Alternate Ways to Monetize Your Writing
GIVEN THE VAST NUMBER OF pirates and the difficulty of combatting the piracy of one’s material once a file is copied and shared, it can be difficult to fight back. While takedown notices may stop some pirates, as might lawsuits and criminal charges, that may not be enough to stop additional pirates who pop up like weeds that keep coming back.
Another approach is to find ways to use the pirates to help monetize your writing that leads to other material you have written that is only available for purchase—or use them to help publicize your work to a paying audience. That’s the approach of Sandra Shepard, an intellectual property lawyer and strategist based in San Rafael, who commonly finds that after people discover their material has been stolen online, they are eager to sue. Their first questions are: “How can I sue these people?” “How much can I get?” and “How do I get them to pay?”
But her approach is quite different in that she encourages people to use the pirates to gain more attention for other work they can sell. As she explains:
“What I mostly will say to them is that you’re looking at piracy from the wrong direction. You really need to try to use the pirates. How can you use them? Well, what you need to do is to think about your digital book as a way to get people to your website.”
The goal of this approach is to use a link to your website in this pirated material as a marketing tool to get people to purchase additional material from you, whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction. Shepard explains:
“From a fiction standpoint, say you’re writing a book that’s based in Hawaii. You might put some links in the manuscript that lead people to your website where they can see the area that you’re talking about. And perhaps there are posters by a photographer along with a message that says: ‘Hey, if somebody buys these, I’ll give you a percentage of them.’ Or perhaps your website might lead them to a place where they can buy published books or other materials.”
Or if one has a nonfiction book, there could be related products available, as Shepard describes:
“Here’s how you might monetize a nonfiction book. Let’s say that it’s a book on art forgery, and you are going to tell people how to know if something is a real Michelangelo sculpture. So then you say in your writing that a Michelangelo will always have this sort of scratching and other distinctive qualities, but then you say that ‘if you want to see what I’m talking about, click on this link and it will take you to my website and I’ll show you the difference between a forgery and a non-forgery.’
“Then to monetize that you can do one of two things. Number one, you charge them a little bit to see the video, say thirty cents. Or you surround the images with advertisements that people can click through if they’re interested in those things. So there might be an advertisement for an art auction, an advertisement for paint cleaner. In other words, you offer them whatever you have, and your deal with them is that if somebody clicks through from your website, they will pay you a little bit.”
Her rationale is that it is virtually impossible to stop the pirates, so you should do what you can to use them for promotional and sales purposes—a kind of “If you can’t beat them, join them” approach. Or as she puts it:
“My view as a strategist is that it is very difficult to get the pirates to stop, so why not work with the pirates? Use your book as a loss leader to a certain extent. Obviously make the money where you can make money. However, you can also monetize what the pirates are doing by using them to bring people to your website.”
Another way to monetize what the pirates are doing is by mentioning a product after you set up an affiliate link, so that any clicks on that link in a pirated copy of your book bring you income. As Shepard explains:
“Say you’re talking about shopping carts, because you’re teaching people how to put a website up with a shopping cart. You could put a link to the cart and say: ‘Hey, here’s a fantastic shopping cart.’ Then, if they click on that link in your book, you get a percentage from the shopping cart people. Or set up a link to any products you like. So the whole point here is that it’s great if you make some money on the sales of the book. But if pirates take a hundred thousand copies, that’s great, too, because you are making money when people click on the links in your book and buy something as a result.”
Still another way to monetize a pirated book, Shepard suggests, is to include a link to your website and an incentive to get people to go there, such as by inviting people to go to your website to learn more. Then, once they are there, you can get their email address or other information, say by having them fill out a form. As Shepard points out:
“You want to get people to go to your website to see more, because the most important thing is to gather people’s information. If somebody downloads your book, whether they buy it or because they’re a pirate, you don’t get any of that information.
“Say I download your book from Amazon. You have no idea that I’ve done that. So you need to capture me, but how do you do this? For that, you need me to go to your website and maybe do an opt-in or something like that to get more information they want. One way to do that is to place at the end of your chapter or in a smaller version of your book a phrase like: ‘If you want more information on this, go to my website.’ Then, you capture that person there by saying, ‘If you want the rest of this information, just give me your email address.’ Or you give them a chapter in return for their email address.”
The strategy is to give out some information, causing the recipient to want more, but the only way he or she can access it is by providing some personal information or paying for the additional material, or both. As Shepard puts it:
“In other words, the only way you can get whatever this thing is or to get more of it is for you to register on the author’s website.
“It’s the same kind of approach used on many TV shows. Often a show will try to get people to go to their website, because they want to monetize them. It could be any TV show. Whatever it is, a little announcement comes up on the bottom of the screen that says something like, ‘Want to find out more about this? Go to www.cbs.com/underthedome’ or ‘thebridge’ or whatever the name of the show is.
“You can come up with creative ways to get them to sign in at your site. For example, the new Hawaii Five-0 did a show where they had four different endings. They invited people to go to their website and vote for who they wanted to die. Then, they could win something. And the next week, at the TV show, they showed the ending with the most votes, although they had all the endings on their website. Thus, in this way they were trying to drive people to that website using their Hawaii Five-0–related swag and questionnaires to answer in return for an entry.
“So in both cases, the filmmakers are capturing those people with an appeal to do something, such as join their cause, and that’s what authors need to do.
“For example, musicians do this all the time with their own music, though you can’t take a quote or tiny piece of music you haven’t written. But if you wrote that music, you could put a little piece of it out there, like on iTunes, though when you click on iTunes, you only get a minute, or even a few seconds. Likewise, you can put out a short piece to everyone, such as on your Facebook page or YouTube account.
“Then, when a person likes something of yours, you say in an email, ‘If you like this and want the rest of it, go to my website.’ Then, on your website, they pay you 99 cents and you send them the mp3, CD, DVD, or whatever.
“So again, you are sending a little tiny piece of whatever you are producing creatively as loss leader. Then, you monetize what you would otherwise be selling on the backend.”
This approach is very different from the “go after the pirates to defeat them” approach that is common. But in Shepard’s view, that approach hasn’t worked because it’s like the whack-a-mole effort, with an elusive target that keeps coming back again and again. As she explains:
“You would think a lawyer would say, ‘Sue the bastards!’ to get rid of the pirates or be compensated for their damages. But the whole point of this alternate approach is that going after the pirates is like scooping a bucket out of the ocean. I think that a lot of lawyers and people seem to think that a creative work is like a pie, in that if somebody takes a little piece of the pie, then I don’t have that piece of pie anymore. But with copyrighted and digital work, pirating that work is like taking a bucket out of the ocean. But when someone does that, can you even tell? No, you can’t. It’s not like taking some physical property, because when you take that it’s gone. So that’s the problem. A pirate can take a copyrighted work online, but it’s still there and it’s so hard to stop the pirates from doing this. So the next question is how do you monetize it? How can you profit from your creative work other than this way?”
While directing pirates to a website to buy other material might be one approach to monetizing piracy, another is providing an alternate platform where writers can gain compensation, such as a Netflix- or Hulu-type service for books. Still another approach to compensating writers for work that would otherwise be pirated is some kind of application that provides a small payment anytime a particular work is shared. An example of this is the AtContent system described by its co-founder and CEO Alex Semeny:
“AtContent helps bloggers and writers protect their content from plagiarism and piracy outside of their own sites and blogs, so they get compensation for it.
“For example, say you are a writer or blogger, and you have your own blog. There is a problem when a lot of people steal your content, but you know nothing about this audience outside of your blog or website who is reading your content. So you don’t know who is in the audience and therefore you don’t have any way to control this content or date who’s reading it and when. Also you lose the opportunity to build a partnership with these other bloggers who are copying and spread your material, because you don’t know who they are.
“So what AtContent does is we allow bloggers to install our special plug-in on their blog and synchronize with our platform. After that, any other person can still illegally post their post to any other site, but with our content duplication, it is like embedding YouTube videos on any other site. And the author of this content then has the ability from another site to update, track, or write about this content on other sites. Plus the author can see the complete statistics and analytics about the audiences on all of these sites.
“So this system is a way of bringing a whole new audience to the author of the content, and it gives him or her total control on this content outside of his or her own site. And he could even use this to contact those reading his material elsewhere, and let them know that he has other available content that they can purchase.”
Plus, the AtContent team is developing still other ways that the original content creator can be paid for his work, which are still in the development/testing phase. For example, one approach is to provide a way to pay the author of content for every thousand views. As Semeny explains:
“One way this might work is if the author of an ebook publishes his or her chapter as an article by using Adcontent technology with plagiarism and piracy protection. Then, with this app in place, the other person can legally post the original author’s chapter to another blog, and if this chapter gets over one thousand views there, then the person who posted this chapter will pay the author of the ebook for each one thousand views of the material posted. In this way, the person posting the material will have an incentive to make money for him or herself by posting it, and at the same time the author will get paid.”
In sum, these different approaches to monetizing pirated content are ways to deal with the seemingly impossible and time-consuming task of stopping the pirates. While some pirates may be put out of operation by the crackdown efforts through law enforcement of litigation, others take their place, and many pirates subjected to restrictions and penalties will find some way to come back again. But through these various strategies of monetization, instead of being victims of piracy, affected individuals can find ways to monetize by getting the pirates to buy other material. This can be material handled through referrals to the author’s websites or other content for sale. In addition, low-cost alternatives can make it easier for pirates to simply purchase something legitimately, or authors can create a legal platform for compensation from the poster, who is generally posting this material to make money from the author’s work. So it becomes a win-win for the pirates and the author, who is no longer a victim.