Stolen

Piracy, Scraping, and Which of It Actually Costs You Money

An author finds her book on a pirate site and loses a week to it. The week is the loss.

Stolen is a book in the Indie Author Guide Line: short, source-checked guides for independent authors who have finished writing and now have to be found. This book separates the varieties of theft an author faces: the pirate site that would never have produced a sale, the counterfeit paperback that would have, the scraped listing under someone else's name, and the training-corpus question, which is the one that changed recently and is the only one where an author's anger points somewhere real.

The argument here is that most of this deserves less attention than it gets, and one part of it deserves more.

What's inside:

• What a takedown actually accomplishes, and what it doesn't
• Which retailers will act on a report, and which won't
• What a counterfeit paperback costs you that a pirate ebook link doesn't
• What the AI-training-data question actually is, and why it's different from ordinary piracy
• What's actually worth an author's attention on a Tuesday afternoon, and what isn't
• Where to find the public documents behind every legal claim in this book, so you can check them yourself

This is not legal advice, and this book says so plainly. What it will do is help you sort real harm from noise, so your attention goes where it can actually do something.

From the Indie Author Guide Line, from Novel Concepts Publishing.