Is That All?

I tried to make this brief, but I think I failed.

Today on Twitter and Tumblr, I posted about piracy and the effect it had had on the publishing side of the Raven Cycle. Several readers lashed out at me and asked why I did not merely release an 11,000 word story for free if the publisher had decided not to release it — further, they noted, other “big name authors” released “loads” of free content and since I didn’t release “loads” of things for free, surely this meant I just was in it for the money.

I don’t have a lot to add to the piracy commentary that is already up, other than the fate of the Raven Cycle and all its extras are up to my U.S. publisher and so therefore the discussion is weighted toward U.S. buyers. 

And I’m not going to speak to the giving away art for free business. The internet has discussed this a lot already, and the fact is that if you take away a paying-for-art model, you end up only getting art from people who can afford to work in their spare time or art that is supported by patrons — both models that we have seen before, both models that end up giving you art produced by and for a homogenous and upper class group. So moving on.

What I will speak to is the “loads” of free content business, because I haven’t addressed this before. I know there are authors who do release loads of free content. Stories of all lengths. Still other authors release loads of extra content available for a low cost, stories and novellas, etc. I can very much see how this is thrilling to readers. However, this will never be me, for four reasons:

1. I am bad at thinking episodically. I think of my novels in novel-shape, and it is difficult for me to think of stories that do not exist within that plotline. Just write Gansey and Blue going grocery shopping, urge readers, but I can’t think of how to make that into a satisfying story shape that will not diminish the original novels, introduce world-building that I will later regret, and be satisfying in one sitting. So ideas come to me very rarely that fit the idea of an extra. 

2. My deleted scenes are 99% bad versions of scenes that exist in the novel. They are not me deciding to cut a scene of Gansey and Blue going grocery shopping. They are me trying five different settings for the same conversation. They’re not extra, they’re less. 

3. I have always been a slow or at least very exclusive writer. I have a year between books and it takes me all of that time to write them, to think about them, to conceptualize them. I hear about some writers who write their contracted novels and then, in addition, write 10,000 word fanfics. HOW. I am not that person. If I try to write any faster, or write two things at the same time, all that happens is that I have to delete bad words twice as often, or end up writing the same story with two different titles. 

4. I am even slower now. I had not posted about my health crisis, because I didn’t want to be that person who talked about their gout at a party, but here it is. Folks who follow me on the internet may have noticed over the past several years that I was posting with increasing frequency about migraines and brain fog. In June, I grew rapidly ill at a seminar and collapsed (I think there’s still a photo of me lying on pavement behind the scenes). I had to be shipped home, canceled a tour for the first time ever, and then spent several weeks trying to get better. I did, sort of — but even weeks later, I wasn’t really better. I had hives all over my body. My hair was falling out. I was weirdly missing abstract thought — some days I could remember my home address, but I couldn’t say it out loud. I also couldn’t stay awake. I had to sleep every four hours, and every time I ate food, I got even more tired. And when I did sleep, it wasn’t real sleep. A drugged, enchanted, dreamless, sick sleep. There are photos all over the internet of me pulled over by the side of the interstate to sleep because when a reaction hit, there was no option. There is also a photo of my crumpled Mitsubishi that happened when I was too tired to avoid the tractor trailer that ran into me on the highway. I should’ve realized sooner that I was having an immune reaction, but it snuck up slowly. Bloodwork ruled out cancer and lupus, but showed that I had no immune system left whatsoever. Since then, I’ve been on a low-histamine diet of about six foods (hence the photographs of the groceries I carry with me on tour) and I’ve slowly become brighter and more like the self I remember from way back when, 2015 self. I can write again, without words looking like foreign intruders on the page. Migraines have vanished. I still have to be incredibly cautious — every time my body is exposed to or creates histamines (dog hair! limes! plane travel!), it still produces hives or puts me into an instant drugged sleep. But I’m getting better. I just can’t do anything stupid. I also just can’t write fast. I will do anything to keep from going back to June 2017 Maggie. 

All of this is to say that I wish I could be one of those authors that could surprise and delight with extras. But for many reasons, I can’t be. I’m continually delighted that readers love my books, and I hope those will continue to be enough.

urs,

Stiefvater

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.’

It starts off with an aerial shot of a quiet night and the interstate has no cars. The shot zooms into the sign on I-64 that says Welcome to Henrietta. It’s dirty, and you can still see remnants of the spray paint over it. Then it goes off into all the places that make Henrietta.  Slowly go over Nino’s where there’s a crowd of kids and it’s hustling and bustling with activity. Then show Aglionby, which is quiet, except for a few lights in dorm windows on. Go to Monmouth, and in the corner of the shot, you see a shadow of a boy. Then Boyd’s where you see just a lone bicycle outside, and a teenage boy hunched over a car through the window. Go back to the streets, it’s quiet, but then suddenly the revving of engines is heard and a white Mitsubishi and a black BMW speed into the shot and then over the horizon in a flash of screeching tires and red lights. And to finish off, it goes to the churchyard, in the distance you see an orange Camaro, and then goes to a stone wall and starts the show with Blue, like it does in the books.  

“Hey, pal!”

my favorite raven boy. matthew. uwu @maggie-stiefvater