Very good blog about book piracy

Kim says everything I'd like to say, so I'll just post the link to her blog.

Book piracy hurts authors. Trust me, those sales DO count. And when they're lost to e-piracy, everyone loses, including the reader.

Chasing book pirates is like herding cats. As a midlist author, I have little time to do it. I'd rather write, and keep writing. But the more sales I lose to book piracy, the less chances I have of getting another contract.

Click here to read the blog.

Herding rats

I just found out Dorchester contracted to have The Cobra & the Concubine printed in Italian. Yay! That means my books have been translated now into 6 languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and Japanese.

Posted an excerpt to The Scorpion and the Seducer on my website. Click here to read.

And speaking of excerpts, a topic that dovetails into web excerpts... I got an RWA alert about piracy sites. There's been talk on message boards and in RWA chapters about this.

It stinks. I have a book on at least two sites I know of. The publisher's legal department is looking into this, obviously not just for me, but the hundreds more, and well known authors, who are also being pirated.

Just to state a fact: If you download any of my books for free, you are doing so from a pirated site. Please. Don't. I doubt most readers are doing it gleefully rubbing their hands. Some probably just want to "test the waters" and see if they like my writing. If that's the case, I post generous excerpts on my website for all my books.

Please, don't download my books off the internet from a piracy site.

It's stealing, plain and simple. It doesn't benefit me, the publisher, or you as the reader. It perpetuates a cycle of negative backlash in this industry for me, other authors and publishers.

At the same time, trying to track down these piracy sites is the equivalent of herding rats. Not cats. Rats always come back. They breed faster.

When I first found my book on a piracy site, I was upset. But when I found a SPANISH copy of my second Egyptian historical on another piracy site, I just started to laugh. Hey, I'm being pirated in TWO languages now!

I laugh not because this isn't a serious issue to me. It is. But I realized then the futility of it all. I had this mental image of me chasing down these ratonas running through the internet in digital form with copies of El Tigre y la Tumba, which isn't even an ebook, so someone scanned it. The whole book. So I'm letting the publishers handle it and going back to what I can control through the many frustrations of this publishing business: the writing.

I'm a writer. I'm going to sit my pirated butt in the chair and get to work on the next project due.

And hopefully I'll be writing about werewolves, and not thinking about those ratonas running amok with copies of my book in Spanish.