Steal My Book?
Contributor
Written by
Contributor
Written by
Should I let you steal my work? More and more, that’s a question most writers will face.
Take a writer who said “Yes” with astounding results ...
In 1999, the agent for Brazilian author Paulo Coelho returned from Russia with bad news. Coehlho's novel “The Alchemist” had sold fewer than 3,000 copies and the publisher had decided to discontinue publication.
A second Russian language publisher was found but the republication was held up by supply problems.
Then Coelho found a pirate edition of the Russian translation on the internet.
He posted the pirated translation on his web site, where anyone could download it without paying.
At the end of 2000, his publisher had sold 10,000 copies, a year later 100,000; by 2002, 1 million Russian language copies had been sold.
Coelho was excited by the discovery that the internet posting helped to lure readers into buying the physical book. So he decided to do the same with his other books. But what about translations to which he did not have the rights?
His solution: Gather all the links to illegal file-share sites and create the Pirate Coelho Web site.
It was a hit. By 2007, a million unique visitors a month were visiting the site.
If you go to the site today, Coelho rather disarmingly advises that if you download a book and like it, “I would suggest you buy the book, so we can tell the industry that sharing content is not life threatening to the book business.” (I’ve cleaned up his English.)
Coelho’s worldwide print sales for all his books had reached 100 million copies in 2007. "Once we did the Pirate Coelho there was a significant boost," he says.
“We do not write because we want to; we write because we must,” Somerset Maugham once said. Surely that must explain the proliferation of words by authors writing their hearts out for free on blogs and websites, including this one. (And maybe all the unpaid contributors to Wikipedia.)
Coehlo admits he’s an example of Maugham’s maxim. “If someone were to offer me the choice of getting paid $3 million to write a book for three readers or $3 to write a book for 3 million readers, I would definitely do the latter,” he wrote in the International Herald Tribune Magazine Dec. 17.
Is he right when he says most writers would do the same?
Perhaps so. But maybe it’s my family’s labor union heritage that makes me wonder if this is fair to the workers, in this case writers like myself.
Apparently other writers who once lauded the “content wants to be free” line are having second thought as well.
New York Times columnist John Tierney is one of the enthusiasts who praised the spirit of digital collaboration back in the 1990s. “[I]it did not occur to me that the Web’s ‘gift culture,’ as anthropologists called it, could turn into a mandatory potlatch for so many professions—including my own,” he recently wrote.
In a new book, “You are not a Gadget,” computer scientist and musician Jaron Lanier is another enthusiast thinking twice. He once lauded the Internet’s potential to allow artists, writers and scientists around the world to share their work instantly.
In that vein, I’m admiring of “citizen journalists” like the anonymous Iranian who recently won a Polk journalism award. He uploaded the video of a female student killed during the Iranian protests last June, sending it around the world. (The video was captured by an anonymous bystander, and sent by an Iranian doctor with an email message “please let the world know,” then uploaded by the anonymous Iranian in the Netherlands.)
I’m less worried than former Times journalist John Darnton that this kind of bystander activity could somehow undermine the professionalism of journalism.
Without the brave young Burmese video reporters who risked their lives to film the government’s violent repression of the monk-led protests in 2007 and send their videos via internet overseas, the rest of the world would never have known what was happening. As the movie “Burma VJ” movingly tells it, these young Burmese working with hidden cameras were motivated by a desire for political change, not professional compensation.
But Lanier argues the end result of all this instantaneous, free sharing has been a destructive new social contract for the rest of us.
“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind… Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
On Amazon. com, the author of the customer review of Lanier’s book rated “most helpful” cites himself as an ironic example: Even his unpaid commentary is probably eyed by Amazon as yet another way to sell books!
No one has yet figured out how to charge for most of this activity.
To some extent today’s writers are no different from the legendary starving artist in the garret, driven to express her personal artistic vision even if she’s never rewarded monetarily.
When faced with the dwindling number of places willing to pay me to publish my stuff, simply putting my thoughts on the web without sifting them through an editor sometimes seems like a refreshing alternative—as I’m doing right now with this column.
Anyway, technofreaks often say that charging for digital content is a hopeless cause because hackers can get at just about anything. But as Lanier notes in his book, society doesn’t condone break-ins to homes and cars just because locks can easily be broken. The “free-open-culture ideology” is often used to cover the guilt of someone downloading music without paying for it, he argues-- though I doubt there’s much guilt there.
The result is much like a mob of looters, says Tierney. “When the majority of people feel entitled to someone else’s property, who’s going to stand in their way?”
I would add that writers are often saying, “Be my guest.”Share
part of the SparkPoint Studio Family
When I decided recently to offer my novel, On the Way to Somewhere Else, as a free download on my web site, www.DonnaLawrenceWriter.com/ontheway, I did it because the current wisdom seems to be that you need to give something away to get people to pay attention. You have to have a platform to convince agents and publishers to people will want to read your book. I have been paid many times for my writing--a nonfiction book that is now in its third printing, more than 300 articles--but a novel is different. As a writer, I'm not used to trying to get attention. When I was doing publicity for my nonfiction book, my publisher set it up, so this does feel different. But I am happy that people are reading my novel! And the goal is still to have it published for pay!
Lookee here, from Reality Hunger by David Shields:
"Lil Wayne, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead are hugely popular artists who recently circumvented the music business establishment by giving their music directly to their audience for free on the Web. The middle man has been cut out; listeners get a behind-the-scenes peek at work in progress. Lil Wayne can put out whatever he pleases, whenever he pleases, and the fan gets access to far more material than a standard release would provide. For all three of these acts, sales went up after they had first given away some, if not all, of the new release." (Emphasis mine.)
hmmm, I had work stolen by a reputable zine when I was only 11. I cried and fussed to my father who wisely said: they like your work enough to steal it. You must have talent.
So when we are copied, we can choose how we view it I guess. I am happy when someone takes a poem of mine and uses it in the classroom, or posts it on his/her wall or comments on it with"authority," but... if i found pirated copies of my books out there, well I might not be so pleased.
@Sarah, Good title for an interesting post that triggers equally interesting comments.
@Gwyn Stephen King has been offering free content of new books on his site. Clearly he has more than a clue about marketing.
@Ginster, Thanks for collecting the different takes on the Helene Hegemann example/case. A 17-year-old who gets away with plagiarism because she's using somebody else's text in another context? That's a matter of eduction, no? A writer's fear that text that's readily available Online can be appropriated by others without credit is real. Ultstein Verlag found a good solution, showing the "borrowed" text. I sure hope Airen is experiencing the benefits.
@Christina, Like you, I wonder about Coelho's fame and the success of his marketing plan as well.
@dangerous old woman Thanks much for heads up re: David Shields. Incidentally the Los Angeles Times published a book review of Reality Hunger in today's paper.
L.A.T.: "Plots are for dead people," he writes. And: "[T]he novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps." Fiction, with its emphasis on plot and narrative, has failed its readers."
The "scraps" he mentioned are of his own writing I take it though, not "borrowed" from another writer, as was by Helene Hegemann.
@Gabrielle, Great to hear from you. Reading about your p.o.v. as acquiring agent (?) is invaluable to all new writers.
Hey you all, I only joined SW a few days ago, and it's contributions such as yours that make me happy to be part of this community. Here's to doing the write thing!
I think a good many of writers giving away their work are content just to have their say, knowing that their words will be read.
Jeri
Very thought-provoking. Thank you, Sarah!
Great post! I agree with Jenne'. Much to ponder. I wonder if a main reason why Coelho was successful "giving" his stuff away was that he was an already well-established author?
Granted my experience in business and marketing is nil, and perhaps I'm still idealistic, but I think it's important that writers, or any artist creating great art, should be paid accordingly. Like what Hollye said, handing out freebies is a great way to promote yourself. But hopefully there's some way society can pay you so your art can be your living too.
I am so glad that Coelho had the courage to pursue this and find his audience. Admittedly writing can be a labor of love, but good writers deserves the dignity that pay would give them. Blogs pay an average of $20 per submission, if they pay anything. No one can make a living on that.
I'm not good with business or marketing, so I have no solutions to offer, but I honor all who are searching.
Meanwhile I continue to offer Writer Advice, www.writeradvice.com, as a service to writers. It's thrilling to be able to publish writers for the first time and to have last year's contest winners pick those who will win this year. Thrilling. Not lucrative. At least I get to be my own boss.
David Sheilds (probably best known for his book Enough About You) has another book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto I think would be of great interest to anyone worrying about this topic. He thinks that copyright is doomed and backs his opinion up with good reasoning, altho reasoning alone of course does not prove his point. Only time will do that.
My own take on this: In addition to writing, I am a nature photographer, and I'm pretty good at it. I do macro photography to illustrate the astonishing beauty most of us miss by not looking closely. I would like to sell my photographs but that ambition didn't last long once I realized that (1) people who don't care about getting paid, apparently making their living at something else, post astonishingly beautiful photographs on the Web to be copied for free and (2) even copyrighted photographs are easy to steal, and are stolen. We have a whole generation of people (perhaps two generations) who think that everything should be free (I was there when this idea took root in the Sixties) and who also think it's OK to steal and do so blithely, without a twinge of conscience.
And most of us regularly receive emails from friends who send to their entire email list with content that is entertaining or enlightening, and authors are rarely credited. And so on.
I tend to think Sheilds may be right. He also thinks literary forms are changing, are already changing and gives examples, and I tend to agree on this, too, because we have hordes of people growing up with short attention spans because of TV and the Net. Whether you agree with Sheilds or not, he knows his stuff and I am learning a lot of things I wouldn't be aware of otherwise. I highly recommend this book. Even if you are outraged by his ideas, I think writers need to be aware of these ideas and the trends he documents.
Provocative. There's got to be a hybrid model in the future as I heard some folks at YouTube, Facebook and the head of Stanford Journalism School discuss. Citizen journalism +platforming +community building (kinda open source), but still needing legacy journalists and traditional writers to give us context and expertise.
It is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, when I am looking to publish writers' works, in the old days I had to search for works in the library or Strand Bookstore (NYC). As much as I love books, it is far easier for me to look up a writer and review their work on the internet (a poem or an excerpt of a book). I will eventually purchase their work (either their book or their work included in an anthology), but accessibility that the web provides in discovering new works is far easier and in my case, gives me the instant results I need to go forward in compiling an issue. By the way, when I publish, contracts are signed that protects the writers' rights and their compensation, but I know there are people out there that do not operate in the same vein. This is why it is important for writers to occasionally google their name and find out if their work has been hijacked. Like I said before, it is a double-edged sword.
I have to agree with Coelho. In addition to writing, I've made my living as a singer, and the same thing has been happening in the music industry. The best way to get people hooked on your music is to give away free samples, just like a bakery. If they like it, they'll gladly pay for more.
Good article. Thanks for posting.