Popular YA author experiments with anti-piracy technique and discovers how much piracy is affecting her sales: I'm not saying it's scientifically conclusive, but it makes sense. Now, Maggie is clearly earning a pretty good living from her books, but she deserves to - she's got a great YA voice and her books are polished and effective. And regardless of how much she's making, people don't have the right to take her work without her consent. Grrrrrr.
It's an interesting read and I applaud her ingenuity but I can't help wondering if her big problem with the previous book was more connected to pre-release piracy than piracy per-se? Yes, I think that her efforts to put out her own version was clever and proved something of a point but... The thing is that pre-release books are a seriously hot ticket, especially for fans of the series. And if you've already read the book before there is a legit copy to buy you are vastly less likely to buy it. And that I think is the real thing to look at here. People will pay for things if there's a legit way for them to do it at a reasonable price; that is literally iTunes (and every other storefronts) business model. Yes, I think she managed to generate some buzz by taking the approach she did, and good for her, but when you're comparing a book that leaked pre-release against a book that didn't, well, are we that surprised that she got better sales on the one that didn't leak? Fans are both the most motivated to buy but also the most motivated to get it early. If they can't get it early then they will buy it, but if they can get it early and the only option for that is to pirate then, well, they can't buy it at that point. And the last thing you want is to be the only person in your fandom who hasn't read the new book. On a more general level though I do agree with her that piracy does hurt creators, especially what you might call medium-level creators who really notice when their income decreases. There is nothing you can do to stop piracy post-release but the fact that publishers don't even seem to care about pre-release leaking is absolutely insane. We live in the internet age; they are already using secure sites to host pre-release readers, so why is no-one tracking when the first leak goes up and checking the people who accessed it? This is hardly beyond the wit of man to at least monitor it over time and figure out where your leak is coming from. But apparently not. Apparently it's ok for reviewers to steal shit.
