A Take on Book Piracy and Plagiarism

Originally published via The Writing Catalogue.

My book got pirated. I am now a victim of plagiarism. It is inevitable. If you create something of value, someone will plagiarise it. I will not pretend to understand a plagiariser’s mind because I don’t understand how you could simply steal someone’s ideas and work without credit.

However, I wish to present the-glass-half full take, courtesy of Neil-himself-Gaiman.

I understand how this is a special take and not meant to generalise so please see the article as such.

Let’s look at plagiarism the Neil way, a way in which he flipped being plagiarised on its head.

• Plagiarism does not mean loss of copyright. You still own the rights to everything.

A quote that fits → “I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.”

• Piracy can have a silver lining if you are smart about it. Neil’s books were massively pirated in Russia and this is how Russians first heard of Neil Gaiman. A market emerged where there was none before.
• Leverage this branding opportunity instead of please-why-me crying. Engaging positively with people who admitted to reading Gaiman’s pirated book earned him a loyal fanbase among people who could not afford to buy books then (age, circumstances, access, et al.) These people grew up and/or outgrew their hard times and now purchase everything Gaiman creates.
• You lose your fear. Getting pirated and plagiarised is a creator’s worst fear. Someone stole your work and the money it generates. What worse could happen? Neil Gaiman thought the same and converted one of his best sellers into a freely downloadable lead magnet on his website for a month. His team tracked all the analytics because this was an experiment. His overall book sales increased the following month because American Gods fomo* started up on Tumblr.

A quote that fits → “We (his team) took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent.”

*fomo is fear of missing out

• If you recenter your focus, your mindset shifts to what is important. Your book getting pirated is awful but then largely, it is unpreventable at this point in time. If it happens, there are few things you can do to stop it quickly. Instead, if you have a different approach where you aren’t a victim of this, you can get ahead of the plagiarists and the pirates.
• Most people discover authors by reading a book their friend enjoyed. The friend then lends you their copy and/or gifts you a copy. This is authors not making a sale but earning fans.

Aniesha Brahma offered, “Binati, you’ve got to read Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl's Guide to Murder Series. As soon as I’m done reading it, I’ll post you my copies.”

“You haven’t read this book yet Binati, that’s why it’s a gift for you,” said Riddhi Sharma as she gifted her copy of Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse to me.

Passing books to each other isn’t piracy. It is people discovering books they wouldn’t read otherwise.

See pirates and people who pirate with this point-of-view. They’re helping people discover you with their act of plagiarism.

“You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.”

As you can see, with some mental gymnastics, book piracy can become a form of advertising. If and when you get hit with this, you will go through stages of grief because being pirated is a loss. Whether the grief destroys you or not, it is up to you.

To read Neil's full quote, read 👇🏾