Please don’t download from the pirates!

Rosemary

Periodically, people let me know about pirated copies of my ebooks being sighted in the wild.  Alas, it does happen, partly because I choose to not use Digital Rights Management restrictions on my books.  DRM-free is a moral stance, but you know: being good does not mean people won’t take advantage of you…

I have to send out takedown notices when I learn of pirate sites — so if you spot pirated versions, please do feel free to tell me about it!  (Thanks again, Barbara, for the latest heads-up!)   I have an automatic Google search set up  that often points me at the pirates as they pop up, but it’s not perfect.  It missed that last one in Canada.

And by the way — the most pirated version of my works is the omnibus edition of the first two books, that were combined into the volume called The Steerswoman’s Road.  And the interesting thing about that is that the only digital version that ever existed was one created for blind people using screen-reading software.  Yeah, think about that.    Stealing from authors is bad enough, but scamming blind people to do it?  That’s a new low.

As a general principle:  There are currently no free ebooks of the Steerswoman series available anywhere. If they tell you it’s free, they stole it from me.

In other news: Finally got free of that second bout of the same damn massive cold.  Living on DayQuil and NyQuil for days on end has little to recommend it.  Being weak and stupid gets old fast.

I’m still coughing, but not constantly, thank goodness.  And I made it back to my office  as of Monday, although I wasn’t much use until today, really. I actually wanted to go for a nice long walk on Tuesday, but when I arrived at the local linear trail (the only route I thought I could handle in my weakened state), I was hit with a massive coughing fit. Meanwhile, two women were loading a toddler into a stroller from the car next to me, and I realized that I’d be coughing my way down the trail more or less in tandem with them for the whole way.  I thought this would be unkind; even though I do believe I’m no longer contagious, they would not know that, and I’d inspire all sorts of worry on the child’s behalf and glances askance cast in my direction.  I didn’t want to just sit in the car until they were out of sight, so I gave up and went straight to the office instead.

Alas, my sister caught the cold, too, and has been miserable for the last few days.  I’m trying to be especially nice to her.  At least the pals who jetted to Florida one day after being exposed to me have managed to avoid the plague, and seem to be having a lovely time in the sunshine, according to their Facebook posts.

Meanwhile, I arrived back at the office, where I had left things over a week ago, thinking that I’d be gone just for the weekend.  Dead flowers!  Week-old trash not tossed out!  Piles of stuff everywhere — things I had assumed I’d deal with shortly, but I can now not remember what I intended to do with them.

I spent the last couple of days, as my brain slowly came back, dealing with all that.  Plus financial analyses and bills, before those get out of hand.

Happily, I find that the book cover for the full-size paperback of The Steerswoman was rather farther along than I had recalled, and I should be able to complete it in a couple of days.  And then the acid test of using KDP’s paperback generation software for the first time, which I am not looking forward to.

My next publishing task after that will be to finally update the ebooks with typo corrections!  I’ve been receiving notes from readers for the last few years, pointing out typos (and thank you all for that) and I’ve incorporated those corrections into the paperbacks (since that’s what I was working on at the time).  With that done, I’ll use the paperback files to create better versions of the ebooks –  exactly the reverse of how one usually does these things.  As is typical of me.

And looming: taxes.  Yow.  Multiple revenue streams equals high level of fuss and bother.  Well.  I’ll worry about that next week, when I hope my mental RAM and bandwidth will have recovered more.


2 Responses to “Please don’t download from the pirates!”

  • Subrata Sircar Says:

    On the bright side, you got several mentions on Tor.com as an author who people would love to have published more :<)

    Hope you are healthy soon!

  • Jan Says:

    Hey, good health to you and I am very much looking forward to getting the full size paperback. I already made room for it by giving the existing one to a friend. You now have one more reader.