Well, here’s something I learned.
Years and years ago, I got two books in a series published by a tiny imprint that did zero marketing, and I was too noob to do any myself. Didn’t sell shit. Had trouble even getting anyone to read the damn things.
Years pass. I get disabled, and make new friends. One of them asks to read the shit, so I send him some epub files I made for my own use.
He, being the awesome fucktard he is,promptly puts copies in his book folder. Which is one of the folders he shares via soulseek.
A few weeks later, I start getting emails from random people asking if the third book is available. My files have my author email in them, so it wasn’t super confusing, but it did take a bit to figure out where the files came from for these strangers.
To date, more people have asked about the third book than ever read the printed version.
Now, would I rather have gotten paid for those reads? Fuck yeah. But, when I sent the small list of interested people a link to the series I’m currently publishing via amazon, maybe ten percent went and bought a copy of the file.
So, despite having had maybe fifty people “steal” my two books, those thefts resulted in sales anyway. Sales that I absolutely would not have gotten from those same people if they hadn’t read and liked the older stuff.
Piracy is not some noble pursuit. But, realistically, it can be an advantage if you’re small enough that it serves as advertising, or big enough that it won’t decrease sales enough to matter monetarily. Mid range “creatives”, though? They’re going to be in a bad spot from it. The conversion from pirated works to sold works is fucking SMALL. It’s small enough that if you’re struggling to make enough income to create full time, you’re fucked because you aren’t going to get serious grass roots awareness pushing sales to bump you up like that. People are going to pirate instead of buying at that popularity level.
But me? I’m fine with it. My old books, I may put up on Amazon at some point, but since I am unlikely to finish the third in the series (which is a long story), I don’t see the point. So, they’re out there, and that makes me happy. Now, maybe once or twice a year, I get a new email. That, for a no name hack like me, is better than the chump change I’ll ever get from Amazon.
Your story reminded of something Paulo coelho said. “Some call this “piracy". I call it a medal to any writer who understands that there are no better reward than to be read."
That’s pretty much where I am. If I was trying to make money as a primary goal, I might be a bit miffed, but then I’d have to deal with deadlines and editors and bullshit, when the truth is that I just want to make stories like I enjoy reading, and hope that letters enjoy it. Hard for that to happen if there’s a wall between readers and the stories
This is a good example and it is hard to attribute a lost sale to pirating as it is more likely there would be no sale if the pirate were unable to obtain it. In some cases it works the other way because someone liked something so much they want to purchase it. Or it helps folks like you gain visibility.
Sicfi publisher Bean Books did this. They published free ebooks for all the older material, but kept the last/newest in a series paid.
So yeah, I bought those new books, since id gotten hooked.
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This is amazing, thanks a lot for sharing.
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Oh hell yeah.
I saw a post on reddit a while back from the developers of Ableton. Someone asked in the subreddit if they had permission to pirate the program because they are in high school still and don’t have the money to purchase the $600+ program but really wanted to start making music using that DAW. A developer responded saying something along the lines of “We’d prefer you pirate our program to start learning and being creative instead of using another DAW. Then, when you start making a profit on your music you created with the pirated program set some aside and eventually purchase Ableton.” This creates lifetime loyalty tbh. These developers know that they’d rather you use their programs via pirating because they know if those users like it enough they will eventually purchase it. This is exactly what I did. I pirated the program and released some songs until I hade the money to purchase it myself.
Piracy is responsible for anime taking off worldwide
It’s a big lie that piracy has caused any drops in sale. I guess those who make such hollow claims, consider the whole planet earth population their potential paid customers.
Exactly if piracy didn’t exist a lot of resources on the internet would just be inaccessible for a lot of people , especially those in third world countries. You think people in third world countries are going to pay 70$(a considereable part of their monthly income) to play the new mario game. They have important stuff they could spend that money on like food or health care.
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How can you not afford the game but have the means to buy the hardware to play it on?
Cos that’s where all their money has gone, on the hardware required to run these games, and extra on the rgb setup for the FPS boost lmao
God, City of Heroes is the perfect example of that, seeing private servers pop up…my childhood was back
Thanks to piracy, in the media history, prices had to adjust to the people’s pockets. Buying an original CD in the 90s was really expensive. Then, because of it was just for rich people, thanks to piracy, prices fell and were more affordable. Even tho it was still expensive, then Napster and all preceding came, and we got Spotify. Which even tho is rental, you have a gigantic catalog and musicians would still get revenue even they were able to avoid the wall of publishers. So it was a two-way benefit. For games, we got steam after the big piracy of the 90s. If I see a title that has a reasonable price, I pay for it.
I wish that older games were still available in some official capacity. There’s nothing morally wrong with pirating a game that’s no longer available for sale.
https://vimm.net/ - my favorite ROM resource
I had to double take when I saw this. My favorite game ever (City of heroes) and I was so happy to watch the whole ordeal break down and then getting the game brought back and continuously updated by the community.
