Like most people, I guess, I used to download free music on the internet. When the music industry toughened its stance I shrugged and paid for my downloads as I know the artists, the singers and musicians who give me such pleasure get a pitiful percentage of the cover price as royalties.
A couple of years ago I decided, after some success with fanfic, to write original characters and see what the small press epublishers thought of my work. I'm happy to say it was considered good enough to be accepted.
Later one of my publishers had to close due to the serious illness of its owner. A friend and I started up our own small press and, so far, we're keeping our head above water and are able to pay our authors a reasonable percentage in royalties on their sales.
Recently, sales started to slip and, at first, we put this down to the global recession. Then we discovered that our books and those from other authors and publishers were, just like music, being uploaded to pirate sites and made available as free downloads.
Now I'm not saying I blame people for downloading free material. The people I object to are those who run such sites, usually from countries such as Russia or China which seem to ignore copyright laws.
If any of them are reading this, or for that matter if any of the people who upload files to such sites are reading, I should like to explain something to you. I realise that you probably won't care anyway but I'd still like to explain.
A ten to twelve thousand word story (the sort I usually write) takes about a month to write, edit, rewrite and polish. If accepted the publisher has to pay an artist to produce a cover. The whole is then polished, formatted and presented for sale for the princely sum of $2.50 of which the author gets around 85 cents. So, as you can see, we're writing for cents per day unless we're lucky enough to have the book sell really well.
When that work is taken, uploaded to a pirate site to be shared free of charge with the world, we don't even earn those few cents. The pirate makes all the money.
For the very reasons I stopped downloading free music, I would ask readers out there to pay the few dollars, pounds or euros charged for a book and make some poor author's day by providing them with a few cents. If you insist on using pirates, authors will be forced to give up and take work that actually pays. Eventually there will be nothing new to read.
The choice is yours.
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m_barnette again. He inspires me all the time and has coaxed my own muse out of hiding.
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