Of Raptors and Writers

by Janis Patterson

I had a visitor this morning. As usual, I was out in the hot tub fairly early, doing my exercises. (Arthritis makes dry-land exercising both harmful and painful.) After finishing I sat in the water relaxing and drinking the last of my coffee, when there was a loud squawking of many different kinds of birds and while I watched a great hawk landed on the top of our fence. I don’t know what kind of hawk it was - as Egyptomanes The Husband and I simply call all hawks ‘Horus-birds’ - but it was definitely a hawk and a fairly large one. Even though we live close to the center of a very large city, hawks are not unknown in our neighborhood. Every so often in our secluded back yard we find evidence of a hawk’s meal - no body parts or bones, just a large circle of disarticulated feathers, rather like a fairy ring made of feathers instead of fungus. I will admit that though this is a normal and expected part of the natural world it is still unsettling.

I can see why ornithologists say birds come from dinosaurs... this beautiful specimen of Horus-bird paraded up and down a short portion of our fence, its head always moving, its ophidian gaze sweeping the entire yard with the bearing of a conqueror, all very much the pattern card of a raptor. Its attention seemed most drawn, however, to a small Indian peach tree sitting on the other side of the fence which divides the back yard from the parking area.

Suddenly there was an explosion of blue jays swooping around and screaming. There must have been at least half a dozen of them, all the brilliant blue of the male, and they were dive-bombing the preening hawk. The aerial show must have lasted a full two to three minutes before the hawk gave way and flew off. While I have not gone to investigate, I surmise that somewhere in that little Indian peach tree is a blue jay nest and do not wish to disturb the inhabitants further. The jays have nested in this area in the sixty-odd years since my parents built this house, so it is not an unreasonable theory.

So what does this digression into nature have to do with writing? The jays are each smaller and weaker than the large and powerful predator hawk, though combined they dominated him into if not submission at least to departure.

Sometimes the little guy does win, though almost never in the publishing industry. Right now I’m all incensed about Amazon’s buy-read-return for full refund policy. Amazon says it wants to provide the best experience it can for its customers/readers... but is dead silent on the experience of its writers, without whom they would have no readers.

It seems they neither realize nor care that the buy-read-return for full refund is simply straight-up theft. Now I will admit that over the years I have returned a few books - either they were misrepresented, or my sometimes unreliable arthritic fingers have mis-clicked, or some other out-of-normal circumstance, but NEVER (and I repeat, NEVER) have I bought one, read it and then returned it for credit. That’s plain dishonest. There are those who start with the first book in a series then work their way through the entire series, buying, reading completely, then returning for full credit before they repeat the crime with the next book. For those of you who say it is not a crime as Amazon allows it as part of their TOC, just remember there are legal crimes and there are moral crimes. Legal crime - maybe, maybe not. Moral crime - definitely, as it is deliberate theft from the author, who deserves to be paid for the work the serial returners are enjoying.

Apparently these people neither know nor care that what they are doing is dishonorable, or that it makes a big and often uncomfortable difference in the writer’s income. Amazon has to know, though, and honor and honesty aside, this constant full-refund bit has to be affecting their money, too - unless they are using the ‘read time’ income as a form of float, which I doubt.

So what are we as writers to do about this serial theft of our work? There are always out-and-out pirates who steal our work and give it away for free, but they’re obviously criminals... not the organization we’re trusting to sell our books for us. And I’m not ragging just on Amazon - maybe the other etailers do the same thing - I don’t know. Amazon’s buy-sell-return for full credit policy is well known and has never been a secret.

So what can be done about it? I have no idea. Amazon is the 9000 lb gorilla in the electronic book world and individual writers have no say.

But - if a handful of blue jays can protect a nest from a sizeable Horus-bird hawk by banding together, perhaps we should start talking about into banding together. If the vendors won’t protect our income, should we not at least look into what is necessary to protect our own? 

Let’s hear it for blue jays!

The Reader-Writer Contract

by Janis Patterson

I hate being treated like a convenience. While there are wonderful readers and I have many wonderful fans, there are those who stand out, and not in a good way. At a glance, the reader-writer transaction seems fairly balanced. I take my time and effort and skill to create a story and make it available; the reader, judging from the blurb, the cover, my track record, word of mouth and other indicators, buys my book, thus giving me wages for the hours of labor I put in on the story.

There’s an elegant simplicity in that... or at least there should be. Some days  it’s hard to find - if not downright impossible. These days somehow the author has morphed from a skilled and respected creator of worlds and populations to the level of a semi-skilled drudge or ordinary and pretty much interchangeable ‘content creator,’ as one large publisher once tried to re-name us. 

Readers castigate us for charging so much for our books - without even considering the time and effort and dedication it took to create that story and even when they are released through traditional publishers who give us no input at all in covers, let alone in pricing. 

People contact us and beg for free books; they say they cannot afford the book, but want so much to read it. Some promise that they will tell all their friends how wonderful our book is and that all of them will buy it - but only if we send the petitioner a free copy. 

Some of the most offensive say that we should be happy to share our books for free just so we can relish the knowledge that our words are being read. Hello! Writing is a business, and a workman is worthy of his hire... Writing is a skilled profession and while we want our words to be read and appreciated, we should not have to work for free to be so. Just try that ‘working just to be appreciated’ reasoning with other skilled professions, such as accountant or plumber or physician!

Part of the problem is that writers are not valued as the educated, professional craftsmen that we are. In America, at least, books are written in English, and since most everyone here speaks (in some cases a sort of) English, they mistakenly believe that anyone can write a book. After all, they speak English, don’t they? There’s no reason they couldn’t sit down and dash off a book or two when they have the time... If I had a dollar for every time some person has assured me with heartfelt intent they’re going to write a book when they get around to it I probably could buy my own private island. The trouble is, most people want to have written a book (and therefore garner the largely mythic benefits of fame and fortune) instead of doing the work necessary to write a book. It is true, though, that most people are physically capable of writing a book. It is writing a good book worthy of being published and read which is the difficult part.

Our books are stolen and put up on the internet for free, whether for actual giveaway or credit card phishing bait. For a long time paperbacks were free of this electronic theft and there used to be a fail-safe built in with paper, but no more. Yes, paperbacks are swapped around, they are loaned and used ones are a staple of thrift stores and garage sales, but paper - especially the paper used in mass-market paperbacks - is relatively fragile and will wear out, where electronic files are forever. Now some canny crooks are scanning the paper copies and putting up the resultant scan for free.

Even worse, whether the book originated electronically or on paper, some of these criminals are putting the book out as being written by them, selling them and collecting the money. With no payment or acknowledgement, must I add, to the original writer. Sometimes the names and perhaps the locations and the title are changed, but not always. 

What is truly sad is that this piracy is barely regarded as a crime by law enforcement and our government. We have to prove that a crime has occurred and then are more often than not ignored or passed off with a ‘sop’ for an answer. Many of these thieves are based in foreign countries, and right or not, that protects them, which is an insult to every creator. (Musicians and artists are pretty much in the same boat, though they appear to have a few more rights recognized legally than does the poor writer.) I say theft is theft, whether it is your words or a diamond ring from a jeweler’s, and it should be treated as such. But they aren’t.

So why do we keep writing? In my case, mainly because I can’t not write. I’ve been a wordsmith in any number of industries since my elementary school days (yes, I was first paid for writing when I was 9 or 10 years old) and the idea of doing anything else is beyond my comprehension. I’ve held other kinds of jobs, but even then I have always written, creating the best stories and characters in the best form I can... in other words, I live up to my end of the reader/writer contract. I only wish more readers did.

The Ever-Growing Peril

by Janis Patterson

Being a writer is a hard life. Not only do you have to come up with a multitude of ideas that you can shape into a coherent, interesting story, you have to then write the thing, all the while you have to check your facts, make sure your grammar and spelling are correct and your character names are appropriate to the time of the story. Then once the book is finished, you have to edit it to the best of your capability. Once that is done you can start the unholy dance of submitting it to agents/editors and waiting for months if not years for an answer. Then even later once the story is contracted you begin editorial combat, reworking your story to fit their prejudices and guidelines. Sometimes more than once. Then you continue to wait until your time comes up in their publishing schedule, which again can be more than a year. Or two. Or, if you are self-publishing, you send your story to an independent editor for their version of editorial combat. This time, however, you have the final say – it is your story after all – but never forget that you are paying them for their expertise and you very well may be too close to the story to see the holes. Then you get do work with cover artists, formatters, publicity/advertising and the various vendors.

Ain’t none of it easy. Any way you look at it, writing takes time, some money and an emotional toll.

That just adds insult to injury when others take your stories and either give them away for free or, what is worse, sell them without your permission and with no benefit to you. There’s a reason they’re called pirates.

Now of course I’m not talking about the promotions the author her/himself does through legitimate outlets. I don’t always agree with that attitude – training readers to expect a full book that has taken perhaps several years to write for nothing or for a pittance cannot be good for any of us or for the industry as a whole. Plumbers and carpenters and pastry chefs and just about everyone else don’t give their services for free or close-to-free in hopes that you’ll come back to them when you’re ready to spend money. More and more most people will just go on to the next freebie. However – free or .99 is a legal decision when made by the owner/author.

What really frosts me is the blatant way in which our works are simply taken. “If it’s on the internet it has to be free” is something we hear a lot. Pirate sites simply scoop in books and give them away to anyone. To my mind that’s theft, but apparently beyond a feeble ‘that shouldn’t be’ our legal agencies aren’t doing much of anything to stop it.

Amazon itself is fostering a kind of theft – the returns scam. A customer will buy a book, read it, then return it for full credit, which is then subtracted from your earnings. Now I’ve returned a book I’ve bought – when I find out it isn’t the book I thought it was, or my sometimes unreliable and arthritic hands click when I don’t mean them to, or some other legitimate reason, but almost always within the space of twenty-four hours, and not very often – like less than once a year. However, some people brag that they get the books, read them and return them – sometimes as many as four or five a week! I know Amazon is proud of its commitment to customer service, but surely they should be able to see that this is a form of theft, not only from us but from them! Surely they keep some kinds of record about who returns what and when…

And we won’t even go into the subject of plagiarism, where someone gets a book, sometimes does a search-and-replace on names and towns (and sometimes not!) then publishes the book as their own creation. Even when such an egregious crime is exposed Amazon does nothing about giving just recompense to the actual author. The plagiarist walks away with the unjustly ‘earned’ money.

Even though it doesn’t seem possible, it does get worse. A bunch of crooks on eBay are selling multi-book collections – sometimes numbering in the thousands – to which they have no right. Worse, they are also selling RE-SALE rights, telling their customers that they not only have the rights to these books, that they can sell them the rights to re-sell them themselves. Everyone makes money – except the creator of the books. After all, what do we matter? All we did was write them… To add insult to injury, in spite of being told many times about this situation, eBay has done nothing about it.

There’s another scheme out there that seems a little bit shady to me, but it is legal. The site – and there are many of them –  advertises that they have all kinds of books, but when you click on a book, it takes you to the Amazon page, where you can purchase the book. It’s an affiliate scheme, where the site gets a few pennies for every book sold because the purchaser came through their link. It’s true they’re using your book to earn money without your permission, but it is a legal purchase and the author does get what they’re due. That alone makes it acceptable.

However – as loath as I am to support crime, there is a bright spot on the horizon. There are sites that claim to have just about any book in the world for free, but to access them the freebie hunter (i.e., the thief) has to give them his credit card number in order to browse, or to pay for a membership, or to make some token payment like a dime a book, or whatever. The good thing is that the site has no books – it either uses the freebie hunter’s visit to plant ad/malware/viri on his computer or it’s just a plain old phishing scam that rips off his credit card number. The thief looking for free books thus gets stolen from. Golly, karma is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

So it’s not enough that we have to research and write the books, we must also be our own policemen, sending out DMCAs, which are more often than not ignored, and be constantly alert against the theft of our books. Some authors have just given up, saying that it takes too much time and the people who steal books aren’t going to buy them anyway, but that sends out the signal that theft is okay, and that offends my sense of what is right. I don’t know what the solution is, other than our government and legal agencies stepping up to the plate and actually doing something about such blatant theft, but that ain’t a-gonna happen. Anybody got any ideas?

Pirates, Shares and Thieves, or It’s Only an Ebook

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

Not too long ago I and some other writers were told about the differences between piracy, filesharing and theft. I’m sure there are true and legal distinctions, but as far as I am concerned, taking/using/sharing/profiting from the work of another without compensation to the owner is stealing, no matter what kind of label or fancy definition is put on it.

Simply, as I understand it, a pirate is one who takes a digital copy of a book and puts it up on the web for free. Presumably they get their money from the advertising that invariably proliferates on the site. A fairly new wrinkle in this form of theft is that on some sites there are no books actually involved – the site is a ‘phishing’ site preying on the something-for-nothing crowd by getting their information (credit card and otherwise). I find this vaguely pleasurable – a kind of instant karma. Gotta love it!

File-sharers are just that. They get a digital book, then put it up for free on what are called torrent sites where anyone can download. Sometimes there are subscription fees which must be paid for access to the site – in other words, the reader has to pay money to be able to steal. The torrents are notoriously unresponsive to writer complaints, because they say as there are no books stored on their servers there is nothing they can do – the exchanges of books are done between individuals and the individual must be contacted directly. Of course, they have a policy not to release the names or addresses of the people who post on them.

When cornered, file-sharers claim they have done nothing wrong; people have always shared books. There are used bookstores. There are libraries. People pass on paper books to others once they’ve read them. This sounds like a reasonable excuse – until one realizes that paper books have a built-in limitation. Books get old and decay or even disintegrate. There are only a certain number of times they can be read. By contrast, a digital file can be copied almost ad infinitum with little or no loss of clarity.

Thieves are in it for the money only. They sell copies of stolen books for enticingly low prices. A new and distressing facet of this practice is that some writers are seeing digital copies of some of their older books being sold – books that were never released in electronic format. Apparently some enterprising scofflaws are finding early paper books by popular writers, scanning them and selling them as e-books.

Need I say that the authors, the creators of these books, receive nothing out of all this?

(Also, I hasten to say that none of my vitriol is aimed at those writers who put one of their own books up for free as a promotion on a legitimate sales venue or on their own website. Offering a book for free is a popular gimmick by which some writers swear, and I have no problem with it as long as it is the writer him/herself who does it. Their book, their choice.)

DRM (Digital Retail Management, I believe) was once believed to be the Great Hope against theft. What a joke! All it does is anger legitimate purchasers who have more than one type of device, and generally it can be removed by a smart ten year old in a couple of minutes.

Every few days on a writers’ e-list someone will post that they just found their books on such-and-such a site. Others go to look and, more often than not, their books are there too. There’s a flurry of DMCA notices (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)  and copyright infringement protests, outraged reports to publishers’ legal departments and – if the writer is lucky – the books come down. For a while. They seldom stay down. Some writers I know keep lists of sites and check them every week or so for violations.

There are those writers who say that taking the time to go after thieves is counterproductive, that it’s a form of free advertising, that people who steal books would never buy one anyway, so there’s no loss involved. They have the right to believe such things, but I disagree with every instance. Taking something without authorization and getting some form of gain from it without recompense to the owner/creator is theft, pure and simple, and theft should not be tolerated.

Yes, I am a hardnose. I believe in the law.

Unfortunately, those who are supposed to enforce the laws don’t seem to care about us ‘It’s only an ebook’ is a phrase I’ve heard often. Only an ebook? Even if it were just a single ebook – which it never is – don’t these people care about principles? Imagine how the author who has labored months, perhaps years, to create that book, who has spent years learning her craft, feels when she learns (as happened to a friend of mine) that there have been 40,000 stolen downloads – 40,000 copies of her book stolen and she hasn’t received and won’t get a penny for her work.

When digital theft is discovered, unless the author has a powerful and responsive publisher with a big legal department, most if not all policing falls on her. She must first find if the site has a copyright infringement contact – or any kind of contact information at all. Then she must send a DMCA notice. Sometimes sites will have their own take-down forms that are so Byzantinely complex they are almost unusable. Sometimes the sites are offshore (China and Russia are two of the biggest offenders) and they just ignore everything. If things get too hot for the site, if there are too many take-down requests or if their ISP usage is threatened, many sites just close their doors and open up a couple of days later under another name and URL. The whole process of getting them shut down is rather like an obscene electronic version of whack-a-mole.

A good analogy would be someone stealing a loaf of bread from a grocery store and the police saying ‘hey, it’s only a loaf of bread – we can’t be bothered.’ Well, if Thief A got away with it, what if the rest of the alphabet gang think they can get away with it too? Pretty soon there’s a mass assault by thieves on loaf after loaf of bread, and the poor grocer is expected to take care of it himself – catch the thieves and, since the law is disinterested in punishing them, try to keep the thief from taking another loaf and then another on a regular basis.

It’s alarming that so many people regard anything on the internet as fair game. ‘Information should be free,’ they cry. Well, a book can be informative, but it is not information. It is a commodity, created through the work and sweat of an author, and stealing it is no different from carrying away a paperback from a brick and mortar store without paying. Digital is just a delivery system, not a license to steal.

What alarms me most, however, is the entitlement mentality of  some thieves. ‘It’s the writers’ own fault,’ one young man in a chat room cried indignantly. ‘I’d buy their books if they weren’t priced so high. My appetite for entertainment is so great that I simply can’t afford to buy everything I want.’

Wonder what happens when he gets hungry? Does he go into the grocery and take what he wants based on such startling illogic? Along more basic lines, has he never heard of living within his means? Nor, apparently, does he believe that the owner/creator has a right to charge what she wants for her work. The author and the marketplace should set the price – not the unbridled greed of some consumers.

Writers write books for any number of reasons – a message, a compulsion, a calling – but most of us work at writing like we work at day jobs. It is a profession, and one for which the author, like any other professional, should be compensated. The ideas of writing for no other reason than the sheer love of it, for the satisfaction of knowing people are reading and enjoying our words, that it is an intrinsic part of our profession for an artist to starve in a garret are pretty ridiculous. Writing is a profession, and professionals deserve to be paid for their work, not to have their works stolen without punishment.

One thing that these thieves have never realized – or do not want to accept – is that for most writers, for the good writers, for the popular writers, writing is a business, and that the purpose of a business is to make money in exchange for their work. Most professional writers don’t write for fame, or adulation or the knowledge that their words are being read by thousands of people. Those are nice perks, but they’re not the main reason. Writers write for money. It’s a job.

I have heard from many, many writers that if they can no longer make a decent return for their work, they won’t quit writing – they’ll just quit publishing. ‘I can always write for my own enjoyment. There are always other outlets for my writing; I don’t have to publish and watch my work being stolen. People don’t value what they don’t pay for.’ I’ve heard variants on all of these statements from more writers than you can count.

I wonder what will happen when theft is so overwhelming that the professional writers stop writing, leaving a vacuum filled with nothing but bad writers and wannabes. Will the thieves blame themselves? Of course not. ‘It’s only an ebook,’ as one thief said. ‘Writers are rich and I’m not. They should be glad people are reading their books. They’ll never miss just one ebook.’

Oh, yeah. And I’m so not going to get into those lower-than-the-low scum who copy a writer’s book, change a couple of names (maybe!) and then republish under their own name as their own work. My blood pressure wouldn’t stand it.

So what can be done about this, short of rewiring the brain of every ebook-stealing thief? The only thing I know is to keep after them. Complain. Even if the thieves are in a foreign country, usually the money passes through an American credit card or on-line payment company. Complain. Their sites are usually hosted by an ISP in this country. Complain. Send DMCAs. Complain. Report the offenders to the cybercrimes division of the FBI and any other law enforcement agency that might be appropriate. Complain. Sometimes you can find who owns the theft site (and be prepared for some surprises!) through Whois.com and other such sites. Complain. If you have a publisher, even a small one, send all the information, including specific URLs to them. Complain. Hire companies whose job it is to track down such theft and have them send the notices for you. Speak out!

Yes, writers shouldn’t have to do this. Writers should be writing books, not being forced into spending their time chasing thieves, but if we don’t do it, it won’t get done and the problem will only grow. This is a problem that affects everyone who wants to write or likes to read, and right now it seems the solution is in our hands.