Author Enemy Number One Isn't Piracy ... It's Obscurity

From the fables of Aesop and the earliest books of the Bible, through Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Douglas Adams, this writing life has always been about making words stick. Literature is an inexhaustible goldmine of quotable quotes.

One simple line that registered with me recently, though, wasn't from a great man of letters at all, but from hard-nosed business scribe Seth Godin in the US. He said: "The enemy of the author is not piracy but obscurity."

Simple, memorable, to the point ... and oh so bloody true!

Take ebook piracy, for instance. The big boys of the publishing industry are frantically trying to safeguard their investments by slapping Digital Rights Management padlocks and geographical restrictions on their best sellers. At least, war on piracy is their official line.

Who're they trying to kid? The rawest young intern in the mail room knows that it's just as easy to scan and pirate a paper book as it is to hijack an electronic copy online. The most pirated books are, in fact, books that have not even been officially published in digital form. (JK Rowling, who flatly refuses to allow her publishers to release ebooks of her Harry Potter series has seen all her novels offered as free ebook downloads all over the net in all digital formats, available within hours of official launch of hardback, courtesy of the pirates.)

We've said this before, so I won't go into detail again, but -- in a nutshell -- DRM and geographical restrictions do not discourage piracy as is claimed, they merely greatly inconvenience the honest customer, garner superfluous sales ... and actively encourage frustrated readers to turn to the black market.

So that's out of the way. Piracy ain't the enemy.

But what about obscurity? How about those brilliant authors whose names are so massively and universally unknown that no self-respecting pirate would even bother to run up his Jolly Roger to give chase?

How do we turn an author into someone worth ripping off? What's the recipe for buccaneer bait?

Answers on a postcard please ... Neil

TAKE-OFF OR RIP-OFF?

Over recent years, while full scale war has raged in courtrooms around the world, BeWrite Books authors have often asked us why we don't take a stand against Google's Book Search system as the rest of the publishing industry seems to have done.

They've sometimes been surprised to find that -- far from resisting Google -- we were among the very first to recognise the their initiative for what it was ... and to enthusiastically jump in with both feet years ago to volunteer our books as part of the Google global collection when it had an opt-in rather than an opt-out policy. The Google system is something so mind-bogglingly huge it makes the Great Library at Alexandria look like a poorly stocked wee bookshelf in your local 7-11.

BB authors see the wood for trees. And, it seems, some other smaller publishers are also catching on at last to the huge benefits on offer.

The clincher is simply this vital but strangely overlooked fact, something we appreciated from the very start: GOOGLE OFFERS ONLY TWENTY PERCENT OF A BOOK FOR FREE DOWNLOAD! Want the full monty? OK, go to www.bewrite.net and stump up, dear reader!

BB writers recognise the difference between massive free advertising and piracy. Authors with other publishers should be smart enough to say: "Hey -- I want in, not out!" Hopefully there may actually be someone at mission control taking some notice of what authors want.

Google is simply doing on a much grander scale what we do ourselves when we offer browsers extracts from books on our own site and others and allow free download of thirty percent of a BB ebook at third-party retail sites like Smashwords and Silver Publishing.

Anyway, here's the low down from a wise publisher who discovered the plain truth for himself straight from the horse's mouth, and now, like BB, knows a good thing for his authors when he spots it: http://michaelhyatt.com/2010/03/why-authors-agents-and-publishers-should-embrace-google-book-search.html

And it's worth checking out the author comments at the foot of the piece. I've always believed authors can be much smarter than their publishers. That's another opinion with which BB authors often concur.

Cheers. Neil

PS: And, talking about straight from the horse's mouth ... I love it when authors produce their own book trailers on video. BB has some crackers (a favourite of mine is Bosley Gravel's for *The Movie* linked in the right margin of this blog page -- it's just so darned whacky! Typically Boz!!) Here's one from an author with another publisher. Simple, fun, effective ... anyone with a book, imagination and a vidcam can try their hand and we'll help all we can: