Ahoy Maties! Thar Be Pirates Aboard!

The pirate invasion began for me a few days ago when I got an email from our very own Anne who said she'd found one of my books on a Pirating site! You know the kind. The ones who steal authors books and offer them either FREE or for sale, cutting the author and publisher completely OUT as for as money.

Went to the site and lo and behold...there I was biggern Dallas offered as a free download. Talk about steamed! Later I hit some author loops and found this same addy was being talked about by the other authors and it seemed this same woman had not only one file sharing blog but many. Curious about what she had going on, I pulled some of them up and was appalled at the number of authors who were being systematically ripped off. In some cases, the entire collections of some longtime writers were offered free of charge.

I did my part by notifying two of my publishers who said they'd get right on it by sending out 'cease and desist' letters. I later learned that other authors were doing the same. Everyone pulled together and did what they could. Last night, I read this woman has posted a note to her blog saying she was 'shutting down' and didn't realize she was doing anything wrong. SNORT...yeah RIGHT! Of course, she knows she's doing wrong. It's STEALING. No doubt she'll be back up at a later date and, if not, plenty of others will take her place.

Guess what I'm getting at is, in this vast cyber-world in which we live, operate, and do business, it pays to be careful. If I stumble across another of these sites and see a friends book, you'd better believe, I'm letting her know. If I see hundreds of offerings of fellow writers from my own publisher, I'm reporting it whether my own book is listed there or not. The way I see it, we're all in this gig together.

Writing a book takes imagination, creativity, hard work and long hours. In my pre-writing days, I'd tear through a delicious book in an afternoon and sit there wondering how many weeks or months the author spent writing it. Now I KNOW. A lot of work, heart and soul goes into something like this and for someone to thoughtlessly GIVE IT AWAY steams me plenty.

So be on the lookout, Maties! Only through keeping an eye out for each other will be get through this stuff.

On a lighter note: Made for Mischief, my erotic regency at Resplendence Publishing is now available in PRINT. It can be purchased at Resplendence or at Amazon. I haven't picked up my author copies yet, but I'm getting my credit card warmed up now. Very exciting.