Oh yes, the dreaded P happened to me. Suprina, the writer currently without a NY publishing contract. Suprina, the self-publishing author who has been slowly but surely building up her catalog of e-books while she waits for her big break. That southern belle from Georgia. Yeah, that girl…me. lol.

I discovered that I had been pirated by following some sage advice given to me in a Yahoo group (RWClist) a long time ago. That advice consisted of simply cutting and pasting small segments of my novels into my favorite search engine just to see what kind of results it would yield.

Usually this type of search yielded no matching results for me. I never really expected it to. After all, I’m still just a small-timer, an aspiring NY bestselling author wannabe. Surely no one would want to pirate my work. Right?

Wrong.

I soon discovered that ANYONE can get pirated. All it takes is for one reader to deem your work valuable enough to share with others and viola! You’re pirated.

But I digress…

After cutting and pasting a segment of an e-book that was currently going through revisions, my search engine suddenly revealed a link that had a match to my document. An exact match!

Grrrr…

I followed the link and lo and behold, there was my e-book. Not an excerpt, but the WHOLE thing!

More growls ensued. Loud ones. I mean, how dare someone pass off my work as their own! And then offer it for download, too. What?! Where’s the referee? I call foul!

My growls lessened considerably when I scanned all the way to the very end of the document and saw my name. When I also recalled that I had given this same e-book free to the world on one of my promotional websites and noted that the pirate wasn’t offering it for profit, the growls left completely. In their place were:

1. Frustration about not being contacted beforehand for permission to post my work.
2. Anger towards the hosting website (Scribd.com) that would allow this atrocity.
3. A bit of flattery at the fact that someone liked my work enough to copy it at all.
4. General confusion as to how I should handle the situation from there in an efficient and timely manner.

After turning to other authors (some of whom had been pirated themselves) and after doing a bit of research on the issue, I came up with a workable game plan.

As sole copyright and exclusive rights holder of this particular work, I knew that it was my job to contact the website’s management to have the e-book removed. For authors who only hold the copyright to their work and not the exclusive rights, they will need to have their ‘people’ contact the site’s management. In both situations, there may be a particular format that the ‘Takedown Notice’ must be in, so make sure to find out what that is from the website in question.

Fortunately, the website where my work was pirated (Scribd.com) is diligent about removing copyrighted material once they are alerted to the offense. They even have a sample of how they want their ‘Takedown Notice’ to be formatted. See the following link: www.scribd.com/doc/3504180/Sample-DMCA-Takedown-Notice-for-Scribdcom

Unfortunately, Scribd.com still has enough loopholes in place for someone to do it again. But since they genuinely seem to be working on those things, I’m not as angry with them as I was before.

At this point, you’re probably thinking that I went the expected route and contacted the website’s management after drafting the before mentioned ‘Takedown Notice’. Nope. I decided to make this situation work for me instead.

Here’s what I did:

1. Instead of contacting the site’s copyright agent, I directly contacted the person who pirated my work. Not to take down my e-book. No, to keep it up (after all, it was a freebie anyway), but with certain considerations. I even went so far as to post my requests/considerations in the comment section of her Scribd page so that everyone that links to that book will see that I’ve given this person my permission to leave that e-book up.
2. I also posted a statement on my main blog giving all my readers permission to post that particular e-book along with another freebie on their sites (with certain considerations, of course).
3. I decided that if that site can be used to pirate my books, why not use that same site to PROMOTE my books. After a bit more research, I discovered that other authors were already utilizing this great idea. Lynn Viehl comes to mind as a perfect example. She posts excerpts there for her upcoming NY releases and a few novellas that she self-publishes.

Now I don’t know how much Lynn’s sales have risen from her efforts on that particular file-sharing site, but after posting excerpts of my own at that site over this past weekend, I’ve had a tremendous spike in e-book sales. Which means people are not only reading samples of my work, but going the extra step to actually buy copies.

In conclusion, I hope that the details (albeit long-winded. lol) of my experiences with being pirated will remind all writers of the need to protect their work on the internet and to also be diligent about the business side of writing.

Suprina Frazier

Email: suprinafrazier@yahoo.com

Main Websites: www.mochainterlude.bravehost.com

www.mochainterlude.blogspot.com

Filed Under: Blog	About the Book: