PIRATING THE PIRATES

                                
                                       
                                    by Norman Spinrad
                                   
                The Death Spiral of the Publishing Death Spiral revisited

I had no idea that I was going to write this until some of the people commenting on THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL put two ideas in my head:

First, many people suggested I put my backlist books on ebook publishing sites.  I googled round and about and found that Amazon offers the best deal.  All Amazon requires you to give them is non-exclusive rights to sell your ebook in their proprietary format for Kindle.  So that much indeed is a no-brainer, since these are rights you can’t do anything with anywhere other than Amazon, and they tie up nothing else.

Furthermore, you set your own sale price, and Amazon pays you 70% of the sale price if you allow them to adjust it as they might see fit, and 30% if you want to lock in your own price.

So far, so good.

But I, like many writers of a certain age, and even some who are not, wrote many of my backlist books on typewriters before the era of word processors, and  later with now moribund programs and/or operating systems, and/or computers, and backed them up on floppy disks, even the real floppy 5 inchers.  I was an early computer writer, starting in 1985, but my first computer ran on  CPM, and I wrote on Wordstar.  Later I went to Windows and Wordstar for Windows, and then to something that few people know about but should, Polyedit, a downloaded word processor out of Russia (http://www.polyedit.com ) much superior to Word and at about a tenth of the price.

The point being that I had no readable electronic files of some of my primo novels: THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE, THE IRON  DREAM, THE MIND GAME, THE VOID CAPTAIN’S TALE, CHILD OF FORTUNE....

All of which are now on sale as ebooks for Kindle on Amazon, plus a few others. Link:
(http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_9?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=norman+spinrad&sprefix=Norman+sp)

How was this accomplished?

Not easily.  But one of the commenters, a bit shamefacedly, to the extent you can be shamefaced in print, suggested I might try pirating the pirates.

I quickly saw the reasoning, and just as quickly the justice.  I knew that there were some pirated electronic versions of some of my stuff because I had seen them floating around in the bowels of cyberspace, so I started googling up some research.  It wasn’t easy, it was rather tedious, and there are dragons in those virtual waters.  It was a steep learning curve, but I learned a lot.

I learned that there are basically three species of literary pirates.  There are outright thieves in various countries out to make money by stealing copyrighted works and selling them, making it a relatively easy matter to buy. 

Then there are many Peer-to-Peer torrent pirates who put on the pirate works in fast downloading special formats that you have to download and pay for their programs to read, who can gain access to your computer thereby, and whose files themselves may contain who knows what, and who therefore are to be avoided as the plague they are.

But there are also true idealists who believe they are performing a public service to both readers and writers by making books available for free that otherwise would have disappeared.  You don’t have to agree with their ideal--and I certainly don’t--to admit that they are sincere.

What previously had kept me from experimenting with ebook self-publishing of my golden oldies was that I would have had to destructively scan paper copies at no little cost and hassle to myself or pay someone else to do it for me, and since I was, and to some extent still am, skeptical as to how much money I would get back from the investment, I didn’t want to make that investment without testing the waters first.

However, the pirates all have to do it in order to come up with ebook files in whatever format with books that did not previously exist in bits and bytes form.

So--pirate the pirates!

The Peer-to-Peer stuff is more widespread, but extremely dodgy, and what you might download would be difficult if not impossible to convert to some usable format like txt, Word, rtf, or pdf.

The bastard crooks who steal copyrighted works and sell them in one of the standard formats deserve whatever you can do to them, and they have no legal ground to stand on.

And the idealists not only have no legal ground to stand on but no moral ground either, since pirating their pirated versions of your copyrighted work and selling it yourself is only performing the same public service they are.  It’s not really even  worth your while to try to take their free illegal versions down after you’ve pirated them, at least by my lights.

The next step is the most tedious, time-consuming, and frustrating.  You have to do a lot of fancy googling to find your own pirated works in usable formats.  If you find them in pdf, you’re in luck, but don’t count on it.  Mostly, the files are in html.

With Polyedit, you can download html files, and strip them to txt easily enough, but you end up losing format and gaining a real mess you’d have to reformat line by line. However, with Polyedit at least (I’ve never used Word) you can copy the html text straight off the pirate site and paste it into a Polyedit file in txt or rtf format and it’s quite usable.

Well almost.  Amazon wants pdf.  But again, with Polyedit at least, no problem. There’s a free plug-in called Primo pdf. (http://www.download.com/PrimoPDF/3000-10743_4-10264577.html?part=dl-10264577&subj=dl&tag=buttonhttp://download.cnet.com/PrimoPDF/3000-18497_4-10264577.html?part=dl-10264577&subj=dl&tag=button ) (or directly on the Polyedit site)You mark the text, hit the “convert to pdf” button, it does the rest, and there you have it, a pdf file that the Amazon program converts to its proprietary format, and, after going through their fairly simple process, puts it up for sale at your chosen price.

Well not quite, they put a $9.95 ceiling on what you can charge.  But I don’t find that unreasonable at all.  The ebook business is not going to really take off until the publishers get it through their greedy heads that ebooks have to be price competitive with trade paperbacks, or maybe mass market paperbacks.  And these days, that’s something like $15 for a trade paperback, $7.99 for a mass market paperback.

So if you take a look, you’ll see that I’m not selling any ebook for more than $8, some for less.  Do the math, or rather allow me to do it for you.  At 10% of a $25 hardcover, your royalty is $2.50.  At 8% of a $15 trade paperback it’s $1.20, at 10% of a $7.99 mass market paperback it’s $.79.

At 70% of an $8 ebook you net $5.60.

If, and it’s a big if, these things sell, it’s the revolution.  The only way the old mainstream publishers will be able to compete for the works of reasonably well-known writers will be with advances, which Amazon  and its ilk are not offering.

Not yet.

The questionable downside to all this is that when it comes to new work, at least for now, you have to forgo an advance to collect those 70% royalties, and nobody really knows how successful ebook first edition launches will be for now.

So I’m hedging my bets, which is to say, investing neither money nor time, testing the business model with backlist books.  It’s work, it’s some hassle, but otherwise you’re risking nothing.

So go thou and do likewise.

Pirate the pirates!

If it works well, we can afford to buy each and every one of them a nice parrot to sit on their shoulders.

Comments

  1. Norman --

    Might check out Smashwords, too. Once they run your ms through their meat grinder, you can offer it in a ton of formats -- and upload the epub version to places like Amazon.com, too. Gets you into Apple's book store, and a couple other places, and as long as you don't charge any more in one place than in another, no conflict.

    And I also got copies of my backlist from the pirates this way and stuck 'em up. Seems only fair.

    Perry

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  2. I looked at Smashwords, and indeed they put you through a meatgrinder to join up. I had to keep starting over. And I don't see the point of using something like that when I can do the posting myself and keep a straight 70% of the sale price.
    Checked out Barnes & Noble's operation, not yet up, but sounds like it will be a real player when it is.

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  3. Meta-pirating is a great idea, and has been employed in other media, to good effect, by (inter alia) Frank Zappa:

    https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Beat_the_Boots

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  4. As far as I know, it also happens with video and arcade games. Since a lot of the old games were produced on arcade hardware that has since degraded, and ownership of the IP is an impossible tangle of bankruptcies, auctions, seizures and takeovers, the only extant copies of the old games are the ones floating around the Internet as emulation fodder.

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  5. Thanks for sharing your experiences, Norman. I’m glad to hear you’re getting into the ebook arena yourself. It’s a lot of work, but many are noting decent sales in that medium. Even if you don’t release newer books in ebook formats yourself, the set of back-list books you have available outnumbers the career output of many writers. They will never be out of print again and will become an active, accessible library of your works. Hopefully they will help drive sales of your current stuff and vice versa.

    You probably already plan on it, but try to create a cover for each ebook, even if it consists of just text on a plain, solid-color background. This creates a more visually appealing “gallery” for your Amazon page. Also, books or items without some sort of accompanying cover or image usually indicates out of print or unavailable on Amazon. Ideally they should all have a good cover like the Iron Dream ebook you have up. That one should have the title on the cover graphic as well. The more book-like you make the ebooks appear, the more fitting they will seem next to your publishers supported novels.

    Maybe play with the price a bit. There is still a perception that ebooks should be worth less than a print book, even a mass market paperback. If you offer buyers a deal, even if it’s just a dollar cheaper than a typical MMPB, readers may not hesitate at all to just buy it (to read for not, for later, or never at all, doesn’t matter).

    Consider making one novel a lower priced “gateway” book, a sampler. A novel that is a good representation of your work, but not one of your most famous stories (those are priced regularly). Novellas and short stories collections work well for this purpose. I recall you mentioned on your site some short stories and a novella were on fictionwise. If you can convert them to Kindle, they would make fine smaller ebooks.

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  6. Henry--have put on JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS and VAMPIRE JUNKIES, which are novellas and are cheaper. The problem with illos that look like books is that they are book covers, and there's a rights question. The IRON DREAM cover is what it is because it's cropped from an Estonian cover.
    As you can see, I am playing with price a bit, but actually these days $8 is just about the price of your average mass market paperback.
    The big plunge would be to try it with OSAMA THE GUN, but I'm waiting to see what backlist does.

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  7. It's nice that some people who disagree with Pirates try to understand and benefit from what they do. Still there are a couple of things that seem inacurate to me. While there is no reason to doubt that "there are Peer-to-Peer torrent pirates who put on the pirate works in fast downloading special formats that you have to download and pay for their programs to read, who can gain access to your computer thereby." I have personally never stumbled upon such books and I have downloaded many books (when you work in a small university, partly illegal corpuses - which you therefore cannot share with anyone - is all you're left with, for paying for every word you use in a million word corpus will exhaust the funding of your research). What I mean by that is that white sharks may exist in the virtual waters of cyber-libertalia, but actually being bit by them (especially in the bittorrent waters) is actually no more likely than an actual attack in the Mediterranean (it also could come from me not being a landlubber ;-))
    But above all, your expression of "pirating the pirates", "meta-pirating" or anything of the sort makes utterly no sense. It is like saying you went to the soup kitchen and in a gesture of rebellion against those commies left without paying. Pirates do what they do to spread culture, to spread the books they like. You have been able to evaluate how tedious it is to make a digital version of a printed book and decided it was too expensive (either in cash or in time spent) to do it yourself. And these guys take the time to do it for free and expecting no financial compensation (maybe a few megabytes for their ratios). You are very fortunate that there are some people who like what you write THAT much. Because we are not talking here of putting a DVD plate in a drive, pressing a button and waiting a few hours for the file to be created, the guys love your work that much that they spent dozens of hours just for the sake of having people read your books (DVD ripping is actually a bit more complicated than that and more time consuming if you do things right, but it is nothing like scanning a book).

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  8. End of the too long previous post...

    While I liked your article, you're excitement at "pirating the pirates", like a sort of small revenge actually seemed rather cuteish to me. You really don't get it...
    Please take some time to read free culture by Lawrence Lessig, read Cory Doctorow's blog (he is also a writer and you would probably benefit from watching his conference at bloomsbury), read books and texts from the Wu Ming collective, download the freely available "steal this film" (pt 1&2), view "rip: a remix manifesto", spend a little hour watching "Good copy, Bad copy", listen to the commentary track of "Sita sings the blues" (after having watched the film of course). When you understand better these idealists, with whom you disagree, just try to make it known to the ones you got your own book from that the guy they idolize enough to spend countless hours spreading the words has found a use to what they are doing. You'll make those pirates happier than selling your books on amazon will ever make you and in no way with the feeling of having been ripped off. As a final reading (I guess you will not have time for all that, but anyway), you should try Marcus Rideker's "Villains of all nations", it has come to actually make me feel proud to be designated by the word "pirate".

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  9. I did say that I believed some of the pirates are idealists, and indeed I haven't made any moves to take their copies down even after putting the books in question on sale on Amazon.

    But the idea that I, or any other writer in the same position, will make the pirates happier than getting paid by selling the same books will make me overlooks the fact that writers have to make money to be able to afford to eat, let alone invest their time in writing the next book.
    And by the way, I have seen Sita sings the Blues," not once but twice,love it, but don't see the relevance to the issue at hand.
    What it boils down to is whether or how many people will buy a novel for a modest price that they can get free elsewhere with some difficulty.
    It's a bet on idealism too, the idealism of readers. And I've already written that some of the pirates are indeed performing a public service.
    But as for the Peer to Peer locked format ones, I stand by what I said, at least about the ones who are doing it for money.
    And I have indeed had this conversation with Cory Doctorow, with whom I partially agree. But writers should be paid for their work.
    Maybe pirates too. So here's an offer to pirates: scan a book of mine into pdf that makes it easier for me to put it up for sale, and not only will I not come after them to take theirs down, I'll pay them 25% of what I make on the title by selling my ebook version.

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  10. And I think this is the direction people should try to go towards in creation. The qualification, the actual process of creation, should be paid for in order to allow people to create. But once it is created, art should be available to all no matter how much money they can afford to spend on culture...
    To find a solution, people have to try to understand all parties, that is artists, the public and sellers (RIAA, MPAA, big name editors, retail stores, who are the biggest voice of all right now, pausing as the artists point of view) and try to go beyond the antagonism that is being created by those who find themselves in a position where they are no longer as necessary (see the wu ming article of my above post about this antagonism) as they used to be.
    Without being necessarily the best solution people can think off, despite the fact that it is probably not viable yet flattr (a pirate initiative) seems to me to be going in the right direction.
    And I'm not sure pirates should be paid for their work, this is one of the things that make file sharing so extraordinary, the fact that people do that for the sake of sharing, not because they will benefit money-wise (they benefit from it in terms of recognition within their communities). And at this time and age, people are happy to do that this way, why add a variable which could ruin everything ?

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  11. Most writers are not happy with the situation. The pirates do not understand that ongoing sales year after year are essential unless the writer has been paid some enormous advance. And advances are determined by what the publisher thinks will earn out in royalties over time.

    The writers are far from unnecesary, they create the work. Without them there is nothing to either offer for free or to sell.

    As for pirates getting a percentage share of scanned and digitized work that they might do for free, I'd certainly be happy with freebies, but if I want to be paid for what I do, I'm certainly willing to pay something for the work someone might do that aids me in doing it.

    To say that this would ruin everything is just as reactionary as saying that writers should do what they can to take down all the pirate sites. These are indeed revolutionary times, but that doesn't mean that what exists now is anything like a final outcome.

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  12. "The writers are far from unnecessary, they create the work. Without them there is nothing to either offer for free or to sell."

    I would never ever dare to think that writers are unnecessary (and even if they were... imho usefulness is completely overrated). I might tend to believe that publishers (at least the big ones which decide of what will be read and what won't, buy flooding supermarkets and chain libraries while smaller one have the biggest difficulties to make their books known) are less and less so... I believe we agree on the problem of indexing payment of artists on sales (see my previous post).

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  13. Again, I do not see what exists now as a final outcome. But what is beautiful in file sharing is the dilettantism with which it is done. And we come back to the difference between work and employment. Sharing something is a longer process that people think, that involves many participants. For instance, when someone shares a film, he or she might have ripped it him/herself, which takes time to find the right settings (especially considering ripping a DVD takes about 12 hours on an average computer). But that is just the start of the job. If you want to make it accessible to more, you'll try to find the subtitles to it. They might have been ripped of the DVD, which prompts corrections, but nothing like creating the subs from scratch, which many people do. Then you might need to resynch that (which can be tedious). And then, if you write a description of the film, explaining how it moved you, why you think people should see it.

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  14. Completely sorry, I guess technology is not yet where it would need to be... Some posts disappear, some reappear. I hope that does not make too much of a mess administration-wise.

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  15. I do agreee that conventional publishers will have to adapt or die,especially when Amazon and/or Apple and/or Barnes Noble and/or Google realize that they can deal with the writers direct.

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  16. Norman:

    I have 4 titles on Kindle and would do more if I had TIME.

    Thank you for this insight. I've been an e-book enthusiast since the very first PDF's were distributed on Prodigy.

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  17. Mr. Spinrad,
    I hope you are taking the time to update the e-book versions after your readers have proofread them. Many OCR systems are less than optimal, which is why I tend to buy only books where there is a likelihood that they were converted from an existing digital format, or are popular enough (Dune, Lord of the Rings) that the publisher has invested the time to do a proper job.

    I just finished "The Victorian Internet" on my Nook, and it was the worst OCR job I've seen. Apparently much of the action takes place in "Rritian". Sometimes the OCR just gives up and there's a string of "???" in the text. And not just the "B8" problem, but also the "ce" problem and the "0o" problem...

    Damn difficult to read.

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  18. You can pirate at least some of your books in .pdf from here:

    http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=norman+spinrad

    Also, for the book covers, have you considered posting a contest on your blog, perhaps offering an autographed book as the prize?

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  19. Just as a thought, the folks who are doing the original scanning & OCR of older books for which no electronic versions exist aren't doing it for money, so offering money may not be your best possible form of "payment" to them. For a chunk of those folks they're doing it because they love books and don't want to see any book effectively disappear because there are only 20 remaining ratty paperback copies in basements around the world. They're like the Gutenberg project folks, but with materials still in copyright. The phrase that comes to mind for my mental image of them is "They're very... earnest."

    I suspect Tuckerization would actually be more appreciated by at least a few of them, without the need for any financial transactions. The scanning process may also not be as difficult for them as it would be for you, because some of them have set up scanning systems almost as impressive as what Google is using to scan books.

    Some of the same folks would probably also be happy to assist you with getting books into the multiple formats used by different ebook readers (Kindle, Nook, Sony, etc.) with as much retained formatting as possible.

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  20. WELCOME!! I don't feel so bad about screaming at you in that other post now. Any chance of AGENT OF CHAOS?

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  21. I've come back. Downloading Samples of your eBooks from Amazon, I see there are many errors. I don't know if you're aware of this. You can see the books yourself, if you don't own a Kindle, by downloading the Kindle for PC/Mac software.

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  22. norman said:
    > So here's an offer to pirates:
    > scan a book of mine into pdf that makes it
    > easier for me to put it up for sale,
    > and not only will I not come after them
    > to take theirs down, I'll pay them 25% of
    > what I make on the title by selling my ebook version.

    i write software that helps people digitize books.

    i'd be happy to clean up your e-books for you,
    norman, at no expense to you. and then i will
    show you how you can do the job all by yourself.

    my e-mail address is bowerbird at aol dot com.

    -bowerbird

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  23. Mike--
    I've just gotten a pro bono offer for an AGENT OF CHAOS file, so that should be around in a while. Looked at your site and ire at the disappearing comments. I'm still learning this stuff, and that was not my intent in combining DEATH SPIRAL 1, 2,3 into one post, which was a matter of house cleaning to get rid of redundancy here, didn't know that the comments wouldn't ride along. Or how to make them ride along had I know

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  24. All so interesting....!!

    Most of my book contracts contain a clause that says the publisher owns the publishing rights in "all media now available and for media yet to be invented" So all they have to do is put the old titles into Kindle's catalogues, so that they remain "active and in *print*" and the rights will probably never revert to me--
    sigh.

    As to all the errors and mistakes, I think some of the bootlegged versions are scanned badly, etc, but at the rate the publishers are downsizing, there are legions of (now freelance) editors and copy editors in abundance.

    I have found sites that show download numbers of my books that astonished me. Over 100,000 now, for my two dark fantasy books

    Remember the Chinese curse about lving in interesting times?

    We do.

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  25. A bunch of stuff--first of all, AGENT OF CHAOS is now up on Amazon. Second, bowerbird is now tutoring me in some of this stuff, and partly as a result of this, I'm developing a more complex take on the "pirates," at least to the point of putting "pirates" in quotes. One thing I realized is that the piracy started before there were any ebooks. You had to read the downloads on a computer or print them, so the effect on book sales was minimal, and the pirates were really more idealistic than not.
    ebooks are in the process of changing this though, and I may write something on the blog itself later. Right now, in short, I think some kind of understanding or protocol is needed between pirates and writers. In that direction, I'm not trying to take down freebies of what I'm selling.

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  26. re publishers claiming that ebook or POD availability constitutes in print for reversion purposes, that's a big problem. Decades ago I adopted the policy of use it or lose it, reverting everything that was OP as soon as I could, which is why I own most of my backlist now.

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  27. Hope Agent of Chaos makes it somewhere other than amazon kindle eventually it was one of my favorite books (fortunately I still have a paperback copy think its my second the other finally came apart) but Amazons choice of a format that no other ereader can use is a nonstarter in my opinion as well as the fact this is their second run a ebooks and the first they just left the users high and dry when they abandoned it. I had the fun with a different company although when they were shutting down they let you download unprotected copies of all they could get the authors to okay on (or the right holders) and most of the others were by steve miller and sharon lee who are now over on Baen so I can get on my Sony Reader and my sister can get on her Astak.

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  28. I have one problem with ebooks in kindle format... they are in kindle format. epub is the standard by now.

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  29. Mathias,

    Calibre is a freeware program that will let you read (on the computer) and convert practically any ebook format, among other things. I have a Kindle reader, and if I can't find a book in Kindle format, I'll download the epub format use Calibre to convert it. Naturally, this will also work the other way for you.

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  30. hi Norman!
    I found this blog when I was searching the web for p2p shared/pirated works of yours.
    If you have managed to make epub or pdf versions of your books I'd happy to buy direct from you. Please publish the links.
    PS: forgive me (and others) for freeloading but I've tried in the past to buy music and books from "legal" resellers but believe me it's always harder than just felch it from p2p and most of the times *impossible* (this product (sic) isn'nt available in your country).
    A french fan who lives in China

    ReplyDelete

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