Conversation with My Wife (27)
My wife’s book is pirate booty. Is it just me, or is that strange?
My wife has written two books for kids, Caitlyn’s Adventure and Who Kidnapped Sheb Woolly? Both are self-published (very easy to do with little financial investment, by the way; we used Amazon’s Createspace, but there are others out there). She’s working on a third in the series, Caitlyn and the Best-Dressed Nest, but her mom’s illness and death took the creative wind out of her sails for a long time (Mom was the one who suggested the titles to Best-Dressed Nest and Who Kidnapped Sheb Woolly?, so just working on the book has emotional baggage).
Meanwhile I have one of my daily automatic background Google searches looking for “Caitlyn’s Adventure” out there in the interwebs because hey, who knows when some kind soul will say something? Although, to date, nobody has. Until…
ME: “Caitlyn got pirated. I got notified today by my Google search.”
DEB: “What?! Somebody pirated my book?”
ME: “Yup. Turned up on a site that does pirated ebooks. Sign up for $15 a month and get unlimited stolen property.”
DEB: “That’s awful! Can we stop them? We can’t, can we.”
ME: “Nope! Too hard, and since we haven’t actually made any money on the books yet, it’s hard to argue that they’re stealing our livelihood. Plus our actual market is the print version. And, we already have the electronic version available on our website, so anybody can read it for free online.”
DEB: “So people are paying somebody who stole something they could get for free if they wanted to?”
ME: “But you can add ‘had my stuff pirated’ to your list of author accomplishments, honey!”
What the hell, I’ll put in a plug for the books. Might as well get something out of this.
