The question of the hour among those of us who write and self-publish fiction is what to do about piracy… if anything. Here’s a typically impassioned statement on the matter:
Do not pirate books. Respect the work of the people who spend hundreds to thousands of hours writing, refining, rethinking, and revising their work—and especially those trying to create something different. pic.twitter.com/ta5rpf4VLg
— DanNeo S.S. ✮ 𓂃🖊 (@DanNEO_SS) July 8, 2026
Piracy is indeed dismissive of the author’s work and rights. But there are other perspectives, chief among them this one:
And it is not to be fliply dismissed.
When I started writing fiction, I had a spread of reasons, including the need to know whether I could do it. But paramount among those reasons was this one: I had stories to tell that I felt deserved an audience. Whether I could tell them effectively, affectingly, was to be determined.
Now, a story worthy of adults’ attention must involve things adults care about. Were the stories in my head of that sort, or were they inane juvenilia fit only for children? (Let’s leave out that a lot of them have adult characters doing adult things.) There was only one way to know: I had to write them and find an audience for them.
In my review of Martin McPhillips’s brilliant first novel Corpse in Armor, I wrote:
Many fiction writers claim to write for the sheer pleasure of it. Some claim they only write for the revenue – "to buy groceries," as the late Robert A. Heinlein put it. But all of us, without exception, write to be read. Anyone who claims otherwise deserves no more of your time.
And so it is. Yet the tension between wanting one’s book to be read – or at least, wanting to believe that one’s book is being read – and the desire for a tangible return from all the effort that went into it can be agonizing.
I have no idea how other writers feel. Why do I write? See previous answer. Why do they write? You’d have to ask them. I haven’t done much of that. But I’d bet heavily that it does a lot for them when a reader writes to thank them for their books. It’s more or less what I live for.
What’s noxious is when other people manage to profit from the writer’s efforts. I don’t know how many book pirates manage to do that. I doubt there are many; if we indies can’t pull it off, why would anyone else be able to manage it? Yet the problem is not illusory; piracy is rife.
Can anyone think of a way to poll book pirates for their motivations? Has anyone ever buttonholed a book pirate and tortured an answer out of him? If any of my Gentle Readers can think of a way, please let me have it! After all, there might be a book in it.
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