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Why Book Piracy is Silencing the Writers You Love
Book publishing is a business. That’s so obvious, it hardly needs saying. Yet it does. Even indie book publishing (self-publishing) is a business. It takes a writer dozens, and more likely hundreds, of hours to write a book. A series could take several years. All that time, the writer is usually working a day job to pay their bills. They’re writing because they’re passionate about the story they want to tell. But those hours are ones they could be spending on working overtime or a second job to earn more money. Instead, they’re writing — for free.
Because nobody gets paid for their writing until it’s out there where an audience is willing to pay money to read it. This is not about writing for free because you love it. This is about the serious business of writing as a career, as a way that someone might potentially earn an income, or part of an income, from their hard work of writing.
Every time someone downloads a pirated book, they take away a little bit of that writer’s ability to earn an income. If piracy gets much worse, it will stop a lot of writers from writing. It’s that simple.
This recent Guardian article says it all. People who downloaded pirate copies had a dozen excuses as to why it was OK “for them”. No libraries nearby, they couldn’t afford to buy books, and my favorite — greedy authors…
