Saturday 30 April 2011

Amazon Pirates Defeated

Good news! The pirated copies of The Cyber Chronicles - Queen of Arlin, and Slave Empire - Prophecy, have been taken down on Amazon.com. Although the staff at Amazon did not respond to my emails regarding this matter, the message evidently got through this time. I'd like to thank everyone who sent emails or made comments on the site, which undoubtedly led to the pirated books being removed.

These books are both available for free on Smashwords.com and it's a sad day when pirates try to make money out of other people's work. A special thanks to Tracy Falbe, who went the extra mile to email Amazon and added reviews warning people about the books being pirated copies. Thanks Tracy! Visit Tracy's site http://www.falbepublishing.com/braveluck/index.html and get a free copy of the first book of her epic fantasy series Union of Renegades.

I hope one day my books will be available on Amazon, but at the moment Smashwords has a technical difficulty with this. Other news is I have now published the rest of The Cyber Chronicles series, Book IV, Cyborg, Book V, Overlord, Book VI, Warrior Breed, Book VII, Sabre, Book VIII, Scorpion Lord and Book IX, Precipice, and they're available on Smashwords.com. You can find them all here: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TCSouthwell. They should be distributed to the other retailers within the next few weeks.

I am now working on Book VII of the Demon Lord series, which is tentatively titled Beast God.

Friday 15 April 2011

Pirates on Amazon

I have recently discovered that two of my free books, Slave Empire – Prophecy and The Cyber Chronicles – Queen of Arlin, have been pirated and are being sold on Amazon.com. I have contacted the relevant department – piracy procurement, apparently – at Amazon and been roundly ignored.

They evidently don’t see the need to protect authors’ copyrights – well why should they when they’re making a cut of the pirate’s profits? They demand that I jump through a whole bunch of red tape hoops to prove I am the author of these books, when they clearly didn’t make the pirate jump through any, or he wouldn’t have been able to pirate my books in the first place.

If people are buying these books at exorbitant prices – $6.99 for Queen of Arlin and $3.20 for Prophecy – they are being resoundingly ripped off, as both these books are free on Smashwords.com. I’m unable to comment on this situation on Amazon, due to the fact that I’ve never bought anything there.

So if anyone would like to help, and has bought stuff on Amazon, please leave comments stating that these pirated books are copyright infringements. Just do a search on Amazon for ‘T C Southwell’ and the two books will pop right up. Thanks to all who help!