Buy my books please don't pirate them!

I'm signed up to Google alerts to keep a track of my books. This lets me know when reviews come in or people are discussing my books. It's a really handy feature and without it I'd have to spend hours every week trawling through the search engines. I always get excited when an alert comes through because it means someone has posted something on the net about one of my books.

I got one of those alerts today and I clicked through to see what it could be... It was a torrent site. On that site there were several copies of Paying her Debt, several copies! PDF, Zip files the whole shabang. I gaped at the screen for a moment and scrolled down, shocked at what I was seeing. Now don't get me wrong this is not my first experience of piracy. I get web hits every month or so with the search terms, 'The Kiss free read', 'Download The Valentine's Fae for free' and so on. But this is the first time I've seen a whole screen with copies of my book ready and waiting for someone to download.

It gets worse. On this site when someone has succesfully downloaded a file a thumbs up gets posted. You can use this feature to keep track of how many times a file has been downloaded. For Paying her Debt there have been over 700 successful downloads. SEVEN HUNDRED! That is, in terms of my royalty rate, over $1400, not to mention the money my publisher would have made, which then gets invested in supporting other upcoming writers, and encourages them to contract my next book! The Kiss has been downloaded several hundred times as has The Valentine's Fae and Twas a Dark and Delicious Christmas. All in all over $3000 worth of my books have been downloaded illegally, and that doesn't even take into account other sites they might be on... to be honest I'm not even going to look, it's too depressing to see where else they might have been stolen from.

Yep, I said stolen, because that's what ebook piracy is!

I write the books, my publisher puts money in to pay an editor, to create stunning cover art and to market. The final product belongs to both of us. We've worked hard to get it out there... and in return we sell it. That's how the system works. And you know what really annoys the hell out of me? They're not even freaking expensive! The vast majority of my books sell for less than five dollars. Most distributors give discounts at certain times, so you can sometimes pick them up for less than a large mocca. And I do giveaways all the bloody time! To be honest if someone emailed me and said how much they'd like to read my books, but couldn't afford them, I'd probably give them free copies!

I want people to read my books, it's why I write. But at the same time I want to be able to write full time, and to do that I need to make enough money to pay my rent and feed my children. If everyone who had downloaded my books paid for them I'd have made enough money to live off for two months. That would have allowed me to write another two books and get a little closer to writing full time. As it is right now I write into the early hours of the morning and keep my fingers crossed they'll sell... Now I'm not stupid enough to think that everyone who has illegally downloaded my books would have paid for them... but if just ten percent had...

So basically this is a call out, rant, moan, grouch, to anyone who might be considering illegally downloading one of my books. Please take a moment to think about the hard work put in by the author (in the very early hours of the morning after a full day at work) and the money spent by the publisher. We do this because we love it, but we'd quite like to be paid for our efforts so we can do it some more... just think about that

Emma x