Thank you for this anecdote. I made a post awhile ago about how it's almost never small-time authors who get screwed by piracy and was promptly downvoted
Yet again, we find that benefits of exposure > costs of some free-loading
Yet again, we find that benefits of exposure > costs of some free-loading
In the beginning I worried about this, but in the end, there are two reasons why I stopped caring:
1. I keep the book updated and relevant, so those versions of the book are basically historic artifacts and become more and more worthless over time. This value helps people who actually care about the knowledge in the book to decide to buy from LeanPub or Amazon, eventually.
2. Most of the people who put up with getting popup ads and malware on their computers just to download my book aren't likely to pay for it anyways.
I have only filed one or two takedown notices, to people who posted YouTube videos infringing on the content of some of my talks and past videos, and once to a more popular / non-malicious site that was sharing a PDF.
1. How does "purchasing" a few chapters look on the user side? e.g. Do you price every chapter and they only pay for the difference if they want to purchase the full book later? Do updates (which you said they're entitled to?) come out for individual chapters?
2. How do you get the word out initially? (I see you mentioned going to conferences; it'd be nice if you could elaborate or mention if there are other potentially effective approaches.)
Thanks, and congrats on your success so far!
1. I choose a point in time to start 'publishing' (in my case with A4D it was after 3 chapters were written, first draft). 2. Users can start buying at this point, at a minimum price I determine (starting at 'free', or 4.99 and up). 3. Any user who buys the book gets DRM-free downloads in any format from LeanPub, and the book is on their permanent shelf on LeanPub, so they can download any newer version forever, free.
As an author, when I push a new update, I have the ability to also send a notification email to all subscribed readers so they know a new version is available—otherwise I can just silently update it (e.g. for smaller bugfixes in the text or slight corrections).
See here: https://imgur.com/a/UxSyr28