I'm sorry to hear that your hard work was leaked but I was curious about what happened. I hope the person faced consequences because that was a very selfish thing to do leaking your work like that :(
I haven’t taken action against the person who leaked the book. I know who they are, since they uploaded the page I signed for them, and I was able to match that against my records.
I haven’t refrained from taking action because I feel sympathy for them. I don’t. It’s beyond shitty behavior to receive an early, signed book as a gift, and to then leak the entire book online. It’s a shit thing to do to the authors and an equally shit thing to do to other fans. However, I don’t want to put myself (and Wes) through the exhausting, grim and expensive process of legal repercussions. It doesn’t mean what this person did isn’t horrible, and it doesn’t mean they haven’t cost the entire fandom any chance of there ever being an early contest giveaway like that again. They did. There never will be. There will be no ARCs of Chain of Iron, either, and you can thank them for that, too.
Part of what makes piracy such an issue for authors goes far beyond the individual assholes who upload and distribute and translate stolen books. It’s that the whole system is set up to make it incredibly difficult for us to do anything about it. Publishers do little to nothing to prevent piracy, and authors shoulder the entire burden of searching out and reporting illegal copies of their books. And even then, we’re dependent on whether or not the reported website feels like complying with copyright laws or not. Twitter is incredibly slow to respond, Tumblr is about fifty-fifty on bothering at all. They’re legally required to take action, but they also know that the effort of doing something about it if they do not falls on exhausted, overburdened artists who often can’t afford to follow up with a lawyer’s letter.
And like, I get being broke and wanting to read books; there were a lot of books I had to pass up reading when I was broke (I will be forever grateful to the library system of New York and Brooklyn, which is how I read books at all from about 2001-2004.) I was broke enough that I slept on a bare mattress because I couldn’t afford sheets, but I’m pretty sure if I broke into Bed, Bath and Beyond and stole a bunch of fitted percale bedding I wouldn’t have encountered much sympathy if I got caught.
I talked about this on Twitter before, and I’ll say it again here though I know it will make very little difference: pirating books doesn’t just hurt the author of those books. It hurts everyone at the publishing company, where the margin of profit is razor-thin (and yes, publishers should do more to protect themselves against piracy; I agree there); it hurts bookstores, especially indie bookstores (I remember doing an event at a store that told me, sadly, that they were likely going to have to close because people “came into the store, looked at the books, took notes, then went home and pirated them.”) It hurts libraries, who rely on circulation for funding, and the shutting down of libraries hurts people who actually can’t afford books.
Now, I know is no way to talk people out of piracy; the internet has normalized it, and besides, people will generally do the cheaper, easier thing — you can’t talk people into not doing something they want to do by telling them it’s wrong, in my experience. They’ll find ways to justify it, whether it be that they can’t afford the book or it isn’t yet available in their language or that they find the author “problematic” and this is the way they’ve chosen to punish them.
The reason I put “problematic” in quotes is because yes, of course you can read and enjoy work that has problematic elements. Pretty much everything has some element that’s going to be found problematic by someone — which is exactly why deciding that it’s morally excusable to steal from people you think are creating flawed work is more than problematic.
I listen to a lot of political podcasts, and some of them review work by extreme right-wing politicians etc. who have written books that the podcasters find morally despicable but wish to, or need to, review and discuss. Since they don’t wish to give money to the authors, they buy second-hand copies or take the book out of the library. They certainly don’t steal, translate and distribute copies of the books because they genuinely do not like them and do not want more people reading them. That’s what it looks like when you have an actual moral problem with a book or author.
However, running multiple fan accounts for a book series, naming your internet identity after characters from that book series, and talking endlessly about “your favorite parts” and how this is “your favorite book” entirely invalidates any argument that you’re doing this because you think the books are bad, evil, etc. If you claim a book is actively homophobic or racist but are so desperate to read it that you’ll steal it, so excited about it that you’ll share that stolen copy, and so dedicated to the fandom that you’ll name yourself after the characters in the books and write poetry about them, I have to tell you: the last thing that looks like is that you actually find the books problematic. It looks like you like them but don’t want to pay for them, because in fact, that’s the case. (Either that or it looks like you’re really into racist, homophobic books, which is your problem.)
One of the issues I have with piracy is that it teaches you to hate creators. You have to hate them, because you’re doing a fucking awful thing to them and you have to justify it. Those who steal books wind up in a headspace where they are obsessed with the content of the books, and entirely unwilling to accept the reality that those books were created by a real person that they’re really harming. It encourages the mentality that I didn’t create Jem or Magnus or Will or Cordelia: they came from some kind of sparkly outerspace planet and I was just lucky enough to get to write down their adventures. It invalidates the hard work creators put into what they create, and in fact, erases their very existence. The internet attitude toward creators is already incredibly toxic (especially if they’re women, LGBT+ and BIPOC) and the feeling of entitlement to free content, and vicious hatred toward those who aren’t providing it (even though a lot of creators, me included, provide a great deal of free content) contributes to that. Genuinely, if you’re stealing someone’s work, the least you could do is not also be an asshole about them.
I know I sound pissed off, because I am. The whole business is shitty, I spent all of today dealing with someone who’s been illegally providing Lost Book on their twitter (including their “favorite parts!” — but you know, it’s okay, because Cristina and Diego are insufficiently patriotic) and I am weary of the whole thing. I understand there is a pressure to be up to date on the books that are being released so as to participate in fandom, and I do get that. Unfortunately, piracy has real consequences that stretch beyond just hurting me and Wes. Because LGBT+ books are pirated at such an incredible rate, and we’ve definitely seen that with TEC, I am left wondering if there will ever be an actual Spanish translation of TEC, or whether the publisher will decide not to bother because it’s already been so thoroughly pirated in Spanish. I have to wonder if there will even be a third book of TEC at all, or whether publishers will feel it isn’t worth doing. And I have to wonder why the people who create this situation so often have usernames that include Jem or Magnus or Alec or Cordelia or Julian or Tessa. What an incredible misunderstanding of those characters, to imagine a world in which Will Herondale or James Carstairs would approve of stealing books and harming writers. And why name yourself after a character who couldn’t stand you? I don’t know. I don’t get it, any more than I get hating someone who provided you with something you claim is your favorite book.
That was a much longer answer than you were probably expecting or hoping for, and I know I’ll get yelled at quite thoroughly for writing it. Writers always do, when we engage with the issue of piracy. I know most of you reading this acquire your books honestly; most of you are not like this at all. But like most things on the internet, a small amount of people really do have the power to make things pretty rotten for everyone else.
