Posts Tagged Wil Wheaton

It’s getting easier and easier to sell self-published books even through mainstream dealers like Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com, largely thanks to the e-book “revolution.”  However, I’d warn my fellow writers against doing such a thing unless they are already well-established and guaranteed good sales. (Wil Wheaton self-publishes through Lulu, and though he has a niche fanbase, it is well established and he already has reliable sales-numbers.)

It may be incredibly gratifying to finally see your name on the cover of a book, in a store, but for an unestablished author, this may be shooting yourself in the foot. Say you self-publish that first book and it sells a few copies, mostly to friends and family, of course, and a few others. Then, miracle of all miracles, your next book gets picked up by a Big Name Publisher. Big Name Publisher has more resources at its disposal and wants to make money from your book, so it will go out and promote it heavily.

However, the bookstores they try to market your book to pull up your name as the author and look at how many of your other books it has sold, and the number of books it buys is based on that. Big Name Publisher sees that the bookstores aren’t interested in selling your books, and that’s that.

There have been authors who have had to change their names just to get away from the low sales figures attached to their initial self-published books. This is not the path to a spot on the Bestseller lists, it is actually likely to work against you ever having that opportunity, no matter how good your writing is. If you choose to self-publish in spite of the problems with it, I’d recommend using a pseudonym. You can always come back and “reclaim” the book under your real name later if you do get the real big break, as Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman) and Anne Rice (A. N. Roquelaire) have done.

Offering writing for free over the internet to gain an audience is, however, a good way of promoting yourself, but even then you have to be careful. The same easy self-publishing platforms that authors are beginning to take advantage of are being used by unscrupulous publishers to steal content and offer it for sale.

Creative Commons offers an easy way to protect and license your content, but be careful that you do not accidentally sign away your rights to any money that is made from it.  If you choose to license your work with Creative Commons, make sure to choose a license that ensures that your work can only be used and shared non-commercially – that is, people are free to download, read, and share, but not sell, your work.  You can still offer your books for free over the internet with a full copyright rather than a CC license without giving up any rights to it at all.

Like I say, though you earn nothing from it, offering free samples or even complete books for free can be an excellent way to begin to gain an audience, as well as giving you a place to direct potential agents and publishers to so that they can easily see what you’ve done. The trick is to be careful and to keep a watch on the most popular self-publishing and e-book publishing websites to ensure that your work does not get stolen.

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I have written in the past against DRM and methods of property protection that punish the consumer rather than the thieves, but my annoyance with DRM is in no way an endorsement of piracy, which is a huge issue, especially for the little guys.

And one of those guys has a book coming out this week. You might’ve heard of him, here and there.  Wil Wheaton.  Yes… that kid from Star Trek with the bad sweaters and really annoying sense of superiority.

Wil Wheaton may be a bit famous (or infamous).  He is somewhat like a demi-god among geeks. He, also, isn’t a fan of DRM, though I would understand why he might want to look into trying it, since his book, Just a Geek, has been pirated and offered up for free.

Now….this isn’t some tremendously wealthy celebrity or best-selling author for whom a bit of book piracy is just a drop in the bucket, because they’re making millions anyway.  This is a man who still has to work for a living, and and who just happens to do that work with his pen or in front of a camera.  His books are even self-published and promoted out of his own pocket, so any piracy directly affects him in a way that it never would a large corporation.

The same goes for the majority of authors and actors and musicians out there.  Because the majority of creative professionals are not wealthy. Most of us will never see even a shred of the type of celebrity that Wil might enjoy. We have to work for a living, and we offer up that work to the public, for your enjoyment.  If you do enjoy it, we ask a little bit of compensation. Not because we’re greedy bastards, but because we need that money to put food on the table and clothes on our backs, to feed our children, to pay for our shelter.  We may offer some content for free, and ask you to share it with your friends, because there’s no better advertisement than free advertisement.  But when we ask you to pay, all we are asking is compensation for our work, the same as you would pay farmer for his vegetables, or a butcher for his meat.

When you seek to profit from a pirated item, or when you purchase or download a pirated piece of work, that’s just like running into that farm stand and grabbing a bushel of vegetables and running off.  If the farmer’s a big industrial farmer, well, he may have several tons of vegetables to sell, and be able to shrug off the loss of that bushel, but if it’s a small family farm, the loss of even one bushel is a huge loss.  That’s the way it is for all of the other little guys out there too. Just because what we produce is something less tangible – a song, a movie, a book, an hour’s entertainment – doesn’t mean that we don’t need that money just as much or work just as hard to produce what we have.

So think about it, next time you head to your favorite torrent sites. You may enjoy the thought of “sticking it to the man” by pirating things produced by huge corporations, but sometimes the person you’re stealing from is the person next door.

Oh, and…if you’re a Star Trek fan? Head over and buy Memories of the Future.  It looks to be a good one.

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