A New Year Starting With Free Stuff

I hope everyone had a great holiday and is humming along back at work. I'm doing well -- could hardly be worse after 2012 -- and have a couple of major goals for this year. One is to write at least 250K words of fiction. I've done that before, should be able to do it again, and have joined a challenge through one of the mailing lists I'm on to help encourage me along the way. On track so far, yay.

The other is to get into indie publishing this year. I have backlist stories that are sitting on my hard drive, unavailable to anyone who doesn't hang out on pirate sites, and I need to get those back up and available. I also have stories that've collected multiple positive rejections -- the kind that say, essentially, "Good story, well written, not buying it, enjoyed reading it, looking forward to reading more from you." If you have to be rejected, that's the kind of rejection you want to get, but it's still a rejection. I have some stories that've gotten multiples of these, from multiple professional editors. I figure any story that multiple pro editors thought was well written and enjoyed reading would probably be enjoyed by readers too, so I'm going to start putting them up myself.

To help me along with that, I downloaded and printed out the Smashwords formatting guide, figuring that was a good place to start. Then, in a great piece of serendipity, I heard that Adobe is giving away free copies of a lot of its older-version software, stuff that it's been using phone-home DRM on for a number of years while newer versions have been released. It's no longer cost effective for them to maintain the validation servers for their older packages, so rather than cut off all the customers who've handed them money for their software packages, they've released free, non-DRMed copies of this stuff, and it's open for anyone to grab. The list includes both Photoshop and InDesign, and I've grabbed copies of both. If you're thinking of indie pubbing, or if you're doing it already but have been saving up for expensive high-level software, I highly suggest you grab it too: Free Adobe Software. I have no idea how long this is going to last, so get it while you can.

And major props to Adobe for being cool about this. Plenty of companies in the same position just say, "Too bad, buy the new version, here's a percent-off coupon," and leave it at that. Making sure that the honest customers who've handed them money in the past can keep using the software they've paid for is a class act. Letting other people (like me) try these older versions for free is also very classy, and might make them some money in the future, if I like these tools and decide to upgrade.

Angie

Going Visiting

I did a Q&A session with writer Giselle Renarde, and the post has gone up on Giselle's blog. I got to talk about writing, reading, piracy and DRM, and the unfortunate existence of way too many bad BDSM books. Come join the conversation. :)

Angie

Some Links

Federal judge says you can break DRM if you're not doing so to infringe copyright -- this is excellent news, in my opinion. DRM is a pointless annoyance anyway, and courts ruled many years ago that someone who bought a piece of software was allowed to make backup copies for personal use, so it only makes sense that we should be allowed to break the DRM on a movie, and e-book, a game, or whatever that we've legally purchased if it's become a pain in the butt, or if we want to make a backup of that for our own personal use. Of course, some of the publishers would love to force us to re-purchase our entire electronic libraries every time a hard drive crashes or a book reader is stolen, but it seems there's a judge who disagrees. Good to know at least one circuit court is on the consumer's side.

Funny, smart commentary about burqa bans -- the idea of a government body dictating what people can wear, short of the really riciculous exception examples cited in this piece, is ludicrous. If Moslem women want to wear a burqa then they should be able to. Anyone who wants to wear a burqua, or a veil, or a T-shirt saying "Our Government Is Full of Idiots!" should be able to do so. Banning a traditional item of clothing which causes no harm to anyone is an outrageous infringement of freedom, and racist to boot.

Period Speech -- this xkcd comic pretty much says it all about various writers' attempts at period speech. (It also applies to various kinds of accents and dialects used by writers who apparently have never been exposed to same.) It's easy to see how silly it looks when our era is one of the ones being mangled, but plenty of writers trying to write "medieval" or "Southern" or whatever sound pretty much like this.

Jane Austen's Fight Club -- this is a really wonderful video. :D I'm not usually one for videos, but my husband e-mailed me this one and I was LOLing. Watch and enjoy. :D

[Edited because embedding the video didn't work. :/ ]

So Much For That Experiment

So the argument is that e-books go up on the torrent sites, a bazillion people download them for free and those who enjoy the book go out and buy a legit copy, once they've found out for sure that the book is worth spending money on. I was skeptical, but figured I should give folks a chance. So back in July I issued a challenge to the pirates. Someone had uploaded a copy of my story, "Learning to Love Yourself," to the torrents and I was willing to wait for my next quarter's royalty statement to see if there'd been any positive impact on sales. I promised that if there were a clear (or even a squinty) increase in sales after the story had been torrented, that I'd stop chasing after pirates; my publisher would still issue take-down notices and such, but I myself would stop doing so and let the uploaders do whatever they wanted.

Well, it's next quarter and I have my royalty statement, and there was nothing. Not even a blip. So much for that theory. Sorry, folks, the cease-fire is over.

Given recent discussions [cough] on the net, I want to make it clear that I don't get too excited if someone likes my story and thinks, "Hey, I'll bet Mary would love this one!" and gives Mary a copy to try. A personal rec is more likely to turn someone into a fan, if they do like the story. My objection is to the torrents, where people steal copies of my copyrighted, for-sale books en masse. I'm not even going to deny the possibility that some people out there use the torrents to try before they buy; a few people have said they do, and I'm willing to provisionally take their word for it, although I still think torrent piracy itself sucks.

Reading the pirate message boards, though, there seem to be far more people there who actively mock the whole idea of paying for something you can get for free. These people think anyone who pays money for an e-book they could get for free is stupid, period. This isn't a case of try-before-you-buy, or of poor people being unable to afford to buy books. When people can't find a copy of something to "share" on the torrents, and someone in the group says, "I might actually have to spend money on this one, haha!" and everyone laughs on cue over how ridiculous that is, yeah, my spirit of compassion and generosity shrivels up pretty quickly.

You know, I was really hoping this would turn out differently. If there'd been any kind of visible up-tick in my sales, I'd have been willing to let things go and been happy to do so. It's really a shame.

Angie

Pirate Humor, and a Challenge

The funny first. I was checking hits on my blog and I saw that someone was querying Google for "chasing fire by angela benedetti torrent" recently. Yay, someone else looking to steal one of my stories.

Except I've never published a story called "Chasing Fire." :) Nor even written one. And when I checked, it doesn't seem there's anyone else named "Angela Benedetti" who's written a story by that name either. (Although there are a couple others of us; one's a meteorologist who publishes a lot of scholarly papers, and the other is a lady who works with children in Bogotá. So far as I know, neither one writes fiction.)

So it looks like this is one confused pirate. :D Not that I'm complaining or anything -- confused pirates are the best kind. Hey, dude? If you can find a torrent copy of a story by me called "Chasing Fire," go for it, with my blessing. [wave]

Moving on to the subject of slightly more competent pirates, someone finally did find a copy of "Learning to Love Yourself" and got it up on a torrent site back around the end of June. I sent a takedown note and, credit where it's due, the site took it down. It was up for however many days, though, and a bunch of people got free copies.

It's been argued at many times and in many places that piracy of this sort actually benefits the creative producer. That people who'd never have tried my work if they'd had to pay for it right off will instead download a pirated copy, and some significant number will like it and, being essentially good people, will then go and buy a legitimate copy. They might even buy more of my work, once they've tried my fiction and become fans. I'm pretty sure this isn't the case with the person who made the original request for a free copy of "Learning," judging by his/her comments in the request thread, but supposedly most of the people who use these sites are not actually selfish, entitled thieves, contrary to all appearances.

All right, fine -- let's test that.

Since the pirate copy was made available in late June, that's too late for any Pirate Bonus Sales to show up in my upcoming royalty statement, but about three months from now I'll be getting another one, covering sales in July through September. Surely that length of time is enough for most people to read a short story (about 3300 words), decide to buy a copy, and scrape together $1.29.

If my third quarter royalty statement shows a significant spike in purchases of "Learning to Love Yourself" -- not necessarily a huge flood of sales, but a clearly noticeable increase over prior sales trends -- then fine, I'll assume that there is some significant number of ethical people who prefer to try before they buy, but who do buy, and that the net result of the torrent upload was a gain for me. "Learning" hasn't been reviewed recently or anything like that, so there's no obvious other source of sales stimulus right now; I'm willing to credit it to torrent people, if it occurs.

[Caveat: if "Learning" is reviewed within the next couple of months, or if irony strikes and this challenge is publicized all over the web, that would clearly taint the experiment with multiple sources of attention for the story, and it'll be impossible to sort out what caused any given number of sales. If the situation remains as it is now, though, then I'll assume extra sales are to people who downloaded the torrent copy.]

So there you go. To BUGCHICKLV and associates: if you've read a stolen copy of my story, this is your chance to prove to the world (or at least to me) that you're not just a bunch of thieves. If I see that spike in the sales numbers, then I'll admit that all the pirate apologists who make the "But letting people read for free results in more sales!" argument are right, and I'll shut up about the issue. I'll let my publisher go after pirates and torrent copies if they want, but I'll personally leave it alone. Fair enough?

I think it's more than fair, myself.

So, let's see what happens. I'll check back in on this subject when my third quarter royalty statement comes in, in late October or early November, and then we'll find out whether piracy is actually "to the writer's benefit" in the long run, or whether that claim is just a bunch of thieves whining and making excuses.

Angie

To the Person Posting as BUGCHICKLV on Demonoid

Thanks for expressing interest in my story, "Learning to Love Yourself," as well as a number of my colleague Mike Shade's stories. It's great to know there are people out there who want to read my stuff.

But seriously, dude, it costs $1.29. You can buy a copy right here for, like, a quarter of what a cup of coffee costs these days.

Now I'll admit that with the many, many stories which were passed around on that particular Demonoid thread, you ripped off saved quite a lot more money than that. I'm afraid I can't find it in my heart to admire your frugality, however, since it comes at the expense of my own earnings and those of other writers I know.

If you're really that strapped for cash, there are plenty of legitimately free stories around on the internet. There's some great stuff in fanfic fandom (look for rec lists) plus a lot of published writers have free stories on their web sites. Archives like Nifty are free and specialize in gay erotica. Oh, and there are also places called libraries where you can borrow books for free -- I'll bet there's one near you.

But you know, the pirated e-book thing? Please knock it the fuck off. Thank you.

Angie