A friend just forwarded screen shots from a forum where the audiobook of my book has been posted by thieves. It’s been downloaded 202 times. I wish I could say I’m flattered, but I’m not. I’m just pissed. Two years of my life, tens of thousands of dollars of PR (not to mention lost income from time I spent writing Get-it-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More), and 161 Get-it-Done Guy episodes available for free, and people think buying one tiny little book (however magnificent and astonishingly useful) is just too expensive.
WTF??
If I save them 5 mins/day, it pays for itself 100 times over. I may sick Europa and Thomas on them… 🙂
Please remember that it takes incredible amounts of time and effort to produce a quality information product. If you steal and redistribute it, you’re just removing the incentive for me (and others like me) to produce more. I have to make a living, and I’ll find another way to do it if necessary.
If I’m really lucky, I may actually see royalty income in a couple of years. If I’m really, really, really lucky, I may even make enough to pay for the book launch.
“Information wants to be free” is stupid. Quality information is expensive to produce. Crappy information is free to produce. By paying nothing for information, you gradually select only for the crappy information produced by people and organizations who can do it for free. In other words, hacks and shysters.
You wouldn’t walk into a stereo store and take one home without paying. Don’t do it with an audiobook, or an online program or an electronic program. Ease of theft does not translate into the right to steal. And when people steal, ultimately they simply drive the quality producers out of the marketplace. (Or at least they will for me, since if I can’t make a decent living at this, I have no intention of producing more content. If there’s no income that comes from my podcast, it makes no sense for me to continue.)