Yeah, I’m late on posting today. It was a long one. Work was wonderful, as always, and kept me busy all morning. The afternoon? That’s a different story.
See, I spent the afternoon chasing down yet another book pirate site and slamming them with cease and desist emails. If their site was accurate, they illegally sold over 7,000 copies of my books.
That’s more than I’ve sold to date.
That’s close to $7,000 they STOLE from me.
It’s theft, no matter HOW you want to spin it. They’re taking something, my intellectual property, and screwing me out of any sort of profit.
And the people who downloaded the books? Yeah, I call them thief too.
Authors don’t get rich overnight. We don’t write a book, put it up for sale (or a publisher does), and then buy a beach house just for the fun of it. Writing books take months, years, to get from idea to up for sale. We work other jobs and sneak in time between dinner and bed to promote. We don’t just sit back and rake in the royalties.
So why the bloody hades should anyone think it’s a good idea to post a file online and cut me out of any royalties? Who are the readers who think it’s fine to get free books that are legitimately up for sale on Amazon?
Authors want to write…to promote…to relax with their families. We do NOT want to spend hours screaming at people to remove our books. But we do.
We worked hard for those. Some yahoo who can’t be bothered to get a legitimate job has no right to profit from our work.
I’m happy to report that, according to my publisher, the site did pull my books. But that doesn’t truly repair the damage done.
Because, if the numbers are true, that’s a lot of money I could’ve used for something else. Bills, new ink cartridge, food my family can make themselves when I’m on a writing tear. And coffee. Lots of coffee.
BB
K. M. Warfield 
They didn’t just pull your books – they pulled every book by major US publishing houses. Yesterday I found books published by Ace, Random House, Ballantine, Del Ray, Lulu.com, Harper-Collins and Harper One, Bantam, Scholastic, and Penguin Classics. And that was just SOME of the ones I came up with. Today – they are all gone. All of them. They have also changed the pages of what IS there so that the author’s AND PUBLISHERS’ names are missing, which will make a search of the site a lot more difficult in future. I think they did that deliberately. I think they will reload the books when they think they can get away with it, and the hue-and-cry has died down. They need constant watching to make sure they don’t do it again. Creeps.