homes and yachts. Pretty sure the number is about zero, unless they work high-flying corporate jobs, and *those* have the tendency of eating a person up so much that there's no fiction coming from that mind. Juggling a corporate career and writing is not easy. I've moved out of journalism because it was damaging my writing. And because working for a bank pays me 60% more, but bottom line, because I want to be a writer and need a job that doesn't kill my writing.

Unless with many other m/m writers, I can actually eat (or get my teeth fixed or buy a couple nice steaks) even if I sell no book at all. (For the record, my sales appear to be steadily growing, but at a fairly slow pace. I'm curious if "Scorpion" and "Dark Edge of Honor" will have an impact, one because it's universally well-received, and the other because it's from Carina Press, which has an enormous reach that not many publishers can offer).

I have friends who need the royalty payments to eat. To buy a new (or a better used) computer. Where selling books means the difference between having a roof over their heads and not.

To me, sales are basically validation... the only way I can "track" if I'm successful. Being ambitious and proud of what I do, sales is the main way for me to see if it's "working", but, bottom line of it all is... for me it's a game and not a matter of life and death. I will admit, freely, that I'd like to draw some writing income when I retire, and I hope I can retire before I hit 67, or whatever the retirement age is going to be for Britain. Dragging my 60+ year old carcass through the London commute is not very enticing. Yes, I'd like to retire on writing, but I'm not asking for a free lunch, and I don't believe the m/m genre will ever pay enough to match my corporate salary (with pension, and private healthcare). Also, I can see the holder of my mortgage, HSBC bank, get twitchy about the very uneven income stream of a small fry author. And nothing would give me more serious writer's block than actually *having* to pay off my house with the bucks I make writing.

Lastly, I can't ask my partner to subsidise a writer. That's not how my idea of a relationship works. Everybody is pulling their financial weight. Life as DINKS is pretty sweet, overall, and we can save towards retirement.

What annoys me about piracy then? For me it's a respect issue. It's crazy-making to read on a pirate forum "I love his stuff, he's so talented, can anybody upload everything he's written?" And a few hours later, the "complete Voinov" has 700 downloads. (No, no exaggeration, that's *exactly* what happened a little while back.)

I'm not sure how *you* express your respect and love for an artist, but I don't think stealing from them would be on the list.

Respect cuts both ways. I will write like you guys out there have a brain and can deal with morally ambiguous characters. I'm here to make you squirm, to sometimes challenge assumptions, I'm here to put a smile on your face, but not with a cheap joke. For you guys/gals, I'm writing my little black heart out. I respect you. I'm not dumbing down, not selling out. I'm not getting lazy. I'm working hard to edit, because I respect you enough that I know that a wrong comma or a badly chosen word grates on you as much as it does on me when I'm the reader.

I'm killing books that are not good enough. I will never write cookie-cutters, even though they are easy and fast. I'll never copy and paste my sex scenes from one book to the next. I'll always reach for the heart (and the throat, and the balls). I do that because I respect my readers. All I'm asking is that my readers - and that pirate was clearly a reader - respect me in turn.

Piracy costs you books

Here's an excellent post on the real costs of piracy by Shiloh Walker. Very good, sobering reading. Lilith Saintcrow also talks about money here. And tells people not to steal her books. And responds to some idjits who attack her for asking people not to steal her books.

Me, I've long decided that I can work and write. I'm not sure I'd write more if I wasn't working - possible, but hard to prove - but I sure want to get paid for all the hard work. And if I did make enough money to retire, I might. But I've made the decision to be a dilettante, and quite possibly forever, to only write what I am desperate, hungry, craving to write. And get books out immediately (or after 6-8 months maximum) rather than spend years and years going the traditional publishing way (which I've done and found too hard and too slow for a no-name like me, plus, in the niche, there's no real point to it, at least not at the moment).

Talking about getting paid - I'm in my second week and still enjoying it. I figure I've found an excellent place to stay. Also, because I can edit my own stuff in the lull between assignments (I forgot how it feels to not multitask and rush all the time). The last three days, that amounted to around 60 pages getting edited. At that rate, I'll finish the edits of FOAT much sooner than expected. There's still some heavy lifting to be done, but I'm reasonably sure I can do that lifting by Monday.

So far, the main thing that bugs me about being a working writer is that I have to go to bed in a way that preserves my strength and mental togetherness (to bed at midnight, latest) for the day job rather than when I run out of ideas (which is two or three hours later). It's a small price to pay, but definitely cuts the writing short even when I hit the flow.

Am Working and liking it

It's the weekend after the first week at the new job. I do enjoy working in a bank as opposed to a business media publisher - the coffee's free and much better quality, for one, and I've never had such a shiny office. I can also go home when I'm finished - there's quite a bit more flexibility there. And I enjoy being the primary breadwinner - at least until my partner has signed up with *his* investment bank, then we should be bringing home the same kinda money.

Talking about money, there's a good article on e-piracy at dailyfinance. Since all my titles get stolen somewhere on the internet (lovely when you wake up first thing in the morning and see somebody so very eager to share your book with a few ten thousand of her closest friends - that sets you up nicely for a productive writing day /sarcasm), it's topical reading. And means, incidentally, that I'll be working a day job for the rest of my life. I simply cannot rely on making enough money to retire and write full-time.

I'm currently editing "Father of All Things" and am pushing the total edits to around 40% of the total book right now (that's chapter 13 and counting, of 27).

I'm also having a reviewing crisis of faith. I get so much negative backlash about reviewing (and I use the full range of 1 to 5 stars) that I am rethinking how I review and for what ends. I'm thinking I'll use a reviewing pseudonym from now on. I don't want to spend half my writing time in fights with other authors or publishers. It's that simple. I'm a writer, first and foremost. I'll publish positive reviews (3-5 stars) under this name, and 1-2 star reviews under a different name - if I feel the urge to review.

I'll make 2011 the Year of the Novel. I have a crapload of novels in the drawer, and I want to kick them all out into the world. Deal with old stuff. Baggage removal. Time to draw a line under a certain period in my life - and the best way to do that is to throw out the books I wrote during that time.

Right, back to editing chapter 13.

Killing the golden goose

So many things damage artists. Apart from the knocks that we - like everybody else - get in life, there are some specific knocks that we somehow have to deal with. How to do it, though, isn't covered by the booklet with the delivery of "Artistic Talent". In fact, there's no booklet at all. We get this enormous thing delivered, and barely know how to deal with it. Maybe but a table cloth over the box and a fruit bowl on top and ignore it?

Apart from the usual issues - balancing "life" and "real life", there''s the other stuff. Piracy is one of them. Just today I learnt that Paul Richmond, the brain/hand behind the covers for "Clean Slate" and "First Blood" is being bootlegged by some asshole in China, who claims the copyright for the paintings. Read the full story here. What stuff like that does to a writer or painter, I guess few people can imagine. Maybe if somebody broke into your house and sold your clothes to random strangers out of your front door - and no police to call, no efficient help.

That's what writers feel like who get pirated. Some people get so hurt by this that they simply don't open the door to strangers anymore. They stop publishing and keep stuff to themselves and their friends. Pirates/bootlegger have quite literally killed the goose that lays golden eggs.

Another story is rather more personal. There are writers out there - and usually the best of them - that cannot deal with "publicity". They cannot deal with the need to run around on blogs and get on the stage and talk about themselves. Entertain in any other way than to send stuff to a publisher and then retreat, somehow reaching deep inside and digging up that pulsing heart that is the beginning of every story.

Forcing these people on the stage is like forcing a 9 month pregnant woman to dance on the stage, with a theoretical 5 billion people watching. For eternity. Because nothing that's posted on the Internet ever goes away. Dance bitch. Because you want to sell those books, don't you? You feel uncomfortable? Well, that's too damn bad, we're sure there are others that will just kill their dogs to be allowed to dance.

It's those expectations - some spoken, some unspoken - that kill the story. Make the author aware of what they are doing - and suddenly their legs cross, they stumble. Above all, they stop loving what they are doing. And it freezes the story to death before it had any chance to live.

The audience, the expectation, the publisher, one's own terribly high expectations - they can kill stories by a thousand cuts. To write, writers need to skin part of their own souls, and then write with the blood, through clenched teeth. We do it because we must, and getting watched makes it all awkward and kills the love.

There's one book that died on me like that - it took my agent to say "awesome, I'll sell that for a five-figure sum", to kill the book. I was dead flat broke, unemployed, desperate for money and recognition, and that book could have solved every problem I had.

I wrote 35 pages. They were good pages. I ended up staring at the screen and hated the idea of writing a single sentence. I threw fits over it, shouted, hated, resented every unborn character, every unwritten line of dialogue, knowing I'd have to drag myself by my teeth through a book that I never grew to love because of those expectations.

That's when I stopped wanting to be a "real author". I cut the throats of almost all my literary ambitions. I didn't write much. When I wrote again, I decided I'll only ever write fluff. (Granted, it hasn't happened... but the serious books happen against my best intentions, by following the story rather than sitting down with any notion of "I R Noah Serious Rita!"). Fuck that. My agent kept telling me how talented I am, and in a way I know all all - unless I don't, and doubt everything I do - and that's great, but the expectations are really, really tough at times.

I'm now productive and happy because I'm telling my muse "know what, I'm just playing", and he writes his little black heart out. I'm not thinking of the audience. There IS NO AUDIENCE. All those people are my friends. Elaine, Audra, Lori, Marcie, Peter... not "the audience" and not "the lions I get tossed to."

I'm a people person. I deal with people one at a time. I can't deal with groups at all. Groups in my brain are scary, hostile, faceless. I need to break that word down into who and what it's composed of. I can't do it any other way.

That's how I can dance while carrying a story. I only ever see one face in the crowd. That's the one person I'm doing it for. It can be as many as four or five, but that's it. Then again, I'm not ignoring the others. A stranger is a friend you haven't met yet - I've gradually stepped away from my learned paranoia and decided I will not live in a way that allows the bullies from the early decades in my life to decide how I deal with people for the rest of my life.

But it happens, we lose a lot of fantastic writers and great stories because something kills the spark. It might be the violation of disrespect and ignorance, it might be that pressure to "perform" and be everything - writer, promoter, VIP. I just know that sometimes, it can wipe out the best of us. These issues never crop of with the mediocre and the plain bad. They take the best.