Iโve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.
I didnโt think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided itโs time for this story.
Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:
1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.
2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a bookโs fate at the publishing house.ย
3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing canโt afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well.ย
It is only about two statements that I saw go by:ย
1) piracy doesnโt hurt publishing.ย
2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so itโs not a lost sale.
Now, with those statements in mind, hereโs the story.
Itโs the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously.ย
Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. Theyโre usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader โ beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.
So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.
There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too โ one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers.ย
BLLBโs e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, itโs not hurting you, itโs like the mites in your pillow, and so I didnโt think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLBโs e-sales cut in half.ย
Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing.ย
I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadnโt been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didnโt really do anything, but yes, theyโd make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy.ย
Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, itโs just that the sales for Blue Lily didnโt justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didnโt equal sales. They still loved me.
This, my friends, is a real world consequence.
This is also where people usually step in and say, but thatโs not piracyโs fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually donโt like you that much.
I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; Iโd already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldnโt be able to hold the fort for long โ real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging โ but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.
Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldnโt throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.
The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadnโt been able to find a pdf, theyโd been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.
And we sold out of the first printing in two days.
I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didnโt have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.
Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didnโt matter: Iโd proven the point. Piracy has consequences.
Thatโs the end of the story, but thereโs an epilogue. Iโm now writing three more books set in that world, books that Iโm absolutely delighted to be able to write. Theyโre an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world.ย But the numbers almost didnโt. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out.ย
The Ronan trilogy nearly didnโt exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they wouldย โrather die than pay for a bookโ. As an author, I canโt stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ainโt 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isnโtย โgood advertisingโ orย โgreat word of mouthโ orย โnot really a lost sale.โ
Thatโs my long piracy story.ย
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