Quote:
Originally Posted by taustin
Generally speaking, it seems like the bigger a name you are, the more you'll be hurt by piracy, if only because everybody knows who you are to begin with. It's been a long, long time since Stephen King got any new fans because somebody passed on a bootleg copy of one of his books to a friend. But a relative unknown is far more likely to find new fans that way than, perhaps, through any advertising their publisher does.
I suspect there's no One True Way to approach the issue, and every author needs to figure out what's best for himself.
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Eric Flint wrote an interesting series of essays on this very issue which I believe are available on the Baen's universe site.
He pretty much said what you said in the first paragraph above. If you're successful enough to be impacted by piracy, you're already raking in enough money that you shouldn't worry about it. Everybody else can only be helped by so-called piracy, because a mid-list or new author's biggest problem is someone discovering their books in the first place.
-Marcy