How Bad Is It, Really?

The first thing I have to acknowledge about the state of publishing is that everything is unstable now. Among the things that have been on my mind lately are the following. First, the negatives:

• Ebook piracy is rampant on the U.K. version of eBay in part because eBay has weak policies. EBay does not require sellers to disclose the contents of omnibus book collections, so rights owners can't just look at the listing and see if their work is being sold as part of the package. It takes a lot of leg work, even to the point of buying a copy of the omnibus, to find out if the contents are legal or not. Then it takes time to shut down a seller, and more sellers pop up like Whac-a-Mole moles.

  
  No moles were whacked in the making of this illustration.
  

•  Ebook piracy is also common on the U.K. eBay because British copyright law is laughably weak. The infringed party can only sue to recover the pirate's profits and has to pay legal costs.  And U.K. pirates sell internationally, so buyers in the U.S. can buy pirated copies of my work from the U.K.

•  One of my friends is trying to offer her backlist of stories on Amazon as ebooks, but Amazon crawls the web, finds pirated editions of her work, and tells her she can't offer it for sale because it's available for free somewhere.

• Traditional publishing houses have high overhead expenses, and the downward pricing pressure of ebooks is likely to mean that they can't sell books at a high enough price to stay in business, at least not using their current business models. Those publishing houses have already been cutting their operations to the bone for years. Traditional publishing and bookselling are severely endangered, and I don't expect most major houses, chain stores, or big bookstores to be in business ten or fifteen years from now.

 On the other hand, I see some positive signs:

• Ebook piracy is not rampant on the U.S. version of eBay, in large part because American copyright law is very, very strong. There are statutory penalties for copyright infringement that award high sums per infringement to the plaintiff, to the point that if some of the sellers that infringe my work on eBay from the U.K. tried to do the same from the U.S., I'd be eligible to collect whatever big assets they hold. I'm talking about their house, their car, and the contents of their bank accounts.

• I don't see any signs that U.K. copyright law will be reformed to offer statutory damages, but the U.K. is instituting a small-claims court for Intellectual Property cases where it will be inexpensive to file for small-scale damages. When these courts are up and running, pirates such as those on eBay may find that writers are motivated to be the first in line to claim any and all profits the pirates have made. That is, pirates will be making themselves into targets of opportunity for any infringed author who is short on cash. (That's most of us!)

• My friend who can't sell her work on Amazon because of pirates can subscribe to the services of Muso, a company with software that can do some surprising things. I don't know exactly how it works, but for $15 a month, Muso will use the same search engines as someone looking to download a writer's books or stories for free. Muso identifies all the instances it finds and lets the rights holder identify unauthorized uses. Once Muso knows that a use is unauthorized, it notifies the ISP with the offending server, waits half an hour, and then removes the offending file. Legally.

• Traditional publishers have been asking writers to take over more and more of the effort of publicity, the hard work of finding the right readers, to the point where a lot of writers are beginning to wonder why they have to do so much publicity work for a small share of a book's revenue. The same ebook pricing dynamic that is probably going to kill big publishers is making it possible for writers to write, publicize, and sell their work for a larger share of the sales price.

The upshot is that I can see the market for my self-published backlist and new books being quite profitable in the coming years, or else being a complete bust.

Without a trust fund to draw on, I need to make money from my writing, both my new work and my backlist, and I need to succeed whether or not books sold in bookstores or by Amazon are a viable revenue stream. So how can I do it?

More tomorrow!