Piracy Stabs Me in the Pocketbook

You may remember my blog earlier this summer about ebook pirates. This week, the proverbial crapola hit the fan. I received my royalty statement for the second quarter of 2009. My third book, the one appearing on all those pirate sites, had many fewer sales than the first two books in the series.

The first two books, The Greater Good and The Lesser Evil, held steady with downloads and had a minor upswing in print sales. But that third book, A Ruthless Good, had not near the download sales as the first two books did in the same time period.

I'll blame a little bit of the drop in sales on my cover. The cover misleads one into thinking A Ruthless Good is an erotic romance when it's actually only a sensual level of heat like the first two books and the forthcoming fourth book, One Good Woman. But I truly believe it was the durn pirates that blasted my sales to the bottom of the financial sea.

What should I do? I'm going to ramp up my promotion and try to find those honest readers who believe in paying for merchandize instead of stealing it. I'm working on a plan right now so stay tuned.

Real Pirates Aren't Cool

First you might think of the bandits preying on ships of all sorts off the cost of Africa, but they're not the ones I'm speaking about. Though I admit, I don't understand why those ships don't mount some guns on their vessels. Those pirates are usually in some really small speed boats. It's not like they're in armored battle ships.
But back to my point. Yesterday I discovered all three of my books from NCP were available for download from a pirate site. Those SOBs were giving my books away right beside free downloads of The Dark Night and every other movie recently released on DVD. And considering A Ruthless Good has only been for sale for a few weeks, it was fast and evil work.
I've sympathized with other authors when their books appeared on pirate sites, but mine have never been there before. At least I didn't catch it if they were. It's so infuriating. I couldn't sleep last night for my fuming and today I took it out on my poor students at school.
Finally one of my colleagues pointed out the upside. If my books haven't been on a pirate site before and they are now, should I be complimented that I'm finally popular enough to make it worth their while to steal from me? Is that really reaching for the silver lining?
I think the more popular ebooks become, the more widespread the pirating of novels will become. Just as it's impossible to protect the illegal sales of video and music, I don't believe there's any technological answer to protection for authors. In the end, we can only trust the honesty of our customers to purchase our books through honest means.