Emu with Arms

TOKYO—Working for nearly eight hours to bring the record-setting catch aboard, a group of Japanese fishermen reportedly reeled in a 600-pound can of tuna Tuesday that was later auctioned off at a local fish market. “From the moment I felt the lip of the can tugging on our line, I knew it was going to be the catch of a lifetime,” said fisherman Hideo Kamada, posing with his crew in front of the shiny 10-foot tin of solid-white albacore and beaming with pride.

It builds character!

Wheels upon wheels, eyes of flame, the roar of a thousand wingbeats: BE NOT-

Me: nope [closes door]

Bearer of the throne of heavenly God, through door: YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO-

Me: I don’t live here

Celestially Ordained Mover of the Unmoved: I CAN SEE YOU-

It builds character!

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.’

Ive told this anecdote before but I will tell it again:

One of my best friends wanted to write a screenplay. He wrote the first 25%, and then re-wrote that eight times. He wrote two whole screenplays worth of words, and had a fragment of a draft to show for it. If I had a first commandment for my writing career, it is this:

No Backspace until the first draft is done.

Most of writing as a craft --the actual process of producing a written work-- is editing. To practice writing, you need a finished draft to edit. That first draft will inevitably be incoherent, embarrassing, bloated, personally revealing of your own unexamined biases and quirks, and generally not very good. You have to embrace this. This is what editors are for. @/mortalityplays has a post that articulates this better than I can.

In this vein, I would recommend that your theoretical practice webnovel be as indulgent as possible. Write your potato chips. Something that sparks a bit of chuuni glee. Whatever gets you to that daily word count every single day. Take Amber Skies, my own experimental webnovel; it is a far-future found-family bildungsroman full of pornographic gore and biomechanical dragons. It is my chuuni. The prose is adolescent, melodramatic, and riddled with grammatical errors. I love it.

Writing Amber Skies taught me what it feels like to actually sit down and write 125,000 words. How much effort that takes, the effect it has on my body, what is physically possible for me to produce in a single day without burning out. It is also a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency and routine are your strongest soldiers.

In terms of concrete structure, I have fewer thoughts. My first webnovel was written as a serial, which worked for my strengths as a writer, and the nature of the text. A thousand words a day, every sunday, for 125 sundays, published to the audience SOON as I was done writing. Don't do this. Let things cook a bit. Maybe 5-10k chunks?

They do not offer paperbacks or hardbacks at this time.

But their digital market has the same e-book and audio market reach as D2D/Ingram and allows for library lending. So if you are an indie author who was mostly using D2D for that library access, and for whom the maintenance fees would be prohibitive against your earnings, you can use Kobo for free.

I haven't used it, because I'm not affected by the D2D fees and I didn't want to mess up my market listings by having duplicates, but when I heard about the D2D fees, I started researching so I could hopefully find a free alternative with comparable market reach. And good old Kobo was there.

It allows for the same subscription model as KU, but doesn't enforce an exclusivity clause, so you can still mass sell through the global market and also be hosted in libraries.

I know it seems risky when KU is so established, but Kobo+ subscriptions are increasing quite a bit as even the most stalwart of Kindle fans get sick of Amazon, and my Kobo+ numbers are starting to eclipse Kindle, which is delightful.

The more we as authors push readers to Kobo+, the more freedom we'll have, so I think it's a worthwhile endeavor, for us and them.

I know copperbadge uses Lulu Printing, and while they do have some access to the global distribution market, I don't think it's as wide as either Ingram/D2D. (I also think the global pricing with Lulu is a bit bonkers in comparison, but I haven't looked at it in a while, so it might be different.) And before anyone suggests Lightning Source or whatever, they're owned by Ingram. A lot of print houses people recommend when this comes up are owned by Ingram. They have monopolized a huge chunk of the market, for better or worse. Usually worse.

If you want to get your ISBN's back from Ingram, you need to go through customer support to get your books de-listed. If they fight you over the ISBN's (like they did me) those ISBN's belong to you. You paid for them, they are yours. You are within your rights to use them with a different printer. You just need to get it decoupled from Ingram.

"If “man” and “woman” are opposed and mutually exclusive categories, if men can only ever be predators and women can only ever be prey, then trans men can’t exist. We are logically impossible under the terms of the current system. You either “treat us like men” by voiding out half our lives, or you write us back into womanhood by denying our male identities. I knew all that, at least in theory, but when I came out, I actually saw my life story disappearing into other people’s blind spots. I watched myself become unthinkable in real time."

Also these:

"This wasn’t about accountability. This was people tactically forgetting my entire life,including incidents from my life they had personally witnessed or been involved in, so that they could shame me for transitioning. It was bad for me to be a man; if I was a man, I was a bad man, I was all the worst things men are. I was hulking, I was threatening, I was predatory, I was violent."

"I was treated as both genders, but only the most monstrous stereotype of each one."

"The idea that I had always occupied a privileged position within patriarchy was, frankly, untrue; nor did it seem to me that a trans person was any less gender-marginalized than your average cis woman. What privilege I had was conditional, and these books were no guide. Men who wanted to “forge a positive masculinity” (and everyone was very clear that I needed one of those) were encouraged to get in touch with their “feminine sides.” Maybe that was healthy for cis guys, but I had been forced to do feminine things, and present in feminine ways, for the entirety of my young life. Whatever liberation I had achieved came from giving myself permission to stop."

As did the ending:

That I'm writing them from the first person perspective only lets you get in their heads to see how they try to justify what they're doing so readers might spot themselves making those same kinds of justifications.

We are supposed to be able to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others. If someone is faced with a decision one of my characters made (and screwed up), I hope that the object lesson I provided can help them make the right decision.