Is your book ever finished? Letting go of your baby. #selfpublishing

One of the best things about self-publishing is the freedom it gives you to go back into your book and tweak it, change it, improve it, amend it, and oh boy, do I take advantage of that!

I think of my stories as something organic and always open to change.  Sometimes a reader might ask a question about something they need clarifying, or make a comment that has me seeing a situation in a completely different way.  Perhaps something occurs to me in a flash of inspiration, and I realise that should have been in my story… or needs removing from it. Sometimes (to quote one of my early characters) people simply change their minds.  How easy it is in these days of e-books and self-publishing to go back to that finished book and make those changes.  But I sometimes wonder if this is sensible, if I should just say 'enough is enough' and focus only on new ideas.  I also wonder if other authors do this.  

I enjoy revisiting my stories and tweaking them, polishing them, hopefully improving them so new readers might have a better experience of them.  Perhaps I should leave well alone, but I doubt  I could if I tried.  Just recently I came across a poem that almost shouted at me from the computer screen.  It could have been written for one of my characters and I simply had to go back to my very first story and do a bit of rewriting in the light of that poem. There’s always room for improvement and I'm convinced an author’s work is never really finished.  But should it be?  

Authors often refer to their books as their babies, and, as all mothers know, your child continues to be your 'baby' throughout his or her life.  Are our stories that much different?  I’d love to know if others find it easy to bid goodbye to their projects once they’ve hit those magic words: Publish my book.

Pride & Piracy

Have you ever Googled yourself?  I must confess, I hadn’t until yesterday.  What prompted me to do so was reading several blog and web posts about marketing, one of which suggested getting a friend to create a Wikipedia page on yourself.  That prompted me to start looking around to see what information actually did exist about me.  Google yourself – it’s a fascinating and eye-opening experience. And sometimes you find far more than you bargained for!

I came across a site purporting to be about term paper sharing with an open request for one of my titles, dated about six weeks ago.  Intrigued, I clicked on it and found it to be a pirating site on which someone calling herself ‘housewife’ had requested a free download of one of my books.  This was made available to her and to anyone else – and a number of people availed themselves of the opportunity to download it for free.

My first instinct was to join the site and tell the desperate housewife and all the other free-loaders that if they were so hard up that they couldn’t spend $2.99 on a legit copy, they should contact me via this blog for a gift.  I mean, I’m just a struggling author – their need is clearly far greater than mine.

The book in question happened to be one I’d self-published, otherwise it would have been my publisher’s headache to deal with, not mine.  A good friend of mine, another self-published author, told me it would be impossible to take any action against the pirates – she herself had suffered at their hands.  Fortunately, my clever son (I know, I’m always talking about him, but he’s just such a useful person to know!) has not only a sound knowledge of the internet, but also of intellectual property law, including copyright infringement, so I followed his advice.

So should this happen to you, through Google, the first thing to do is contact them on the following link:  http://support.google.com/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1114905&page=ts.cs.  You will have to complete a page of details but this is very straightforward.  I received an email from Google support a few hours later telling me they were removing the website from their search index.

Feeling more than a little hacked off by this website, as an added precaution I also contacted the web hosts informing them that their lessee had violated their terms of contract and should be dealt with immediately.  You can look up a website on: http://www.whois-search.com to find out who is providing them access, and then contact those people for action.  My email did not receive the courtesy of a response, but that’s not to say it wasn’t acted upon.  One or the other must have and, although I can’t be sure who got there first, the offending site became inaccessible remarkably quickly.

My advice to self-published writers is to Google yourself regularly and watch out for these cheapskate pirates.  Then take action – fast.  Many e-books cost far less than a cup of coffee in Starbucks, but you can bet your boots that Starbucks wouldn’t stand for the theft, so why should we?

Message now showing on Google:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

Result!