Robert Marks aka Garwulf is MAD!

Date: 2010-07-05 11:57 Subject: And Demonsbane joins the Pirate Bay... Security: Public Location: In my chair Tags: demonsbane, diablo, e-books, piracy

Well, it finally happened. My e-book, Diablo: Demonsbane, has shown up on the Pirate Bay. Somebody named "Reelix" (with the user name "Xileer") uploaded it after scanning it from the Diablo Archive.

Now, there are those who would say that I should just be happy that people are reading it. After all, people enjoying my work is supposed to be my end goal, right? It shouldn't matter if they paid for it or not, right? Shouldn't I be flattered?

Well, guess what - I'm not flattered. In fact, I'm quite upset. And here's why:

This is not flattering attention to my work. It's not exposure that I need. What it is, frankly, is freeloading, and undercutting my publisher.

Now, Demonsbane isn't great literature, and I'm not Stephen King, or J.R.R. Tolkien. I wrote a short pulp horror/fantasy and tried to put a bit of depth into it. Hopefully, those who have read it have really enjoyed it. But undercutting an author's publisher isn't showing appreciation. Hell, you might even be shooting that author in the foot.

Don't believe me? Robert J. Sawyer once told me that it's easier to sell your first book than it is to sell your fourth. The reason is that by the fourth book, the publisher knows if you're building an audience. So, sales figures do help determine whether an author gets another contract. Piracy can make a big difference there, if it gets too bad.

Let me cast us back about ten years. It's October 31, 2000, and Demonsbane has just launched as an e-book. It's at the start of the e-book revolution, and as I'm with my friends and family at the e-book launch party, everybody is hoping that not only will Demonsbane do well, but so will e-books as a whole. In fact, it's the great experiment - what happens with the Blizzard e-books will help determine the future of the e-book market. Only a few publishers were releasing e-books, and all the others were watching what happened very closely.

The e-book had the full support of Blizzard, and was advertised on Battle.net - everybody playing multiplayer Diablo knew about it. That's a pool of hundreds of thousands of tech-savvy people who are already fans of the game. And the first chapter was online as a free sample, too. So, did it sell tens of thousands of copies?

Nope.

In the first year, Demonsbane was a wildly successful e-book, selling a couple of hundred copies or so (I don't remember the exact number - that royalty statement is long since lost). It blew away the other independent e-books out there, which were lucky to sell ten copies. But, as a book itself, it was an utter failure. So were the other Blizzard e-books. And for the next few years, the sales remained mediocre. So, across the industry, e-book support was either never picked up or dropped. By 2002 the experiment was considered a total failure.

Now, I haven't had a fantasy book published since Demonsbane. It wasn't for lack of trying, either. But, in 2001 also came The Lord of the Rings movies, and the publishers glutted themselves, transforming response times from months to years. If Demonsbane had been a wild success, it probably would have given me a leg up. Unfortunately, it wasn't, and my manuscripts got caught in the same black holes as some others. And while I can't really complain about my non-fiction career, I still don't know if Demonsbane is going to end up being the sum total of my fiction career. I hope it won't be.

But let's have a little thought experiment, shall we?

What if there had actually been an audience? And any readership tech savvy enough to buy an e-book would also have known how to download it from a torrent too - and that way, they wouldn't have had to pay for it. Free swag is a big temptation - even I've gone after it, and openly (let's just say when you're in academia, "desk copies" are your friends). So, let's say that lots of people had read the book, liked it, and enjoyed it...from the torrents. So, while a few hundred people laid down money, a few thousand were reading illegal copies.

Well, if those thousands had put down their $5 instead, a few things would have happened. I might have quickly gotten another book contract - after all, publishers tend to reward success - and those two full length novels that my agent is trying to move might have both been published by now, with a couple more on the way. But forget me - the low sales were the cause of the e-book experiment being declared a failure. Those pirated copies would have prevented publisher support for the e-book from appearing for close to a decade.

Suddenly, downloading copies of books doesn't seem so harmless, does it?

Now, can I prove this thought experiment? Of course not - frankly, I think the sales of e-books reflected the demand accurately at the time, and still does. But, there may be something to it - a couple of years later, Stephen King did try an e-book experiment. He released chapters of a new book for free online, and got massive downloads (to the point that he started losing money on keeping the server running). Then he tried to charge a small fee for the chapters...and the downloads went down to a small trickle.

But, forget Stephen King's e-book experiment for a moment, and forget the thought experiment. Let's talk downloading books. When you illegally download a book, you're freeloading. And, you're freeloading from an industry that actually does treat its talent quite well. This isn't the recording industry, where artists are treated so poorly that Courtney Love once wrote an essay explaining how pirate copies of songs were an improvement on the status quo. It's not the movie industry, where making sure that people who are owed money don't get it has been brought to such an art form that it is called "Hollywood Accounting." This is the book industry, and large-scale piracy would make a difference, and hurt the people in it.

So, if you're thinking about downloading a book, don't. If you can't afford it, borrow it from the public library - believe it or not, those loans are tracked, and royalties get paid. Or, borrow a copy from a friend. If you want to know if it's a book you'd like, go to the publisher's web site - you'll usually find at least the first chapter as a free online sample. Hell, sometimes you'll even find the entire thing online as a free e-book. It's not like these books are hard to come by, or that expensive. If you can afford to go to a movie, you can afford to buy a book.

But don't download it illegally, and whatever you do, don't upload it. If you like the book, support the author and the publisher, and shun the illegal torrents and the uploaders. They're not fans, they're not protesters (protesters write letters and, well, have protests), they're not rebels, and they're not worth your time. The ones who spend months writing the books you love, and the publishers who spend thousands to get them ready for print and into your hands, they're worth it.

So please, don't illegally upload and download books. Support the authors and publishers by using their online samples, buying their books and e-books, and taking them out from your local library (another thing worthy of support) if you can't afford the book itself.

For the record, Mr. Marks, despite the endless months of your book being on top of Battle.net's chat interface in the form of an annoying Ad -- which led me to actually making a predated Ad-Block for BNet -- I purchased a copy of your novel via the Diablo Archive. You're welcome, sir. However, I also pirated it. Smoke a bowl and chillax, broski. Here's another free plug for your book. If you'd like to arrange having your book advertised on the official Blizzhacker's site, drop me a line, son. We're actually good people.

Sources: Garwulf's Corner, ThePirateBay [De-linked in response to Mr. Marks -- BUY THE BOOK!]