Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Stolen Book Update: Of Honor and Love

Hello, everyone! I'm in a much better mood as I write this. My free book, Of Honor and Love, that was stolen and posted for sale by someone without my authorization, was removed from sale at Amazon within hours of me contacting Amazon's Security, Author Central, and Copyright Divisons. Woo hoo!

I really have to give praise to Amazon. Everyone I communicated with took this matter very seriously. Each one was professional, courteous, and they worked quickly to get this situation resolved and have the book taken down. My thanks goes out to Amazon for the wonderful service they provided!

Unfortunately, it seems this person had also stolen more works from the M/M Romance Group on Goodreads and listed them for sale on Amazon. The thief posted all the anthologies from the Don't Read in the Closest event in 2011 and had them for sale without the group's or authors' permission. I also reported the anthologies, along with several other people, and the books have since been removed.

If you're an author who has written for one of the M/M Romance Group's events, I encourage you, please check Amazon for your work and the anthologies it was featured in to ensure your efforts and hard work aren't being stolen and profited from. In this age of ebooks, it's hard to prevent things such as this from happening, but as this experience has shown, the thieves can be stopped.

It's really a despicable thing, to steal the hard work of authors and the money of readers. The nerve of this person amazes me! However, there was a bright point in this and that was seeing the unity of authors and readers working together to spread the word on these thefts. I truly believe that it was thanks to the many retweets on Twitter, sharing on Facebook, review posting on Amazon and reporting to them, "liking" and discussions on Goodreads, that helped bring this situation to Amazon's attention. Many, many people were speaking and sharing the truth against this thief. And the good guys have won, because the books have been removed :-) From me personally regarding Of Honor and Love, my deepest thanks and gratitude goes out to everyone who helped get the word out to not buy the book and that it was stolen. Your help and support means the world and beyond to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you!  

No comments:

Post a Comment