by Anne R. Allen
Piracy has become big business in the age of e-publishing. If your intellectual property is available on the Web—in ebooks, blog posts or other web content—chances are pretty good you’re going to be pirated at some point. If you have a Google Alert on your name and book titles (and you should) you’ll get notices of this stuff pretty much every week.
You can sign up for Google Alerts here.
Mostly I get alerts on sites that use snippets of our blog posts to lure customers to buy fake medications, dodgy hair products, or knock-off sunglasses.
Then there are the torrent sites that offer my books for free.
Torrent Sites
“Torrent” sites are websites that use a protocol called “BitTorrent” for free file sharing. They’ve been around since the 90s. They were invented for sharing (often stealing) music files. But they’ve branched into ebooks now.
A couple of weeks ago I got a Google alert for a torrent site that was downright hilarious. The site advertised not only my title “The Best Revenge: The Camilla Randall Mysteries Prequel” but also “The Brass Revenge: The Camilla Randall Mysteries Prequel” and “The Best Recompense: The Camilla Randall Mysteries Prequel,” and more!
These robot-generated versions of my book are offered absolutely FREE (these people acknowledge this might upset “greedy publishers,” but assure their victims they don’t have to worry about getting busted because “lawyers are expensive.”) All visitors need to do is pay a “nominal fee” with a credit card.
In other words, it’s a dandy scheme for getting hold of somebody’s credit card information.
They seem to think they can make this all okay by altering my book description they lifted from Amazon. Except it’s not quite my book description. They turned it to gibberish using something that’s apparently common in the book piracy world.
I read on the Kindleboards people do this to entire books: the text is run back and forth through a translator (so they translate English to Chinese and then back to English again) or they put it through a synonymizer program. I think my pirates may have done both. Whatever they did, they turned the blurb into a hilarious mess:
“Camilla Randall is a magnet being murder, sabotage and Mr. Wrong, but other self ever and always solves the mystery in her quirky, but oh-so-polite way. Usually with new than a little help from self gay primrose friend, Plantagenet Smith. This prequel to the Camilla mysteries romps through the glitzy 1980s, when 19-year-old Camilla loses everything: superego fortune, inner self coltish overbear friend, and eventually her freedom. When she’s falsely tasked of a TV star’s murder, they discovers she’s forged of sterner desiccate!
I could have got my panties in a bunch, but I figure anybody who’s stupid enough to pay money for the right to download a book with desiccated, primrose characters deserves what they get. 🙂 The whole book may read this way.
Here’s the thing: 90% of the time these ebook torrent sites are scams. The victim isn’t the author as much as the idiot who tries to get the “free” book. The pirates are just using your book title (and maybe the “look inside” lifted from Amazon) as bait. They are identity thieves or creepy outfits who install malware on a victim’s computer.
Annoying? Yes. Sad? Kinda. A tragedy? Only for the Bozos who think they can get a book for free.
The Real Targets are People who Want to Steal Your Book
Unfortunately, the Bozo community is a large one. Tons of people who wouldn’t dream of robbing a bank or a sticking up a liquor store think stealing from writers is perfectly okay. In fact some belligerently claim it as a right.
Reviewer M. A. Kropp talked about this on her book blog a couple of weeks ago. She wrote about an author who got the following note from a reader:
“Dear Ms. Author.
I really like your books. I think they are well-written and I enjoyed reading them. However, I have returned them all because you priced them at $0.99 to $2.99, and that is too much to pay for them. I can’t afford to pay that much for a book, even though I liked it. In the future, can you make sure you make all your books free so I don’t have to return them?”
And, Ms. Kropp reported, when the author in question blocked this “fan” (and reported her as an abuser of Amazon’s return system) the reader in question sent another email criticizing the author for blocking her and forcing her to open a second account (presumably to harass the author further and of course, steal more of her books by reading and returning them.)
Hey, we greedy writers who think we deserve our $.05 an hour gotta understand that readers don’t have that much money and they need to save it for lattes and iPhones and stuff.
It’s so amazing that this nincompoop is actually proud of being a thief and a cheat.
I wonder if she’s tried that argument at Starbucks or the Apple store. “I’m forced to steal all these double chocolate chunk brownies because Starbucks has the gall to charge money for their food!” Or “I had to stuff this iPad down my pants because Apple won’t give away their products for free.”
I’m afraid these people deserve all the malware and identity theft they get. Karma’s a b****.
Torrent Sites in non-Amazon territories
I should add that sometimes the pirates don’t have such malevolent intentions. In many parts of the world, readers can’t access legitimate ebook stores. Amazon blocks users in most of the African continent, the Middle East and much of Asia.
Torrent sites are the only way readers in those places can access your ebooks unless you get on local sites in their countries through aggregators like Smashwords, D2D and BookBaby.
As Neil Young said several years ago, “piracy is how music gets around these days.” Now piracy is the way ebooks get around. Especially in Asia and Africa.
So don’t freak out about this kind of piracy. We know freebie runs and perma-free books help build a readership. Think of these Asian and African pirate sites as a way to build your audience in countries where your book isn’t sold yet… and when your book comes out in translation, or on a legit site, you’ll have a fanbase.
So torrent sites are annoying, but mostly you can ignore them.
Piracy on Amazon
But what’s much more dangerous is the book pirate who steals your books to put on legitimate retail sites under his own name. These people will download books that are on a freebie run, then change the title and author name, and upload the books (usually to Amazon) as their own.
The worst thing about this scam is that Amazon can’t always tell which book is the real one, and they may take your book down and leave the pirate book up.
These pirates find indie books an easy target. Independent authors without a big publishing house’s staff of lawyers look like easy prey.
Last year some guy took a bunch of ebooks, pasted his own name on the covers over the authors’ names (often not even obscuring the real author) and put his stolen versions on Amazon.
I saw them on a Facebook group page. They looked ridiculous. But the guy must have made enough money that it was worth his while.
Amazon took the phony books down after a bunch of complaints. But there are thousands of other slightly less lazy pirates out there stealing ebooks right now, as author John Doppler reported in a blogpost on Kindle Counterfeiting.
Doppler pointed out that Amazon works hard to fight this kind of piracy, and they will work with the author if you report the theft. There will be a paper trail if Amazon paid royalties to the pirates. Sometimes you can even get the royalties back.
But you MUST have the AISN number of your original book (that’s the number Amazon assigns to each version of your ebook), or it will be hard to prove you’re the original author. Keep a list of those numbers handy. (Registering your copyright doesn’t do much to fight this kind of piracy–see below.)
Plagiarism
Plagiarism has also become a big problem in the age of e-publishing.
There are people who will copy an author’s book (also often downloaded on a freebie run) then change the names of the characters (and sometimes their gender), rewrite a few phrases per page, then publish the novel as their own work.
Some “authors” have been taking bestselling straight romances, changing them to m/m romances with a few tweaks and making quite a career of it. There’s more about this on Jenny Trout’s blog, Trout Nation. Since m/m and straight romances generally have different audiences, people have been getting away with this kind of book theft for a while.
I’ve also heard about a number of authors who have received messages from their fans about a book suspiciously like one of theirs. If you find yourself reading an eerily familiar book, do contact the author of the original work. They can usually force the plagiarist to remove the bogus book.
But it helps to have an early version of your book handy. Registering your copyright will help if you have to take the plagiarist to court, but that’s expensive, so you have to hope they’ll back down before then.
A note on co-authorship. Lots of successful books are written by co-authors. But not every partnership works out. I know of an author who has had two bestselling novels stolen by a mendacious “co-author” who has pocketed all the royalties for the last year, but did not write a word of the books. This person is leaving herself open to criminal prosecution, but intellectual property thieves are so shameless they’re sure they’ll never be caught.
If you let a co-author work on a book you’ve already written, make sure you keep dated copies of the original. (Hard copies are best.) Also, make sure you have an ironclad contract with specific rules for severing the partnership. You also might want to have royalties routed through a third party, so one author can’t pocket them all. For more on this, see Melodie Campbell’s post on co-authorship “Murder is More Fun With an Accomplice.”
Blog Pirates
Then there are the blog thieves. I have to deal with these creeps all the time. Mostly I ignore them if they’re only using snippets to sell products.
But there’s one kind of blog pirate you need to pay attention to. These are the ones who hijack your links so your traffic is redirected to their version of your blog instead of your own.
That’s what happened to this blog back in October and precipitated our bumpy move to WordPress.
One day I discovered our blog, then on Blogger, had no front page. When I went to annerallen.blogspot, the url would magically change in the window and direct me to a weird, ugly site with our blog content on itV—slightly garbled—plus a lot of stuff in Portuguese.
We fixed the bogus redirect and send them a takedown notice, and the pirate site seemed to have disappeared. But recently I found it is back and still shows all our posts from 2009-2015 (mostly horribly garbled.) And now there are 100s of other pirated blogs on his website.
The thief is a guy named D. J. Matioka. The stolen blogs are apparently the bait to draw in suckers to click on his ads. With an Alexa rating of 7 million, I can’t imagine his ads are that lucrative.
I do check every so often to make sure the redirect links from the old Blogger url to this one are working and not going to D. J. Matioka again.
But there are blog pirate redirects much worse than D.J. They hijack your traffic to porn websites or malware. That happened to bestselling historical romance author Janet Lane recently. She discovered that when people Googled her, the request would be rerouted to an IP address of a porn site.
Not only do you lose a sale, but your readers might see stuff they’d rather unsee.
So What Can We Do to Fight Back?
I could have tried to send D. J. another take-down order, but they don’t do much good when somebody is off in Brazil, far from US copyright jurisdiction.
I figure my time is better spent writing.
But sometimes we have to fight these guys. And we can take precautions to avoid having some of this stuff happen in the first place.
1) Change your passwords often and make them strong.
D. J. got into my old Blogger blog (which doesn’t have as good security as WordPress) because I didn’t have a strong enough password and I didn’t change it often enough. Now I make a point of changing it regularly and I use a different password for every site.
A hassle, but now I know why they tell us to do that. And why you need a strong password that’s not easy to guess. So make the passwords as long as allowed, don’t be Captain Obvious (the most common password is “password”, followed by 123456) and make sure they have lots of symbols. Here’s a tip I got from Barb at Bakerview Consulting (she built the current version of this blog): put numbers at the beginning of a password. Most people put them at the end.
2) Security Plug-Ins
If you have WordPress, make sure you use their security plug-ins. I understand that other platforms like Wix and SquareSpace have security options too.
3) Send a DMCA Notice to the Pirate
Newer laws have been passed to try to curb intellectual property theft, but they don’t always do much good. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed in the 1990s to deal with copyright infringement on the Internet.
Your first step can be to send a notice to the pirate. Does that work? Occasionally. Some pirates don’t want to deal with cranky authors so they figure they might as well take down your book and steal somebody else’s. But don’t expect them all to be agreeable. They know you can’t touch them if they’re halfway around the world.
And other pirates are way ahead of you. D.J. actually has a menu item on his pirate blog called “DMCA”. It asks for you to put in your personal information. Which of course a pirate would only use in an honorable way…right?
Yeah—he’s not only thumbing his nose at anybody who complains of copyright infringement, but he’s using the law as bait to try to steal your identity.
4) Send a DMCA to the Pirate’s Webhost
If you find material online that infringes a copyright you hold—whether that copyright has been officially registered or not—you can send the hosting website a DMCA notice. When the hosting website gets it, it’s supposed to remove the material and notify the person who posted it, but hosts out of US jurisdiction may ignore them.
How do you find out who the host is? You can find this information by going to Who Is Hosting This and typing in the URL of the site that has stolen your content.
Kissmetrics had a post on How to Remove Stolen Content a while ago. They say website hosting services are more likely to remove duplicate content than webmasters. Often, they will take down the entire pirate site.
5) Contact Google
Attorney Helen Sedwick, author of The Self-Publisher’s Legal Handbook said on Joel Friedlander’s blog that your best way to deal with pirates is contact Google—rather than the host—with your DMCA notice. Google can downrank the site so people won’t find it when searching for your book or blog.
Here is Google’s DMCA form. If Google receives a sufficient number of takedown requests for a particular site, their new algorithm may downrank the torrent site in SERPs.
She says, “Suppressing search result rankings may be the best option for an individual author with respect to the problem of work appearing on illegal torrent sites.”
6) Copyright your Work if it Gives you Peace of Mind.
Sometimes it helps just to put the little copyright symbol © on your blog, but that’s only going to keep out people who have a few scruples.
You can register a book with the US Copyright Office for $35 (Don’t pay a third party to do it—that’s usually a scam.) For more on how to register your copyright, see Joel Friedlander’s post How to Copyright Your Book.
But note that intellectual property attorney Kathryn Goldman doesn’t think an individual author has much of a chance with a lawsuit, even with a registered copyright. She addressed the problem on Molly Greene’s blog in a 2-part piece called “Has Your Ebook Been Pirated?”
She says US copyright laws don’t help against pirates unless 1) you have the money for a pricey court battle, 2) the pirates are under the jurisdiction of US laws.
Also, copyright doesn’t always hold weight with Amazon, who may take your book down if anybody claims to have written it—even if you have the registered copyright. At least that’s what happened to author Becca Mills when a pirate sent a DMCA on her own copyrighted book, which was discussed on The Passive Voice blog in March of 2015.
Amazon took it down and refused to put it back. They considered this a “dispute between private parties” even though Becca Mills didn’t even know the identity of the person who sent the DMCA and she had registered the copyright.
7) Make Sure You Record Your AISNs!
The important thing to have in a battle with a pirate who is trying to use Amazon against you is the original AISN of your book. (That’s the number Amazon assigns to your ebook.)
This is much more important to Amazon than a registered copyright. They will have a record of your AISNs and know if yours was issued earlier than the AISN for the pirate book. Each version of your book will have a different AISN, so make sure you record all of them.
Note: don’t go to customer service for copyright issues on Amazon—go directly to the legal department. Amazon provides an online form for filing a copyright infringement notice, or you can email your own DMCA notice to Amazon’s legal department, via copyright @ amazon.com.
8) Pat Yourself on the Back—You’ve Made it!
As fantasy author William L. Hahn said when he first found his book on a torrent site:
“This is a sign. A big-time milepost on the road to fame and sure-fire success. Up there with getting one of those golden award-thingies shaped like a star, or meta-tagging your way to number one on Amazon in Bulgaria for the Epic Fantasy Classic Races Non-Standard Genders category. Almost as good as selling copies.
I’ve been pirated. I know, squee, right?
Sure, we say it’s bad. I mean, it IS bad. Technically. Indies know how tough it is to sell, and we sometimes count the copies, check the sales a bit too often (is it 9 AM yet? Local?). And sure, somebody taking our work and putting it out there for free, or for half-price, or for AnyMoneyNotGoingToMe sure does seem like theft. I mean, it IS theft. Technically.
But I won’t lie to you. It’s also flaming cool to be pirated.”…Read the rest of his tongue-in-cheek post at William L. Hahn’s blog,
That’s Will playing pirate in the photos. Thanks for letting me use the hilarious pictures, Will!
The truth is pirates will be pirates and there’s very little we can do about the third world variety. Will is right when he says in a way it means you’ve made it. Nobody’s trying to pirate my new book blog, which only has a handful of readers. But start getting a couple thousand hits a day, and you’ll probably be a target. So change that password often to protect yourself from those pesky pirates!
by Anne R. Allen (@annerallen) May 22, 2016
What about you, scriveners? Have you had your book pirated? What did you do? Did it have any effect on the pirate? Have suffered a royalties grab by an unscrupulous writing “partner”? Or had your intellectual property pirated from a blog or website?
This week Ruth Harris has a post on the stupidity of having robots do everything and ignoring the humans impacted by them. Especially when it has to do with medical prescriptions. I’m with her 100%. On my book blog, I’m continuing my series on poisons with a post on arsenic.
UPDATE: This afternoon, I got home to find I couldn’t make a comment on the blog. My comment was “awaiting moderation.” Then I couldn’t get in at all. Luckily I could change the password and I fixed it. At least temporarily. It looks as if Mr. Makiota has hacked the blog again. So I’m sure all our new posts will show up on his blog by tomorrow.
And readers, if you don’t see replies to your comments from me, you’ll know the creep has hacked us again. Grrrrr.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Here’s the real, un-pirated version of The Best Revenge: only $2.99. No dessicated primroses or coltish overbear friends involved! Totally free of malware and identity thievery.
THE BEST REVENGE: The prequel (Camilla Mystery #3)
Snarky, delicious fun! The Camilla Randall mysteries are a laugh-out-loud mashup of romantic comedy, crime fiction, and satire.
Perennially down-and-out socialite Camilla Randall is a magnet for murder, mayhem and Mr. Wrong, but she always solves the mystery in her quirky, but oh-so-polite way. Usually with more than a little help from her gay best friend, Plantagenet Smith.
This prequel to the Camilla mysteries romps through the glitzy 1980s, when 19-year-old Camilla loses everything: her fortune, her gay best friend, and eventually her freedom.
When she’s falsely accused of a TV star’s murder, she discovers she’s made of sterner stuff than anyone imagined–herself included.
Only $2.99! Available in ebook from:
Also available from:
Page Foundry
Thanks for the shoutout Anne! It’s good to know my face is good for something.. and you’ve done the usual bang-up job on this topic. There’s a lot more you can do about pirates than laugh at them.
Will–Your photos and your blogpost are hilarious. Thanks for letting me share them! Yes, there are some things we can do. What we need to do is pick the right battles.
Having the copyright doesn’t matter to Amazon? That seems really wrong.
My books are on a lot of Torrent sites. I get several notices a week. Often the description makes no sense at all.
I did stumble upon a forum once where someone was asking where he could download my books for free. (And someone gave him a link – I forwarded it to my publisher.) And it was a similar story – he’d enjoyed the first one but didn’t want to pay to read the rest.
Amazon really does need to ditch that return policy. ITunes doesn’t have one – I buy, it’s mine.
Alex–I sure was surprised to read that, but at least in that case, they didn’t care. They wouldn’t even tell the author who the pirate was, but ordered her to “resolve the issue between themselves.”
So you’ve had your books garbled on those sites, too? They make such a hilarious mess of your blurbs, It’s amazing that anybody falls for them.
People who think everything should be free (except electronics and lattes) are so infantile. Nobody ever taught them that stealing is wrong?
I agree about the return policy. Too many people are gaming it. I know why they have it, though. When I got my first Kindle, I hit “buy” by mistake when I was browsing for new books. Now I only buy through my computer. But I think it does happen a lot.
Yes, I’ve had my books pirated and in one case, I found a web site where someone was asking where they could get my novel free. Someone on the list did point out that it was in copyright, but whether they paid any attention I don’t know. I’ve seen extracts from other books of mine in a book of practice scholarship exams, without my permission or my publisher’s, and certainly without paying a cent; when asked, the publishers of that book shrugged and said they couldn’t remember who had organised it. They didn’t offer to pay. And by the way, once, when I took a huge risk and downloaded a book of mine from a pirate site, it was there – the only thing missing was the cover!
Sue–The practice exam book is a new kind of theft I hadn’t heard of. How irritating! And their response is worse. Awful.
That’s too bad that your book came through intact. I’ve heard that most don’t. In fact I heard from one author who got an irate letter from a “fan” who had downloaded a pirated book and was incensed that it was only the first 10th of the book (the “look inside”) They wanted the author to replace the stolen free book they didn’t get!
Most people think they have good passwords, and instead, they have one that’s alarmingly easy to guess. Typically, everyone tends to 1) use the same password for all their sites, 2) start with a capital letter, and 3) end with a number. And it’s probably under ten letters. Highly recommend reading Perfect Passwords http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Passwords-Selection-Protection-Authentication/dp/1597490415
Linda–Thanks much for the link! I didn’t pay enough attention to this stuff and paid the price. I’ve discovered that some sites won’t let you have a password longer than 8 characters and won’t let you use symbols–just numbers and letters. It seems like they’re enabling the hackers. But having a different one for each site helps.
Hi Linda,
Following Anne’s blog just as of today, I saw your earlier comment with the reference link about ‘The Perfect Password ….’ book at Amazon. You know that curiosity kills the cat. 🙂 Meaning, I jumped over there right away. 🙂 I had in mind to buy it from this author, just to see a different point of view [than mine] about password security.
To my dismay I realized, that even the Kindle version is priced with $18.07, not to mention the paperback one. I buy quite a few eBooks [fiction and non-fiction] on a regular base, and don’t complain about price tags. Yet, more than 18 USD for an eBook, just because the content touches security issues?
We all invest in our writing, and our time has definitely value. Especially when we try to make a living with it. Yet, I think that this comes close to extortion, and consider the author being greedy.
Well, I’m deeply involved with digital issues for years now, and not going to buy his heavily overpriced book. Setting a price that high may be another way to drive potential buyers away. His Amazon Rank is #1,095,216 Paid in Kindle Store. Does anyone wonder, why?
Hans Maerker
Hans–I agree on that pricing. Usually ebooks priced that high come from the Big 5 and the author has no control, but this looks indie. I see you can buy it used for a penny, though. 🙂
Also, a reviewer has given the basics of his password formula in a review, which might be a little abusive, but under the circumstances, might be fair.
There’s a school of blogging that teaches bloggers to write overpriced nonfic ebooks and then offer them at a discount to subscribers. But that means ordinary folks have to pay through the nose. Anything that creates an “elite” like that is a turnoff to me, so I’m with you. Besides, think all you need to know about passwords is in the reviewer’s piece.
Thanks for pointing out the bad pricing on what otherwise looks like a good book. I’m sure Linda was only being helpful here. She’s a regular commenter who always has good tips.
Anne, thanks for such a helpful post and such good advice. OTOH, if the pirate looked like Johnny Depp, I just might find myself tempted to track him down in person… 😉
Ruth–Yes, as Will pointed out in his post, we have such a romantic view of pirates! They’ve been portrayed on the screen by hot leading men from Errol Flynn to Johnny Depp. But there’s nothing romantic about finding your blog missing. Luckily we’ve got really solid security now.
Thanks for this post, Anne! Yes, I am pirated more than I’m bought, I think. Get those notices several times a week through Google Alert.
Alex, I’ve had the same thing. Someone pointed me to a post on a comic book site where someone was asking where they could get my book for free, because there were 42 holds on it at the library (I wanted to yell, “Tell the library to buy more copies dammit, Sister!!” But I refrained 🙂 Was relieved to see a bunch of messages after that, scolding her for wanting to steal it. (The book is 2.99, for crissake. Less than a latte at Fivebucks.)
You would think pirate sites would be smarter. My books are about a mob goddaughter. Obviously the author has connections (family, or for research purposes. Or both.) Contract pending.
Melodie–Haha–Your heroine might make the pirates an offer they can’t refuse.
I get more alerts on pirated stuff than anything else too.
And why is it these people think $2.99 is too much to pay for a book, but they’re happy to pay $5 for a cup of coffee without blinking an eye? Large corporations deserve money, but struggling authors don’t? Do these people have any brains at all? (I guess not.)
This is exhausting stuff, Anne. I don’t understand how anyone can be making money out of most of the scams you describe here, other than the outright plagiarism obviously, so it must all be based on driving traffic to their sites. I suppose there’s a reason there are so many spam comments on blogs, too – just to get you to click on a link. If we were all more selective about what we clicked on in general, we’d probably cut pirate revenue in half.
Tara–It is kind of exhausting, which is why I decided to stop worrying about it so much.
It also does seem pretty pointless. I look at some of the “comments” in the blog spam folder and wonder how many condos in Mumbai they expect to sell to my mostly US and UK readers. And yet they persist. But I guess it’s like selling fake Twitter followers–they wouldn’t do it if somebody out there wasn’t stupid enough to pay them.
Just added my book title to my alerts. Thanks, Anne.
Beth–Glad my tips help. I hope you haven’t been pirated!
In today’s self-published market, piracy isn’t so much of an “If;” it’s more of a “When.” This is especially true if one has written particularly good. Pirates have a nose for works that are selling particularly well and if one’s work is selling better than others, one can virtually guarantee being pirated.
The most frustrating part is that none of the biggest platforms are willing to do anything about this. It’s up to the author to track down the culprits and find new and creative ways to get them to stop (After a while, the nearest FBI field office gets tired of hearing from you). One would think that, at least Amazon would fight for every nickel of its 30%; but alas…no. It’s all up to us.
Jeff–You’re right that it’s the bestsellers that get pirated most often. I just got an alert on my boxed set which sold 1000s of copies in 2013-14. They had a .pdf of it offered free…along with Catherine Ryan Hyde’s Pay it Forward (which is pubbed by Simon and Schuster) so I felt I’d really arrived. This isn’t just an indie bestseller but a Major-Motion-Picture bestseller. And they are the only two books on the page. Yay me!
I told CRH and she’s contacting S&S, but I don’t think they’ll do anything. A .pdf is sort of like a VHS tape. It’s old tech that nobody much wants anyway.
I don’t think these people take many of our sales. These are morons who don’t pay for books anyway. And as I said, our books are just bait. Many of them don’t even have the books. Just the “look inside” they lifted off Amazon.
There are also some well know stories of theft by the publishers themselves. Like the Sugarman story. Or a book I know of in the 70’s. The name-brand publisher took a manuscript they’d been sent, changed a word in every few sentences and published under the same title and author. (it was already an established seller) The author got 0 for years.
I began putting my name in the body of blog posts when I discovered sites where using scripts to copy the content automatically. Basically, they created sites with Google ads and populated them with stolen content. But the posts also went with internal links to other articles on my site. The simple technique didn’t stop it but cut it back quite a bit. They made tiny amounts on the ads but with thousands of sites, it added up.
A friend of mine who self-publishes has found “new” copies of her book on Amazon that didn’t come from her. It appears to be staff theft as she sends printed copies for inventory. Some of her books are in multiple languages around the world in authorized translations but she also has found them in India, China, etc.
Another friend of mine discovered his books had been sold in India in the millions. He approached the publisher and negotiated a cut rather than trying to shut them down.
Such a dance…
David–You’re right that it’s a dance. And we have to choose which steps are worth taking.
The story of the publisher who stole that author’s book is hair-raising. That’s a time when I think it would be worthwhile to get a lawyer. It sounds like a criminal offense, so you could even take it to the D.A. if you had proof.
If you know who the pirate is and they live in the same country as you, it’s a lot easier to get the law on them. But as you say, if they’re in India or China–you don’t have many options aside from a total takedown of your book from that country. And that only gets it off one retailer. I think that’s happening a lot on Amazon India. There are lots of clever tech guys in that part of the world who know how to game the system.
But those “new” copies for sale on Amazon aren’t always stolen. Lots of Zon retailers will offer a book–sometimes before it’s even been released–that they don’t have. That’s happened to me. If somebody orders it, then they scramble around to get a copy from CreateSpace or wherever it’s available.
On the publisher, that was the 70’s when there where fewer rules and the book had not been published state-side yet. They took advantage of an unprotected author. Looking at my copies, it looks like they regained control 20 years later. Messy as they had another book with the same publisher. Curiously, they still use them today so obviously worked something out.
Yes, I’ve seen that with new copies. Out-of-print books are the wildest. A seller will offer at wildly different prices, often the highest on Amazon to see what the market will take.
But in this case, they’re selling for less than cost after inventory went missing. So there are lots of angles.
David–Now I get it. Things were very different even a decade ago with foreign book publishing. That kind of piracy did happen, even with big publishers. I have heard other stories like that. Glad to hear they worked it out. I hope that means the author got paid!
As recently as 2005, I had a book published in the UK that was completely unavailable in the US. So some secondary seller offered it for $500. I was appalled until I found out this was totally “on spec.” If somebody actually offered them $500, they’d figure out how to get it..
But if the inventory is actually missing–yeah, some employee might have nicked the books. I suspect disgruntled Zon employees of some of the troll reviewing, too. I think they take out their anger on authors.
Every one of my books have been pirated except for The Not-So-Innocents Abroad since it was only available in print. As soon as I put it out in Kindle format, it was pirated.
My sales have taken a terrible hit, not selling a one for months. Now, my sales are slowly climbing back up … except for The Not So Innocents which has stopped selling at all. I mean why bother paying for it when you can get it for free.
,
Some months back, every one of my books was bought, only to be returned that day or the next. Then, my sales stopped.
Amazon doesn’t seem to care. Why should they? It is not costing them money.
Patience seems to pay off. Keep writing. Build your backlist. Gain new readers. But I wish I could make those pirates walk the plank!! 🙂
Roland–The people who read and return books are much more of a menace than the pirates. Remember that most of the pirates don’t actually offer your book. They only offer a garbled version of the “look inside” plus a bunch of malware.
But the entitled little snots who read and return books are a big problem.
An even bigger problem are the scammers who have been gaming the KU program and getting a huge share of the pot by luring readers to click to the end of the book with a fake prizes or giveaways that register as 300 or even 2000 pages read, which they get paid for–which means the rest of us get paid less.
Amazon is starting to fight these guys, but they have a long road ahead of them. I think their creation of a privileged 1% by offering the “top sellers” huge bonuses that come out of the communal pot is a nasty game that’s only luring scammers and punishing solid selling midlisters. The Zon used to thrive on midlisters. Now they’re creating their own elite and kicking the rest of us to the curb.
But you’re right that the more books, the more reward. I also think that in the end, spreading a wide net and not depending on Amazon will be the key to keeping a career going.
In spite of the serious nature of your post, Anne, you still made me laugh. They are nincompoops. Also shared so others will be alerted. Thanks the tips on changing passwords often. ?
Tracy–I’m glad to hear I made you laugh. I think keeping a sense of humor is the only way to survive in this business.
It occurs to me that a lot of people appear to have a lot of time on their hands — a lot more time on their hands than I feel I’ve got. May they direct their future shenanigans in non-Anne directions.
C.S.–I don’t think these scammers are spoiled rich kids with nothing to do. I think most of them are third world guys who can make more money gaming the system than working legit jobs in their own countries. They may be working 12 hour days doing this stuff–getting a tiny bit of money off each scammed book or blog, but it’s enough to feed their families in the places where they live.
Great post! I agree with what everyone has said here and I’ll also point out that finding a pirated copy of a book which is actually readable is a royal pain. Plus then you have to figure out how to put it on your device, and often the quality is super sub par. To my thinking there probably aren’t that many people willing to go through all of that for a crappy reading experience. It’s not like pirating movies or TV shows which are easy to download and easy to view… And offer the same experience as purchasing or renting. Far worse are the plagiarists, book returners, and KU scammers. I’ve only ever returned books if I hated them and couldn’t bear to finish them (though that has only happened a couple times) or if there was a mistake purchase (I.e., my daughter getting a hold of my phone), or the product was seriously misrepresented… Like some of the scam books I’ve run across. Thanks for the post!
Abe–I agree that the pirated copies are so awful (and dangerous) they aren’t much of a threat to authors. But the KU scammers and returners cost us a ton. I’ve only returned a book when I bought it by mistake by hitting the wrong button.
Anybody who returns a book after reading it is a thief. I think if Amazon shortened the time period the return is allowed, that would allow the mistakes and scam books to be returned but not encourage free reading.
Wow. Excellent information here, Anne. Thank you! I got Blasty when it was in its beta stage (you suggested that site, I believe). But unfortunately, with a title like “Marred” I get hundreds of alerts, so many I can’t possibly keep up. I haven’t figured out how to attach my blog content to it yet, but I really should take the time. It looks like Google Alerts only allow you to track keywords. Am I reading that right?
Sue–I haven’t talked to anybody who tried Blasty, so thanks for your input. I don’t know if it’s been successful in fighting this stuff.
I only have Google alerts on my book titles and my name, so I don’t know when people are using my content without attribution, and I think that would be too hard to track. It’s also very hard to fight.
I can see how your title would bring in lots of useless alerts, so that probably doesn’t do much good. Sigh.
Thank you for the excellent information. I didn’t know some of these things and now I will take action.
Shalom,
Patricia
Pat–I’m glad I could help you protect your intellectual property!
This post is chock-full of good information for all of us. Thank you, Anne.
Patricia–Thanks for stopping by!
Thanks for starting a great conversation about this issue, and also I appreciate the shout-out to Hippocampus in your opportunities section!
Donna–I think it helps writers to know this stuff is happening. so they don’t get freaked out when they get pirated. It happens to everybody.
I like the Hippocampus contest because it focuses on creative nonfiction. Nice to find a home for creative essays.
Thanks for sharing all this frightening, yet necessary information. I appreciate the contact links as well Anne. How sad it is when people start thieving the fruits of OUR labour. I’m sharing and bookmarking this important post. 🙂
Debby–Thanks. It’s definitely not pleasant to know all the nasty scammy things people are doing to our work out there. But mostly they’re hurting the people who want stuff for free. I figure those morons deserve everything they get.
For me, the plagiarists are the scariest ones. And co-authors who pocket your royalties and claim to have written your books when all they did was proofread. That’s such a nasty kind of betrayal. Going into partnership with anybody is such a risk. I don’t think most people think it through. I’ve had some unfortunate experiences with that, too.
Keeping hard copies, AISNs and changing those passwords often really helps.
No, certainly it’s not pleasant. And I think the more popular we get, the more targeted we become. This is most likely the reason you’ve had your fair share of agro with pirates and trolls.
Yes, we do have to be as diligent as we can as you suggested.
Thanks for always sharing the good and the bad with us Anne. 🙂
Fighting book pirates is exhausting. People who go on those torrent sites deserve what they get. My publisher takes on some of the piracy but I feel rather helpless about it. The blog hijacking is worrisome.
http://susangourley.blogspot.com/2016/05/back-in-grove.html
Susan–My publisher says it’s not worth it to try to get these guys. It’s like whack-a-mole. Hit one and he springs up somewhere else.
The blog hijacking was something of a tragedy. The blog has never fully recovered from it. But it could have been avoided if I’d changed my password more often.
Hi Anne
To be clear, changing your password regularly is only useful if it’s a longer, more complex one. Modern scripts can crack an unprotected login with an obvious password in a couple of minutes or less.
Having a Captcha on your site login reduces the effectiveness of scripts but can be a hassle. I now use WPBruiser – it uses behavioral protection instead. And also illustrates that my quiet blog gets hack attempts multiple times a day. (so they can spam, distribute ads or viruses)
Another useful WP Plugin is Limit Login Attempts. It blocks such repeated attempts. You can also add Whitelist IP for LLA so your own IP is never blocked by fumbling.
I also recommend LastPass – it’s a well recommended password manager to help you keep track of all those hard passwords. Then you only have to remember one. It fills in the web forms for you.
David–I had a webmaster who made me sign up for Last Pass. Then his computer died and he had no access to any of his sites because Last Pass only works on one computer.
So I have Last Pass, but don’t use it. I wish I could uninstall it. Also, if your LastPass gets hacked, you’re screwed.
But I have some tips in the body of the post on how to choose good passwords. Make them as long as possible, with a jumble of numbers, letters and characters and put the numbers at the beginning. Linda Maye has some good tips in her comment, too.
Unless you’re changing a Yahoo or ATT password. They don’t allow characters other than numbers and letters and it can only be 8 characters long. They seem to be working for the hackers. They have been such a mess for the last week, they won’t let you change your password at all.
Hi Anne
We’re either talking about 2 different things or you misunderstood.
LastPass stores the passwords in a personal encrypted database online. It can be accessed from anywhere on most any device. The only way he’d loose access is if he lost his master password and he had no backup. (You can back up Lastpass but of course you want to secure that too)
If you use a strong master password – which it will ask for – it would be extremely unlikely to be hacked. It’s much safer than written passwords or a local password database. (for the reason you mentioned) I’m not aware of anyones thats ever been hacked. The company depends on that for its paying business customers. It’s very highly rated by the tech rags.
LastPass is a browser plugin so it’s easy to remove. Just go to your browser Add-ins and Remove. If you want to delete your database, you can log in on their web site, go to Account Status in the upper right, and you can select Delete account.
But yes, some sites have password limitations. Another issue with sites like Hotmail is they allow hackers to try over and over again. Thats why you see more hotmail accounts hacked than others. And why sites like that need the strongest passwords. They have free reign to hack away.
David–Wow, your experience with LastPass sure is different from mine. I have a little “vault” on my desktop and that’s the only way I know of that I can access it, so when I was told that the guy lost all his LastPass passwords with a computer crash I believed him.
I guess I got some misinformation. Maybe it was a “the dog ate my homework” excuse and he knew I didn’t know enough about LastPass to know it was not a hungry dog.
When the Guardian reported LastPass getting hacked in January, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/18/phishing-attack-steal-lastpass-password-manager-details, I figured I was safer without it. I’ll go read up on it and see if I can get it to work for me. My rule is usually, simpler is better. Adding one more layer of tech when I don’t have to always leads to bad places for me.
hmmm – sounds like you’re talking about a different product, Anne. Roboform, for example, stores passwords in a local encrypted database or “vault”. The approach is different and it can be lost if the computer dies without a backup. It’s one of the reasons I prefer LastPass. Another is the basic version is free and simple. My uninstall instructions above would not be valid for a different product.
The Guardian report is about a security researcher who found a way to trick users into divulging their master password online. I doubt it would have caught a “careful user” as it would have behaved abnormally. LastPass made some adjustments to avoid this possibility. It was never a threat in the wild. A security researcher finding a possible loophole helps improve software. This is very different from a web site with an active phishing scam. This is an ongoing dance with security tools, browsers,etc. There are even hacking contests.
Many businesses run their security based on LastPass. I’ve been using it for years without a problem and PC Mag calls it Outstanding. But it’s not a desktop vault.
David–It certainly calls itself LastPass. I have the icon on my toolbar, but I have to access it from my desktop. i installed it in October. Maybe there’s a new version now.
Ah – my apologies, Anne. LastPass has introduced a desktop app too. I’ve only ever used or heard reference to the browser plugin. The desktop app would be removed like any program but you may also want to log in to the web site and delete the account.
Like any piece of software, you do need to get familiar with it. But Ive found it much easier to manage passwords with. I used to use a spreadsheet in a encrypted container – that had to be maintained manually. And then the software hiccuped and toasted the container.
Computing has gotten geekier over time. There is lots of talk about a universal online identity. But it’s taking time to reach agreement and theres a little too much desire for user tracking mixed in…
David–Whew! At least I don’t have senile dementia or something. If I’d had time to learn to use it, I’m sure it would have been fine, but I felt bullied into downloading it and then the guy said it ate all his passwords, then I heard about hacking, and I was working 18 hour days trying to get the half-built blog repaired, so it was not something I wanted to mess with. Now that I have this nice new shiny blog and reliable tech help, I may be able to approach new tech without screaming. Thanks for the advice!
Some of those “free” ebook sites don’t really have the books they advertise. Rather, they are set up to steal credit card #’s. See: Is That Free Ebook Site REALLY Violating Your Copyright? Maybe Not…
http://writersweekly.com/angela-desk/is-that-free-ebook-site-really-violating-your-copyright-maybe-not-by-angela-hoy-booklocker-com-writersweekly-com-abuzz-press-and-pubpreppers-com
Angela–That is exactly the subject of this post! If you read the part titled “The Real Targets are the People Who Want to Steal Your Book” and the part labeled “Torrent Sites” you can read all about it.
I found my book on a site where they’re phishing for credit cards, so if you take a glance at this post, you’ll see I’m saying the same thing here that you’re saying in yours.
Yes, I know. And, per my article: Most people are good, honest folks, and don’t go looking for free books to illegally download. And, again, if they do try to get a free copy of my book and get a virus instead, they deserve it.
I call that karma.
😉
Angela–Yup. Karma’s a b****. 🙂 But the blog got hacked again this afternoon. I’m not a happy bunny. 🙁
Nathan–Well, I just got shut out of this blog and got a notice that my comments were “waiting moderation”. So the #%&* pirate probably hacked my super-strong password. Or maybe hacked into my LastPass vault. This definitely is ruining my day. Nothing is safe.
Really sorry to hear you got hacked again.
Even a strong password can get hacked if they have unlimited login tries. And once they find an “easy” site, they tend to come back.
This is why I mentioned Limit Login Attempts above. It’s a free and easy to configure plugin.
It’s also a good idea to have 2 Admin accounts so you can access if one gets hacked or corrupted. Of course both with very strong passwords.
And of course ALL admin accounts have good passwords. You don’t want your host or webmaster leaving an easy door. Fixing your password won’t help then. All Admin passwords must be strong. You can check users in the dashboard under Users.
It’s also a good idea to have NONE of the admin logins match a published username. Otherwise, you’re handing them half the login.
For example Annerallen can be your display name but should NOT be your username. Unfortunately, you cannot edit usernames. Fixing it requires a few steps.
1) Add a new Admin user with an unrelated and non-dictionary username. To that add your name and pick your display name as before.
2) go to All Posts, select all, Bulk Actions choose Edit, Apply. Then you can select the new username as Author and Apply. All your posts are moved to the new user.
3) downgrade the status of the old username.
Another option if you’ve become a regular target is a service like Cloudflare. It virtualizes your site serving it faster while making it much more secure. A site i worked with last year solved their hacking problems this way. The basic service is free but the upgraded security is a bit more. You can use the security while you need it then drop down to free again after.
At least you don’t have DOS attacks. 🙂
David–Turns out it wasn’t a hack!! Just a glitch at the host. We do have limited log-ins, and they let me know if somebody’s trying to get in so we can block them. And they assure me nobody tried to get in. We also have two admins. Unfortunately my username is easy to figure out, but the other one isn’t. So all is well for now. Thanks!
Whew!
Ahh First time in my life finish reading such a long post. The web needs more original content. I have copy restriction and protection on my blog but I will consider your suggestions. Thanks a lot
On blog copy protection, there is browser plugins to bypass that. I use it myself for quoting periodically. You have to assume that if you put it online that it will get copied. If you add related links to other articles in the content, those get copied to – which can help.
As a related thing, how many bloggers give photo credits? I’ve been surprised by writers who complain about content theft but do it all the time with images.
Most of the bloggers I see these days use public domain/Wikimedia photos and yes, they do acknowledge. Or there are Creative Commons web sites where the photographer offers their work in exchange for a set type of acknowledgement. These days I use these or public domain myself. It’s less trouble.
I largely use Creative Commons myself, with a few of my own. But I can appreciate it takes time. I know a large site that posts daily articles. They try to give credit where known but they don’t look for permission. Creative Commons is so much more straightforward than winging it like that.
David–That is so true about photos! I know bloggers who have been sued for copyright infringement when they took photos from a Google search or whatever.
That’s why I always try to find old images (Wikipedia is good for that.) The images need to be the public domain, or I get them from blog friends like Will who give me permission in exchange for links to their websites.
I hope this helps you:
https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-prevent-hackers-from-using-bad-bots-to-exploit-your-website
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/spammers-and-negative-seo/
https://www.silverdisc.co.uk/blog/2015/02/27/how-protect-your-website-hackers
If you need any help with teck stuff let me know I had aw website for years and learned a lot.
What a brilliant and useful post. Thank you.
Martin–People freak out over piracy, but most pirates are more dangerous to the people who try to take advantage of their “freebies” than they are to the authors of pirated books. Do spread the word.