If you like a musician or an author or any other artist, you should consider paying them for their work. If you can’t pay for their work, you should at least support them with your time.

Here’s how it works. These are not actual numbers, but you’ll get the point:

Authors and other artists like musicians earn a “royalty” every time one of their books/albums/songs/whatever gets sold. (There’s more to it than that, but I want to keep this simple.) Let’s say I, as the author, make a 10% royalty on any book sold by my publisher. Let’s say that book is $10 at your local bookstore. How much do I make?

$1.00.

(That doesn’t include 15% or so for my agent…so really it’s .85 cents. It also doesn’t count taxes…but anyway.)

So if I sell 100 books, I get $100. Not a lot, but there’s a lot you could buy with $100. Would you like $100 right now?

So if 100 people illegally download my book, I get . . . $0.00. Zero is less than 100, last time I checked.

Listen:

First, I understand that e-book pricing is odd and inconsistent, and I’m sorry about that, but it’s out of my hands. Second, if you think hardcovers are overpriced, I urge you to write a 50,000 word novel, revise it, proofread it, have it proofread again, and again, and just once more to make sure it is flawless, then build an eye-catching and appealing cover, then dump the whole thing into InDesign and try doing a layout yourself so that the words look appealing on the page….then total up all those hours and tell me how much you think they were worth. It’ll be a lot more than $17.99.

(Of which I would get $1.80, by the way. Again, not counting my agent or taxes or…)

Third: Your local library has a METRIC SHIT TON of material FOR FREE. And if they don’t have it, they can get it. E-books, audiobooks, magazines, newspapers, novels, nonfiction. Tons of it online, tons of it at the library, and if they don’t have it, they can get it 90% of the time FROM ANOTHER LIBRARY FOR FREE.

By the way? You already paid for it. Your tax dollars at work. Go use some of that stuff. A lot of it, like on Freegal, you can download and keep forever. Did I mention that it was free?

As someone else pointed out, if you’re paying $5.20 for a cup of coffee but won’t pay .99 for an e-book? Dude. C’mon. 

Anyway. If you’re gonna steal our shit, then at least, for the love of God, leave a review on Amazon.  Not Goodreads. Amazon.com. I mean, Jesus, if you are reading/listening/in any way consuming an artist’s work, then you must like that artist, right? Don’t you want to support them, even if you won’t do it financially? Then leave goddamn review. It’s three minutes of your time. Small price to pay for a free song you’ll listen to for the next forty years or a novel you can re-read over and over.

And I mean, my God! You can get used hardcovers at Amazon for a penny! Would I rather you buy a shiny new hardcover at my book launch on August 18? Yes. But the next best thing is to just get the cheapest copy you can and then (wait for it)….leave a review.

And finally:

We love you.

You get that, right? Artists love people, otherwise we’d be A) stupid, and B) working in a vacuum.

Nothing delights us more than creating shit for you to enjoy.

It’s why we get up in the morning. I am not kidding about this. Ask around.

I don’t have a problem giving you stuff for free. If you’re that hard up, by all means, send me a message and I will do my level best to get a copy of my book out to you, because, see above. I love you, and I love doing this for you. More than once I have spent my own, unreimbursed money to send a hardcover out to someone because that’s the kind of person I am. I want you to have this book. I want you to love it. Or not! But I want you to have it.

Just don’t steal it. Please. I’m begging you. We have got to move away from this Everything Is Free Online culture. I have to buy groceries to feed my toddler, you know? That’s not free. You wouldn’t want the work you do at your company to go unrewarded. You work hard. I work hard. The dozen or so people it takes to get a book to market work hard.

Don’t steal. Please.

And leave reviews on Amazon. No joke. Please do it.

…Rant off.

And for those many, many, many of you to whom this does not apply, thank you. On behalf of authors and other artists everywhere, thank you. We cherish you so very, very much.