curve and line

Sometimes you really have to put in the effort to have a happy day for yourself. But you deserve to live a fulfilling life, so try to build things into your schedule that make you happy! 💛

Sometimes you really have to put in the effort to have a happy day for yourself. But you deserve to live a fulfilling life, so try to build things into your schedule that make you happy! 💛

I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s 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 book’s fate at the publishing house. 

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 can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well. 

It is only about two statements that I saw go by: 

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing. 

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s 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. 

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re 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 — 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.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — 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. 

BLLB’s 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, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half. 

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. 

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 hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy. 

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, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t 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 didn’t 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 that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought. 

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; I’d 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 wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — 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 couldn’t 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 hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t 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 didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out. 

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t 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 would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

Since the vignette idea posts are from awhile ago, I thought I’d toss this in here so I can have new ones (from newer followers) all in one place.

I’m going to be releasing an anthology of Warchild Universe stories called “Omake” some time in 2017. Ideally before The Warboy. The 7 vignettes that have made it onto this blog will be in it (probably revised somewhat, because I’m a prefectionist with my writing), along with a few other new ones (like how Erret became the captain’s confidante.)

Please submit your ideas here by reblogging with a comment! This is so I have it all in one post and it can be easily accessible.

The basic “rules” of the vignettes are:

1. It can’t be stories that extend beyond Cagebird (that’s new novel territory).

2. It can be anything from secondary character backgrounds to “off stage” scenes (scenes implied in the novels but not shown).

3. They can take place within the timeframes of all 3 novels, or even before the novels.

4. I’m setting Paris Azarcon and Yuri’s family off limits, since I have novel ideas for them. (There is a Paris Azarcon short story that will be published in an upcoming Canadian anthology anyway. I’ll let you all know when that’s available!)

5. I might not be able to write ALL of the suggestions, but I’ll pick the ones that inspire me the most or that people want to see the most. Let me know if you read other people’s ideas and +1 them!

Since the vignette idea posts are from awhile ago, I thought I’d toss this in here so I can have new ones (from newer followers) all in one place.

I’m going to be releasing an anthology of Warchild Universe stories called “Omake” some time in 2017. Ideally before The Warboy. The 7 vignettes that have made it onto this blog will be in it (probably revised somewhat, because I’m a prefectionist with my writing), along with a few other new ones (like how Erret became the captain’s confidante.)

Please submit your ideas here by reblogging with a comment! This is so I have it all in one post and it can be easily accessible.

The basic “rules” of the vignettes are:

1. It can’t be stories that extend beyond Cagebird (that’s new novel territory).

2. It can be anything from secondary character backgrounds to “off stage” scenes (scenes implied in the novels but not shown).

3. They can take place within the timeframes of all 3 novels, or even before the novels.

4. I’m setting Paris Azarcon and Yuri’s family off limits, since I have novel ideas for them. (There is a Paris Azarcon short story that will be published in an upcoming Canadian anthology anyway. I’ll let you all know when that’s available!)

5. I might not be able to write ALL of the suggestions, but I’ll pick the ones that inspire me the most or that people want to see the most. Let me know if you read other people’s ideas and +1 them!

My work is highlighted at Great Jones Street, a fantastic app where you can read dozens of short stories. I’ve got one featured and more on the way!