Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Buy some books, part 2!

And now a post from author Kimberly Pauley.   Kim wrote the fantastic books Sucks to Be Me and Still Sucks To Be Me.

Her latest post is about how you can help authors and keep their books in the stories.
http://www.kimberlypauley.com/2011/01/12/so-how-to-help-your-favorite-author/

This comes from a post she made a bit earlier about how her second book had been illegally downloaded more than it actually sold.
http://www.kimberlypauley.com/2011/01/12/and-furthermore-why-illegal-downloads-suck-i-e-status-of-a-third-mina-book/

This point of view is repeated here as well, http://anywherebeyond.livejournal.com/342581.html.

I totally understand this.  Ghosts of Albion is by no means a cash cow for me.  I don't need to rely on payments of it in order to make my bills.  Kim and Saundra Mitchell though do, or least need the money from their books more than I need the money from Ghosts.  Yet, I still see Ghosts of Albion on file share site EVERYDAY.  I get Google Alerts every single day letting me know that there is a way to get a Ghosts' PDF without paying a dime.

No offense people, but large sums of money or not, I worked my ass off on that book.  I'd like to get paid for the work I did.

Kim mentions that this all puts the future of the 3rd Mina Hamilton book in jeopardy.  This really sucks.  I like Kim's books.  But if people are getting her books from other means then there is less incentive for publishers to want to pay for books to get written.

I think this is worse in the RPG community to be honest.  And what is shocking to me the sense of entitlement that some gamers seem to have that they use to justify the theft of someone else's work.  But I am not going to get into that now.

Instead I want to remind people that if you like the work of an author, buy their product.  If you can't ask your library to buy it and then write reviews.

I love PDFs, but I also like to see people doing what they love and if authors can't get paid then they run the risk of not being able to do what they love to do and we run the risk of not being able to read these books.

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