The Wizard Tim 🥧

Most authors engage with book piracy solely by writing long rants about their moral rights. That's all fine, say what you want, but in the real world, we have to deal with what is, not what should be. And one of the ways that we do that is to learn from the lesson of Steam. Piracy is not always motivated by the desire to enjoy your work while saving a few bucks. It's about resistance to some part of the experience. The novel in question is "Theft of Fire", my first. I'm almost done with the second, and I have no doubt that the day after it hits Amazon, it will hit the torrent sites. Some people will go there because they just don't like spending money, and they don't care if I can afford to finish the series. But others will do the same because the entire publishing industry stopped giving a crap what enjoy reading, 25 years ago, and they are simply tired of being rugpulled. Here's how authoring actually works, not fifty years ago, not ten years ago, but right now today. You are not in the bookselling business. You are in the audience business. You start your career in front of an entire world that doesn't know who you are, doesn't trust you with their time and attention, and doesn't want to pay you anything. Your job is to carve out a collection of people who DO know you, DO trust you, and WILL pay you. That is your audience. How much you get paid, whether you can go full time, and whether you become wealthy, depends entirely on the size and engagement of that audience. Books are just one of the ways they pay you. If you wanna be successful, you better think of others. But first you have to build that recognition and trust. The reason that the most skilled book-writers and story-tellers don't make the best payouts is because the perfect story does not automatically build a brand. It's only one part of a bigger game. So, yes, some people are going to steal your work and not pay you. Others are going to pay you twice. Others will pay you lots more than that for any piece of swag you can dream up to sell. Because they like you and what you do. I won't argue that IP theft isn't wrong. That's not the point. The point is that there is something better to do with your efforts than fuss about it, and that is figure out ways to monetize, build your brand, and develop your relationship with your audience. This may seem hard and unfair to authors who just want to write books, throw them over the wall to a publishing house, then go back to the keyboard. But this is the world we live in. Since publishing houses no longer understand that what they really are is investors, you have to be the investor. You have be the entrepreneur, and take responsibility for all aspects of your business. You can't just collect the gold. You have to figure out where it's buried.