Agreed - there’s no such thing as “no other way to get a book”.
If your local library doesn’t have the book, you can request it. Most online sites have a form you can fill out that requests they purchase a book, and often the library does because they have now been outright told that at least one patron wants it. I’ve done this many times, and gotten new releases within a month of the book coming out in both my school library and my public library.
Yes, libraries are a bit slower to access new works, and yes, you have to wait for the books to come in, or for your turn with them, but it still helps the author.
How, if the books are lent for free? Well, the library has to buy it, so there’s money in the author’s pocket.
But also, that library purchase also gets noticed by the publisher - who may then decide to give the author another book contract, because clearly they’re being read. Publishers use sales as a metric to decide which authors to retain, which ones to promote, and which ones to cut away.
(Pirating = no sales = author getting dropped from contracts/not getting new contracts. You love the first book in that series? The author may not yet be contracted for the whole run - don’t ruin their chances.)
Lastly, here in Canada (and in many other countries) authors get a cheque every year from the government for Public Lending Rights. The government polls libraries, and the more copies of their books are reported back, the larger the percentage the author gets from a pool of arts funding money. So authors get paid every year simply because their books are in the library.
(Paid authors = authors who don’t have to get a side job = time to write more books! Yay!)
My friend wrote this fantastic YA novel that was published by a small press in the States. It did fairly well, she got a small advance, it was nice.
Through the magic of the interwebs, a few Spanish book bloggers found out about the book, read it, and the book BLEW UP in the Spanish Speaking territories. Blog posts, fan art, the whole shebang.
Thing is, the publisher isn’t even going to bother trying to get a Spanish edition made. Why not? Because a bunch of fans translated the book themselves, then put it up on the internet for free for anyone else to download.
There is now no market - the book is translated and out there. Now, no Spanish territory publisher will touch the book, because they know they won’t make back the money they’ll need to invest in the book (new cover, translator, buying the rights, etc.) It’s a bad investment.
So, what? you may ask. It’s flattering, fans doing that.
Okay, sure, it’s flattering. But it’s also illegal. Without permission and without paying for the rights, these fans took my friend’s book, and made it available for free on the internet. They ruined her chances to get paid for a Spanish translation.
That’s not flattering, that’s a slap in the face. That is piracy.
Why doesn’t some Spanish publisher use that version of the book, then? Because there is no contract. My friend never signed anything allowing these fans to translate this work .The file the Spanish fans made is outside of copyright and cannot be looped back into legality.
So the fans made it, so what? It’s not like she had a Spanish book for sale anyway, it hasn’t cost her any sales.
Actually, it has. Because the foreign rights deal her agent had been working on was nuked by the Spanish territory’s disinterest. She had a deal. It was ruined.
And here’s the thing: the book was supposed to be a series. Those same Spanish fans are now emailing my friend, and clamoring on their blogs, and shouting at the tops of their lungs that they want a sequel.
And they will never, ever see it. Because thanks to them, thanks to them making the book available illegally in both English and Spanish, they decimated the sales of book one. And publisher declined to offer my friend a deal for book two.
Let me say that again - fans pirating book #1 killed the series deal.
When all they had to do - if they really loved the book that much - was to write to the English-language publisher and to my friend and her agent, and make it clear that there was demand in the Spanish Territories. That’s it. Just a couple letters.
And now it will never happen. The publisher has declined to offer my friend another contract, because the book didn’t sell well enough, and she’s had to move on to another series with another publisher in order to be able to pay her bills.
So, please think hard before you choose to pirate something.
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