“[Fighting piracy is] becoming a full time job. There’s literally scores of sites containing pirated copies of my ebooks, and every time I get a DMCA notice served on one another springs up. It’s getting to the point where it’s not worth the effort.” — William Meikle, best selling horror writer.
Publishers never sold writing. They sold books. Atoms, not electrons — physical items — were their stock-in-trade. Then came digital. eBooks are not physical. This erodes the whole notion of controlling intellectual property. Used to be one controlled the physical delivery system. No longer needing one, writing became so easy to steal that intellectual property itself is going away, eaten by greedy corporations and criminal parasites such as plagiarism and pirating.
What can be done?
One suggestion is: Leapfrog from it. Use the uncontrollable spread of your work to branch your brand out into merch and other value-added objects. Mugs, hats, tee shirts, other bric-a-brac. It’s chintzy and sad but it’s about the only way we writers and artists are going to be able to eke a living as the concept of intellectual property drains away in a society universally corrupted by greed and money-lust. Mammon wins when it comes to the human condition. Since it’s the physical unit you profit from, that’s where to go to try to earn any kind of profit from your art.
The corporate scum and criminal parasites outright steal anything digital or conceptual. They also control distribution channels, so you’ll have to do it direct somehow. Zazzle is the most established of such platforms but many do it from home, too. Depends on your support system.
Any other concrete ideas will be entertained gladly, and if you’re a writer or artist, I’m with you, and you have my deepest condolences.
