IWSG & Piracy Update

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The cohosts this month are Mary Aalgaard, Bish Denham, Jennifer Hawes, Diane Burton, and Gwen Gardner!

How am I feeling at the moment?

Not as stressed as I was a week ago!

Monday night, after a week of torment, iBooks finally pulled my pirated book from their site. As far as I know, all the authors whose books were pirated have been pulled.

Lessons learned from this experience:

1. If you aren't following yourself on BookBub, do so. That's how I found out my book was on iBooks.
2. Document the writing of your story as you go along--post little snippets on social media. This helps to document that you're the author because you have a "paper" trail, of sorts.
3. Introduce your characters over time to your followers, whether on social media or in your newsletter. Once again, it leaves a trail documenting your creation of the book.

I contacted iBooks and asked them what I could provide to help prove my case. I offered screen captures of the numbers 2 and 3 above. I also offered to provide them with a copy of the invoice for my cover, from my two editors, copies of the critiques from my critique partners, emails from my advance review team for the contest I held where they searched for typos, and the contract I have with a narrator to create the audiobook.

I also submitted the copyright paperwork for the book. I will be sure to do that from now on before release.

Have you ever had your material pirated on a legitimate website or *gasp* plagiarized? 

If so, how did you handle it?

Harry Potter Ebooks--a New Trend in Marketing?

I have a Nook Color and got it before the Kindle Fire came out. I love it. I have a huge library of books on my Nook. I either downloaded them from Barnes and Noble, or I downloaded them from Smashwords as epubs.

I believe in competition. I don't want Big A (either them) to be the only places we have to go to purchase.

But I digress.

Yesterday I bought an iPad. I've wanted one for a long time because I attend a lot of conferences (both for my day job and as a writer), and the iPad--with its little keyboard set that makes it a mini laptop--will be much easier to carry around and take notes on.

But I also want it to be my ereader of choice. I'm giving my Nook to my hubby to use for church books, so I need to move all the books I've downloaded from B&N and a handful of Kindle books I've downloaded to my laptop but haven't read yet.

I wish they didn't make it so hard!

If you haven't had a chance to read the article "What Book Publishers Should Learn from Harry Potter" by Matthew Ingram, you should check it out. He discusses the model that Jo Rowling and Pottermore have developed for the new release of the Harry Potter ebooks.

Imagine! You can download EIGHT digital copies of each book for the multiple digital places you want to read them or for lending. One of the reasons I've continued to buy paper books is because it's hard to lend digital books, especially if your friends have competing readers.

I love this quote from the article:

"Charlie Redmayne, who left HarperCollins to become the chief executive officer of Pottermore, said that all of these developments and enhancements for users stem from a single principle:

My view is that the one thing we should learn from the music industry, is that one of the best ways of fighting back against piracy is making content available to consumers at a platform they want to purchase it on, and at a price they are willing to pay, and if you do that most people will instinctively want to buy it.

Redmayne is right, and if book publishers could only learn one thing from the Pottermore launch, it should be this: that one of the biggest drivers of piracy is the inability to find or consume the content that a user wants in the format or on the platform or at a time they wish to consume it . . . ."

click the picture

Jo gets it.

Why don't the others?