Looking Back at 2017: the Good, the Bad… And Pirates

I posted my 2018 resolutions before realizing I’d forgotten to post my Looking Back at 2017 post. I didn’t realize it was in my Drafts folder but now that I remembered where it was, here is my rundown of 2017 so far (there are 2 more days!) and an addition from a recent development.

First of all, the good things.

I published a few books this year.

1. Loving Riley – April (written/completed in 2015)
2. In His Heart – May (written/completed in 2015)
3. Need – July
4. *Naughty Pen book part 1 – July
5. Falling for Jordan – November
6. *Naughty Pen book part 2 – November
7. *Naughty Pen book part 3 – December
8. Date Night, updated with 2 new stories – December

I met new authors and made new friends (like you if you’re reading this and have followed my blog!).

I had my first successful book launch* yet. I gave over 50K copies of book 1 away to sell book 2 but that’s part of the long game.

I released two audiobooks:

1. Loving Ashe – September
2. Everything She Ever Wanted – October

Now the bad.

Stress. Well, that’s a given. After all, we’re talking about me here.

A messy house. Just don’t come to visit. That’s all I’m saying…

Weight gain. Yikes! I’ve slacked off from my walking schedule and haven’t been to the gym because of the stress of meeting deadlines.

Piracy. Piracy is a fact of life for every author, there are no exceptions. My books are pirated everywhere, whether in pdf or in full text on websites. And there’s nothing I can do about them. I can pay a company to “blast” them off the face of the internet but another copy will surface within hours.

Today (or when I first wrote this since this was pre-New Year), I discovered 12 pirated copies of my audiobooks, one of them having 7K views and released ONE day after the audiobook went live. I always check Youtube for pirated copies and never found them because I only typed MY name or my books’ titles. Today I found them by adding “audiobook” to the title and boy, did that suck.

That’s just the first four listings…

One of these things is not like the other. Only one is actually mine.

Given my investment into those two audiobooks this year, I need to be realistic. I’m not going to see that money for the duration of the Audible contract which is seven years. And maybe that’s why they have that time frame of exclusivity. I need to tell myself to not think of the thousands of dollars I invested and focus on promoting my ebooks instead. If an audiobook sells, it sells. If it doesn’t, well, check Youtube!

So I spent the last two hours finding pirated copies and filing copyright infringement forms on Youtube. The ironic thing is that I have to reveal my personal information, my “full legal name, not a company name” and my address to prove that the audiobooks are mine. So much for anonymity, right?

So while some accounts get this message:

Some get this one:

Some notices are even bigger than the other two:

Copyright of the work belongs to me and while true, I have every right to claim it, the other party knows who filed the claim against them. Meanwhile, do I get any idea who they are? Nope, not beyond their account names on Youtube. They’re protected. I’m not.

Oh well, it’s just another day of being a self-published author.

But now that I’ve managed to have those taken down, I miss that title of New York Times and USA Today Best Selling Author…