Scamming and Piracy

I don't know if readers think that we authors make a boatload of money on our books, but let me assure you, the vast majority of us don't. We get in the neighborhood of 6% royalties of all books sold. When your book costs about $5.00, we're talking 30 cents a book. You have to sell a heck of a lot of books just to make your advance. And these are books that writers spend months writing, sacrificing clean houses, hot meals, family times, going out with friends, taking vacations, sleeping more than five or six hours a night, and goodness knows what else to make their deadlines and deliver stories that people want to read.

All we ask is that people buy these books new. Buy at discounted prices if you must, but please, if the book is available new, buy it new. Otherwise, we won't see a penny for our work. I know that some books can't be found new, and I'm okay with your buying them used in that situation. Or checking them out from the library. But if you want the writers you love to keep writing the books you love, save up a few bucks and buy new, please. It's what makes writing feasible for us, financially. We do write because we love to write, but it's also a business.

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about scamming and piracy. Specifically, this website: http://www.download-provider.com/en/

It purports to be a site where you can download top movies, books, music, etc. for a membership fee. That automatically makes it piracy—downloading copyrighted material for free that you would otherwise have to pay for. It's like stealing from someone, in that the person or persons involved in creating that book, movie, or music is being denied royalty payments on those items.

But more than that, it seems to be a scam site, because it claims to have books that haven't even been written yet. So you pay your money to sign up with the site to download books that don't exist. I suspect it's the same for the movies and music they claim to have. So here's a warning. If you're going to ignore the requests of authors to buy their books new rather than buying used and denying them royalties, don't do it at this site unless you want to be robbed yourself.