As a lot of you know, I have been the victim of epiracy. Both my books have been shared on Sharetermpapers.com and no matter how many angry emails I send, they wont take them down. I was scrolling throught my news feed today when I saw that Rachel Vincent wrote a very honest article concering this fact. I dont follow Rachel, or read her books, I saw this from one of my frieds, and I wanted to share it with everyone.

Oh, the arguments to justify epiracy are old, and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard them all. Here are the most common, followed by the reasons they are total BS:

-I can’t afford to buy new books.

Yeah. I couldn’t either a few years ago. Know what I did? I went to the library and I borrowed books from friends. (Which is different than making a COPY of a book for a friend.) I’ve been there. I understand. But if you couldn’t afford to buy a DVD, would you take one from the store?

-The book isn’t out yet legally in my country.

I’m *truly* sorry. That sucks. But it happens, and trust me when I say that NO ONE is more frustrated about that than the author, who WANTS her books to be available everywhere. But when they aren’t available in your country, the right thing to do is wait for them to come out there legally, if you can’t order one online or have someone else ship a legal copy to you. That’s what I have to do for many things I can’t get in the US. Including Tim Tams and some books that get published in the UK first. I wait.

-I bought the print copy, so I should get the ecopy for free.

Really? I bought a blue shirt, so I should get the red one for free, right? Um…no. Not unless it’s buy-one-get-one, or the publisher is giving away free (legal) downloads. Because those are two different products, which each have their own costs to produce and make available.

-But ebooks are overpriced, so no one’s getting hurt if I download one occasionally.

For the first part of that…maybe. Some ebooks probably are overpriced. And you know what? The more they’re stolen, the higher that price will be, because SOMEONE has to pay for the labor and production that go into even an ebook. But even if all ebooks *were* overpriced, so what? Clothes are overpriced. Especially jeans, IMO. Do you steal jeans because they’re overpriced?

For the second part, you could NOT BE MORE WRONG. *Everyone* is hurt by epiracy. Authors sales dip, so publishers stop publishing them. Publishers lose money, so they have to charge higher prices. Consumers have to pay higher prices (unless they steal books, which started this whole mess in the first place) and they lose variety (because publishers will only be able to publish “sure things”) and readers lose many of their favorite series (because they were canceled due to low sales, because people stole them instead of buying them).

How how right she is. Not only has my sells went down, but I see people giving me bad reviews for unediting material because they downloaded my book from a crappy source. It isnt fair to us authors. I understand that the books can be outrageously priced, but I try to be fair with my eBooks. Why should people get them for free? I worked hard on these books, I paid people to edit them, I think that asking for a price for my books is fair. I thank Rachel Vincent for posting this. I can’t get my words out like this. All I want to do is cuss and scream and cry, but I am proud of this woman because she is standing up for all us authors. So way to go Rachel. I admire you.