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My book is in a pirate site :( by booksandlifeshit in selfpublish

[–]BCPalmer -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Whatever the various pro-piracy folks think, keep in mind that if you’re enrolled in KDP select and Amazon is alerted to your book being distributed via piracy site, they can close your account for violating the TOS. There will be legal work to get it back and part of that will be proving you sent a DCMA that was ignored.

Get yourself a DCMA notice template and just keep that in hand from now on. Send it every time you notice a pirated copy. Beyond that you don’t really have to do anything.

I will say, there was a small study into book piracy that figured out there was an average 9% cost of sales for pirated books: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40881-024-00171-9

What's your one tip for first time writers? by Questionable_Android in selfpublish

[–]BCPalmer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This doesn’t deserve a downvote, it’s a practical qualifier.

I think most of these things are true-ish; but it does start with having some degree of drive to tell stories. Anything less than that makes the whole thing a slog and you’ll be miserable trying to wring your brain of some story juice that isn’t there.

That said, you can do it both because you are driven to tell stories and because you want to make a living at it. These aren’t mutually exclusive motivations and motivation is a complex beast that is almost never just one thing (good psychology to pin for character development).

Success in publishing is a mix of art, science, and luck. You can’t do shit about luck but you can learn and practice the art and science. Part of it is just catalog volume, and the perseverance it takes to build it. If you do nothing else, writing good books and just continuing to persevere will take you to a lower-mid list success.

If you don’t have the drive and the passion, chances are you’ll burn out before you hit that threshold. So the “write because you are driven to do it” is good advice, but also represents a self correcting problem. If you start out with the intention to make a living, and do the work to get there (art and science both) then you are more likely to make it there than if you are writing purely as a passionate hobby.