Piracy or Publicity?

What are writers to think of this article about the increasing practice of pirating books on the net? Do we all start scouring the web-waves for examples of our books being hi-jacked by those who don’t want to pay, or should we, as Cory Doctorow says at the end of the article, be thankful for the publicity it gives our work?

I had a discussion with Son Number 1, better known to readers of this blog as the Ultimate Frisbee Freak, the other day about the Pirate Bay trial where various Swedish e-facilitators were found guilty of copyright theft/infringement. His opinion was that a) it put the word about bands, films and games ‘out there’, b) that many of the people downloading stuff from the site were probably kids who couldn’t afford to pay for the stuff legitimately and represented an untapped audience that would grow up to – possibly – become paying fans, c) that fans will always want the real thing (the CD, the DVD) partly because d) the ripped off copies are usually sub-standard for various technical reasons.

I don’t know what to think. (A state of affairs I find increasingly common. I thought one was supposed to get more dogmatic with age, not less?) For published authors, few of us are making enough money not to care that some people – who might otherwise buy our book – are downloading it free simply because they can. Yes, yes, I know that our primary reason for writing is that people will read our books and, clearly, that is what is happening with the pirated copies and yet… having had the validation of a publishing contract, we also now feel that, as well as wanting people to read our books, we’d quite like people to actually shell out money for them. We’ve put in the hours, our publishers have put in the dosh, it seems unfair that some people should benefit, gratis, from these investments.

But then there’s point a) above. We all – apart from those authors who are sure-fire big sellers from the off – want to be ‘word of mouth’ successes. Well, once the initial burst of publicity is over, maybe the best kind of word of mouth now has an e-component? Maybe where we once relied on recommendations passing from mouth to ear, we now need to see free copies being downloaded and a ‘buzz’ created on the forum or comments trail of many websites. Because if c) above is correct then that will translate into actual, hard-copy sales.

What do you think?

Publishing and publicity

Simon and Tim over at the Big Green Bookshop blog have had a great idea – they’re auctioning BGB merchandise on ebay. Brilliant publicity idea and the cachet of having one of those little badges amongst the BGB cognoscenti is going to be awesome. OK, maybe not awesome because I’m not sure how many cognoscenti there are and whether we will ever all get together in a bunch (shop launch party anyone?). But anyway, the prospect of having badges which say ‘So Many Books, So Little Time, Books Not Bombs and Muggle, Wizard (I am, after all, an immense HP fan) was too much to bear. So I’ve bid for them. That reminds me, I really should check my email to see whether/by how much I’ve been outbid...

Five minutes later: OK, so somebody seriously wants So Many Books, So Little Time. Every time I up my bid, their maximum trumps it. Oh well, now I’m pinning my hopes on the others. It would have been nice to take a photo of me wearing SMBSLT next to the tottering to be read pile, but hey ho ebay could take over your life if you let it. (As could reading other people’s blogs, btw…)

Anyway, the reason I brought up this mega badge auction is publicity. It’s always much on the minds of recently-published authors, especially those who are not household names and, as somebody recently remarked in their blog (sorry, whoever it was, I didn’t make a note of it, but cheers for the observation anyway) authors these days need two entirely different personae – one reclusive, creative and bloody-minded one (my words not the poorly-identified blogger’s) to do the writing and another bouncy, hello-look-at-me one to sell the books.
And, though I may just be speaking for myself here, I get the impression that most writers are not look-at-me types. If we were we wouldn’t be content to spend day after day sitting with only a laptop/pad of paper and a pen for company.

In this context, I'm reminded of the telly programme about Joanna Rowling which was on over Christmas. Am I the only one who thought how uneasy she looked as she turned up to the premier of one of the Harry Potter films (I assume it was last summer’s The Order of the Phoenix) in comparison with the huge-smiled, sleekly dressed stars of the show who were almost visibly purring at all the attention? It wasn’t that JKR didn’t look the part – she looked fab – she just also looked as if she’d like to be pretty much anywhere else on the planet at that precise moment.

So how do we who do not have premiers to attend do the publicity thing? I guess we all secretly hope that we won’t have to, that we slide the book out there into the public domain and, in a very short time indeed, without obvious effort or planning it will be the holy grail of publishing, a word-of-mouth success. Hmmm. Well how many books do you know that that is true of? Apart from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone which, I gather from the word on the streets and no research whatsoever, Bloomsbury did not overly hype on first publication. Like, they didn’t hype it at all. (Please feel free to put me right on this if you are in the know…)

Blogs are publicity. I’m sure all of us who are writers secretly hope that people will be so captivated by the engaging personality which comes over from our witterings, so impressed by the erudition of our occasional forays into criticism, so generally impressed by our over-all spiffingness that they will hit the bookshops in droves and create a demand like a tidal wave for our books. And it may. But let’s not all hold our collective breath because that would a) be bad for our capillaries and b) have no effect whatever on sales.

My sister-in-law, wonderful woman, who read Testament in manuscript and loved it so much she wrote me a letter telling me why, suggested that we should all wear t-shirts on launch night (and beyond) saying ‘I am a Tobyite’ (this will only make sense to you if you have read the book, or at least read the stuff about Testament on my website) and, as one of the themes of Testament is belonging to a community, I guess that kind of t-shirt declaration might work. I just didn’t quite have the bottle to carry it off.

How about the rest of you writers out there? Do you think about publicity, or do you leave it to your publisher’s marketing department? Have you come up with any whizzo ideas for getting your book noticed?

Or shall I just get some badges done?

PS - just found the reference to the split author thing it's here at notes from the slushpile.