By Erin Mitchell
Congratulations! You’ve written a book! Hurrah!
But unless your intent was just to create something your parents could show to their friends forevermore, you want people to read your book, right? Of course.
Reviews. Interviews. Events. The proverbial and much sought-after buzz. It’s all important. And it’s all much harder to get if you don’t give your book away.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m a firm believer that selling books is beyond important because without those crucial sales, writing is kind of just a hobby. But in order to get publicity for anything, you need to show reporters, bloggers and influencers the product. And you can’t charge them for the privilege.
Enter ARCs. Which are fabulous. And far from free to print and distribute. With few notable exceptions, there are never enough ARCs to go around. Which brings us to eARCs (I just made that term up, but you know what I mean).
Some publishers are—understandably—nervous about eARCs. Simply put, they’re afraid that if they put electronic copies of a book out into the marketplace, the book will be pirated and shared and fewer copies will sell. While I understand and acknowledge this concern, I don’t agree with it at all. Why? Music.
Cast your mind back to 1999. Remember Napster? Kazaa? Those we crazy times. Content getting stolen left, right and center. But here’s the rub: This was before iTunes. Before you could easily buy songs. Debates about pricing aside, the fact is, if you were a halfway early adopter of music in an electronic form (that is, you had a pre-iPod MP3 player), it was hard to get music other than illegally. So we P2P stole it.
Flash forward a decade. We’re accustomed to receiving content electronically. We know that if we share it with the world, we’re stealing. The vast majority of us choose not to do that, if for no other reason that doing it is a pain in the ass. When you download a protected, DRMed, expiration-date having eARC from, say, NetGalley, it is technically possible to remove all the protection…but it’s not easy. In fact, it’s decidedly not easy. So why bother? Well, here in the real world, nobody does.
I kind of wish we lived in a world where young people were hard at work building tools to remove DRM from ebooks and networks to share them. But we don’t. So any angst about eARCs is wasted energy, really. Frankly, if you know who you’re giving eARCs to, DRM is unnecessary.
(Gasp! Did she really say that? Yes, she did.)
My point is that if you’ve written a book that you want to sell to readers, having an eARC is just smart. Without one, getting the word out will be difficult. If that means you need to make one with or without DRM, so be it. Because when people read your books and talk about it, readers will know to buy it.
Simple.
