Sunday 27 September 2015

I'm being pirated.

I don't know whether to be flattered or infuriated.

    Someone sent me a list of sites either selling or giving away my novels without my knowledge or permission. It seems that most are from the two conversions I made to CreateSpace, from which I've only ever received £2.04.

    I've heard of pirating of course and read many blogs on the subject, but never really paid it much heed since my sales have been less than stellar.

    All of these sites offer some method of complaining against such piracy but all insist upon a faxed complaint in the first instance. Now I know most people think England is behind the times by a couple of centuries or so, but even over here the Fax has gone the same way as floppy discs. In fact I haven't even seen either in over decade. I wonder if this is just a way of putting us off.

    A couple of the sites have either changed the names of the books slightly, or completely changed the cover images.

     Should I, as many writers claim, take it as free publicity, or fight tooth and nail to stop them. A cursory glance at infringement and copyright laws in the US and here, tell me that things are different. Just for the sake of it I'm going to look into our laws a little more deeply.

    Perhaps if i was selling billions of copies every week I shouldn't be so annoyed - but I'm not and so I am.



  
    And if only for this one alone (which I didn't convert to Createspace) I'm going to chase it until I drop.

    A Wonderful Anytime? What does that even mean?

    Has anyone else been stolen from in the same way? If you have been, what did you do about it, and most importantly - did it work?

    Or should I just succumb to the inevitable?

4 comments:

  1. For the most part the posted books of mine are... Wait for it... The FREE books! Seriously! What the hell? They're free people! But I have run into a couple of the others and even a forum where some chick was asking people for an illegal copy. I ignored it for the time being, but then as I said it's mostly the free stuff and I just felt sorry for the idiots risking fines for something they could get free anyway!

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  2. Maybe it's the challenge for some people. Maybe just getting it the easy way is boring.
    One of those sites is also offering Strange Portals, which as we all know is-free.

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  3. It does bug me though, that we write these books only to have these idiots try to make money off us.

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  4. And one of them is a well known literary site.

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