doublevictory:

iphysianthe:

my mom’s argument against piracy is “well what if you wrote a book and one person bought it and then hundreds of people got to read it for free and you didn’t make any money!”

MOTHER YOU HAVE JUST DESCRIBED

LIBRARIES

Ahem. Sorry to burst your bubble, but have you ever heard of royalties? It’s that thing authors get paid every time someone buys his or her book or borrows it from the library.

Libraries

=

Authors make money

Erm, yes and no. (For credentials sake, I’m an author — it’s my business to know this stuff.)

Every time someone buys one of my books, I earn a royalty from it. Every time a library buys ones of my books, I earn a royalty from it, too. But whenever that library lets someone check out my book, I do not get an additional royalty. If libraries had to pay a royalty to authors every time a book was checked out, their entire operating budgets would be sapped in a matter of minutes and even midlist authors would be a lot richer.

That said, authors love libraries, because people who check books out from the library are usually the kinds of people who love to own books, too. So someone might read my book, decide they really like it, and then go out and buy a copy of their own. Or they might tell someone else, who buys a copy, or if the book is very popular, the library might invite me in for a reading and book signing, where I can sell more copies to those attending.

Anyway, OP’s mom’s analogy is a bit wonky. If I wrote a book (I have — two of them) and hundreds of people pirated them and read them and I didn’t make a dime from those downloads — that’d be pretty cool, because it means hundreds of people read my book who probably wouldn’t have otherwise given it the time of day.

And here’s where piracy turns into a good thing. Of those hundreds of people, I can guarantee that a few will like what they’ve read. Some of them may want a print version of their own — so they’ll go out and buy a copy, and I make money. Some of them will tell other people about my book, and those people will go buy a copy, and I make money. More importantly, if I play my cards right as an author, I can win those readers over and turn them into lifetime fans who will look for all of my upcoming releases — all because I didn’t act like a dick over them picking up a free copy of my book.