Short answer: no.
Long answer: usually not, although it depends.
Piracy is a loaded topic for many of us in the self-publishing industry. The reason is obvious: every time a reader downloads an illegal copy of one of our books we have lost out on a royalty payment. But, is it really that simple?
Probably not. At least not in my opinion.
But, I hear you say, if people aren’t willing to pay for our work, then how will we keep the lights on at home? A fair question. Still, I would like to make the case that most of us do not have to worry about piracy much. Have you ever made a book of yours free for a limited time and found it to be a real challenge to get anyone to download it? Me too. Just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s going to attract readers. And it certainly doesn’t mean that readers will value it. See the bad reviews you tend to get whenever you do a largescale free promo. Somehow readers who got a book for free are way more critical than those who had to pay for a book!
I think it was Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, who put it most succinctly when he wrote an article many years ago stating that for most of us, obscurity is a much bigger threat than piracy ever will be. And I believe that to be more true now than when he first wrote it, because the book marketplace has become so much more competitive over time!
Visibility is a massive problem, and piracy isn’t to blame for that. And anyway, readers won’t care about illegally downloading a book that hasn’t already got a huge amount of hype surrounding it. Why should they, when they can already download so many things for free from Amazon and other websites?
Even just a few years ago, free books attracted attention simply by their very nature of being free. For readers who had been trained to have to pay for hardbacks and paperbacks put out by traditional publishers, free was a novelty. The only way you could read for “free” before that was to borrow a book from a friend or a library. And then you’d be expected to give it back within a reasonable timeframe. But if you downloaded a free book onto your Kindle, you could keep it indefinitely and not even lose any bookshelf space to it!
Nowadays, there are thousands of free ebooks out there already. Legitimate free books! More than any of us will have the time to read. So, most readers need to curate their to-read lists these days, not add to them with yet more free books they’ve never heard of, from authors they’re unfamiliar with. It takes a lot more convincing now to get a reader to try something new.
But, I hear you say, what about those people who go through your books one by one, reading and returning them for a refund? Yes, that’s annoying, and it does lose you money. I hate it when that happens too. Unfortunately Amazon left a loophole open for them, and they’re skipping right through it without a care in the world. But that’s not piracy, though. That’s people misusing a provision Amazon put in place to be more customer friendly. And we really don’t have much recourse beyond trying to lobby Amazon to punish people who misuse that feature.
So, when then should you worry? Since I did start this article by writing that it depends.
In my opinion there are two cases in which you should worry about piracy. Or rather, when you should do something about it. Worrying about piracy isn’t going to help you unless you’re being proactive about fighting it.
Scenario 1: You’re in KU
If you’re in KU, and you find that your books have been listed on pirate websites, you should try to get them taken down. You can accomplish this by sending so-called DMCA take-down requests to the websites in question.
And the trouble with being in KU is that Amazon insists on exclusivity. You cannot make your ebooks available anywhere other than Amazon KDP if you’ve put them in KU (KDP Select). And there have been cases of authors getting into trouble for breaking the exclusivity requirement when actually the book was being pirated, rather than being sold elsewhere by the author. This is scary stuff, because as a KU author you’ve put all your eggs into the Amazon basket. Best-case scenario they simply kick you out of KU if they think you’re doing anything wrong. Worst case scenario, your entire Amazon KDP account is endangered. So yeah. Huge red flags in this scenario. You should absolutely be proactive and protect your livelihood by going after book pirates.
Why only if you’re in KU? Wouldn’t it make sense to get books taken off pirate sites regardless?
For me, not really. As a wide selling author, it would be a huge waste of time for me to send take-down requests to any website that lists my books. Not only are most of these pirate websites fake, and only list book titles rather than actual books, I only have so many hours in the day to devote to my business. I’m simply not going to bother wasting it on piracy.
Scenario 2: You’re a hugely successful author with a huge following
Maybe you’ve taken over Tik Tok by storm and you have a million eager fans out there waiting for your next book? Only for it to somehow end up on a pirate website, taking all the steam out of your impending release… This is kind of what happened to Stephenie Meyer with Midnight Sun when it got leaked all over the internet before it was ready.
This sort of thing might also happen if you or your publisher are planning a staggered release, publishing in the US first, and planning a world-wide release later. Only for your book to be happily downloaded by thousands of fans illegally, because they just couldn’t wait for the official release date.
Now of course these are some super specific scenarios, and not likely to happen to most of us. But still. If you’re that successful, you might as well hire an assistant to send takedown requests to pirate websites. And for the love of god, release your books everywhere at the same time, so your loyal fans in other countries don’t have to wait unnecessarily! As someone who doesn’t live in the US, I’ll tell you it can feel quite off-putting when people come up with some kind of US-centric publishing strategy, leaving international fans in the lurch. As if our support doesn’t matter.
Just something to think about.
Thank you for coming to my eBook Piracy TED talk 😉 Let’s get back to writing!