Quick Weekend Update

Well, it's officially happened.

When some random person stole some of my stories to translate them into Russian and put them on a pay-to-read Russian site, I didn't really care. I was actually kind of flattered. Not only that, but there was no legal action I could take that would be respected, so it didn't really matter.

Then some random guy uploaded the story onto another web novel hosting website while claiming ownership of it, but I got that taken down with a DMCA after just a few days. Plus he wasn't trying to profit off of it, so no big deal.

Now, somebody has officially taken one of my novels and put it up on Amazon.

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081JM74WC 

It has a different cover, synopsis, and title, but five seconds of checking the free provided sample shows all that is needed to confirm that it's a straight-up copy-paste of Lazy Dragon Queen.

As for why I'm posting this - I'm not sure. I just feel like I need to talk about it.

Everybody I've talked to about what I do, who isn't aware of how web serials work, would always say things like "You what? You post it for free? But anybody could steal it and make money off of it! You can't give away your hard work for free! Are you crazy?!"

Sure, I knew it was a possibility, but I always kinda thought it was mostly paranoia. Plus it'd be easy to prove that I was the original owner.

But now it's actually happened. I feel like somebody who was riding a bike without a helmet while everybody shouted at me about how I'd eventually get into an accident, but I was stubborn and didn't think it would happen to me so I never bothered.

Well, it happened.

I would have never found out about this if some random reader on Royal Road didn't inform me. How am I supposed to check to make sure my stories aren't being stolen if somebody is changing the title, synopsis, and the cover? Am I expected to manually check every single new novel posted to Amazon?

How can I be sure that my other novels aren't currently uploaded somewhere on Amazon where somebody is making profit off of them if they're doing the same thing?

I suddenly feel far less inclined to post chapters for free reading. Focusing on editing to self-publish to Amazon's KU myself while continuing with Patreon seems like the best thing to do right now.

Not only that, but I feel like any future stories that start off as Patreon exclusive might stay Patreon exclusive. Like the horror dungeon core story I started. Originally, I wanted to just post it on Patreon up until there were like 40 chapters or so and then post it over to RR and SH like I did with LDQ. Now, I feel like I'd rather keep it Patreon-exclusive until it eventually gets onto Amazon.

But then that poses difficulty of its own. Posting new stories to RR and SH and whatnot is how I get new patrons. If I don't have new patrons coming in to replace the patrons who unpledge, I run out of money and can no longer do this full-time. Not only that, but building audiences for specific stories on other sites benefits me when I go to post them to Amazon since that is a lot of immediate, potential readers and reviewers.

At least with Patreon, people would have to pay me to steal from me. Though, offering full PDF files of each story to the $10 tier no longer seems like that good of an idea since that's making it extremely easy for somebody to pay $10, download all my stories in full, and convert them.

But could you imagine somebody trying to manually (or designing a script to do this)  go through every single Patreon post to steal my stories? Good luck with that. That would be so annoying for somebody to do that I'm pretty sure they'd give up as soon as they realize how unfriendly Patreon's setup is for web serials.

Anyways, it's 6am and I didn't plan on starting my weekend by finding out about somebody stealing my story on Amazon in the middle of the night. I've filed a copyright infringement notice with Amazon, so hopefully they do something about it.

Maybe I'll just leave up free samples of my stories for people to check out and then encourage them to come to my Patreon. I don't know.

Chances are I'll probably continue just doing what I'm already doing. How Amazon responds, and whether they take action or not, is going to really affect whatever decision I make. If Amazon decides to fuck me over despite me providing as much proof as I could that I'm the owner of my intellectual property, I don't know what else there is to do other than make it as hard as I possibly can for thieves to steal from me.

As far as you, my dear patrons, are concerned, nothing is going to change. Y'all are still going to get your usual chapters every week. This is just me rambling/ranting and not knowing how I want to treat free readers.

Anyways, that's my 6am TED talk. Thanks for reading and all that.

Also, fuck thieves.