Piracy has always been a problem in the electronic age. It’s easy and seems harmless, but it’s not. Someone gets an illegal copy of software or a movie or an ebook or an audiobook, and it’s no big deal. Unfortunately, that’s not quite true. Piracy disproportionately hurts small independent authors like myself more than the big names, but it hurts them as well.
As an example, consider my novel Xenophobia, which came out as an audiobook in 2014. Even with protests from me, it regularly appears as a “free” audiobook on YouTube. Trying to get it taken down is like playing whack-a-mole. And, as you can see here, it pops back up every few months.
In two months, it’s had 11,000 views! That’s great, but that’s also 11,000 sales that never happened.
Ah, but what about the sales that DID happen? That’s where the author and audio producer make their money, right?
Hmmm… about that… Over the past decade, Xenophobia has sold less than 500 copies.
For me, this is heartbreaking.
As an independent author, I struggle to get traditional publishing houses to even respond to emails, let alone pick up any of my work. When it comes to audiobooks, it’s a dead-end. Thankfully, Podium has thrown me a lifeline with some of my recent books, but most of my novels will NEVER be produced as audiobooks as they can’t pay for their production costs, let alone put bread on the table.
And the crazy thing about this is all the YouTube “fans” are hurting themselves. They’re the ones that are missing out on other audiobooks that will never be made because of how badly piracy hurts the industry.
It’s easy to say, “Well, those 11,000 downloads wouldn’t have translated into 11,000 sales,” and that’s true, but it misses the point. So what percentage would have been sales? As all of those are gone!
And this is just ONE example that’s only two months old. This isn’t the first time or the only time this has happened on YouTube. It’s just the latest in the eternal game of whack-a-mole with pirates, each one resulting in thousands of downloads. If you go searching, you can find illegal copies of Xenophobia on lots of other sites as well, meaning 11,000 is the minimum, not the maximum. How many illegal downloads have there been? The answer is a disproportionate amount that exceeds 95% of all downloads, making this rampant and unsustainable.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
And I’m not kidding. I literally have to look at each book and decide whether to take it to an audio producer or not because I know they’re not going to recoup their losses. So I never took Clowns and won’t be taking Ghosts into audio. I have to hold out and only put forward those books that I think can survive this kind of rampant onslaught and still make a few bucks. Xenophobia wasn’t one of them. After a decade, Xenophobia is still running at a loss, despite its popularity.
Piracy sucks. It’s a leech, a parasite on creativity.
Update. YouTube has introduced a new copyright reporting system that took swift action to take these audiobooks down… for now…
THINKING SCI-FI 
That really sucks! Have the paperback.
Thank you 🙂
This is unfortunate but I think piracy also has a positive effect.
Some of the people who listened to/read your content without paying for it might have then become fans and later actually purchased some of your stuff. But if there was no piracy these people would not have found out about you or given your content a chance. Also, not everyone who pirates something would have bought it otherwise.
I’m not defending piracy, of course, I’m just saying that the calculation is not as simple as 11k views = 11k missed purchases.
Yes, it does as they all consumed the content. The problem here is the 500/11000 means 95% is piracy. That’s extortionate and unsustainable. It’s unjustifiable. If what you say is correct, I should see a bounce with people discovering me through piracy and then turning to become purchasers. THAT has NOT happened
How would you like it if you lost 95% of your income?
Remember, this isn’t a comparison of ALL the pirated copies of Xenophobia. It’s one copy that in two months has had 11,000 views, while the audiobook itself has only sold 500 copies in a decade. The actual level of piracy for Xenophobia is far HIGHER. This is utter madness and completely unjustifiable.
Yes, they consumed it but my point is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that they would have paid for it if there was no free option, so you can’t strictly consider each view as directly missed revenue. Each pirated view basically only represents a small chance that the person would have purchased it otherwise.
Also, I’m not sure how you can confidently say that piracy didn’t bring you any paying customers. How would you know either way? Obviously, it would be just a fraction of all those who ever pirated your stuff but it’s definitely not zero.
That said, again, the numbers are really tragic, and I’m not justifying or defending piracy. I’m just trying to point out that the math is not as simple as “if there are 100k hits on my pirated content it means 100k more people would have purchased my book otherwise”.
If you re-read the article, I went back and addressed that… I have NOT seeing any bump in ANY sales over the past two months during which this spike occurred, let alone for my other audiobooks, so yes, I can confidently say piracy doesn’t help sales.
Good post after our discussion, Peter.
That has to be one of the most discouraging statistics I’ve seen. And as you noted, that is only 1 stream. I just did a quick search and see 5 of your books on YouTube.
Does Audiobook have to do the DCMA notices for it to get noticed? Does a report from somebody like me make any difference?
I decided to ask Bing to find “audiobooks by Peter Cawdron on YouTube” and it returned 3 of your books: Maelstrom, Monsters, and 3zekiel along with some ads that are actually selling your books. I then asked Bing why it returned illegal results and got the “I didn’t know I just searched…” and “I don’t endorse” response. When I pushed harder Bing changed the conversation.
I’m always looking forward to your next book!
Bing changed the conversation!! Oh, that’s a very human response right there! lol. I’ve reported these videos in the past, but it’s like playing whack-a-mole. They take ages to be taken down and then they reappear under some other fake account within a day. The problem is the culture. Piracy only exists because of the people supporting piracy. Oh, and if you try to report a video on Youtube you get a bunch of options like “sexually explicit” or “hate speech” but you do NOT get an option for piracy or stolen content. In short, Youtube knows but they don’t care.
Hi Peter
What’s yours is mine that is how it works surely, copyright Nah, intellectual property wots that, you would think YouTube would support you but I would imagine it is DILLIGAF situation ?
I was just reading a article about the Pareto principle and it seems it applies to authors too.
Hope your week gets better.
Regards
Chris
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Hi Chris. Despite my pessimism, after some digging, it seems Youtube has improved its reporting. I’ve flagged these pirated copies. Hopefully they get taken down.