Audiobook Bay

Being real, I personally choose to respect an author's wishes regarding piracy of their work.

However, any time I'm on my author account, and someone asks where they can find my stuff, I don't just link to the Amazon page; I also say that all of it is out there on soulseek for free.

Which, I say that on this account too, but I keep the two separate, so it's kinda meaningless on this one lol

No bullshit, when my old books got put into the shared folder of a friend by mistake, I didn't care anyway because they flopped when published because of multiple reasons, but they were/are essentially dead for me.

But then, a few months later I get an email asking about the third book, and where can they find the finished version.

There's been a trickle of those ever since. At this point, more people have read my old books via soulseek than when they were in print. And, those readers have converted to actual sales of the stuff I'm still writing. I have family and friends that were given free copies of all of it that have never any of it. I ain't mad about it, most of them aren't into the genres I write in.

So, I can honestly say that the entirety of my very limited fan base comes from piracy, and that I've made actual money because of that. Less than $20, but still

I know that doesn't scale for a lot of authors and artists, and that there's a big swath where piracy actually does reduce their ability to make a living at it, which is why I don't pirate from authors that have said they don't like it.

But, for real, it isn't like there aren't upsides to it as well.