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Self publishers who feel a little lost in 2012 should take heart in the old rhyme that prescribed for new brides, “something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.” The most important part comes first, something old, because it’s the something old that’s been paying the bills and giving me the breathing space to plan ahead. Something old for most of us means publishing on paper, which remained the largest contributor to my self publishing income in 2011.
Low priced Kindle eBooks, which have taken over as the main source of income for many fiction self publishers, are also something old and a proven business model at this point. Practically 90% of the e-mail I get these days I can respond to by saying, “Publish on Kindle first, worry about the rest later.” Maybe I should just set up an auto-responder. But if eBook reader adoption is beginning to saturate, as suggested by some surveys, paper may hold on to the number one spot for nonfiction self publishing for some time.
There are so many options for something new that I think the problem for authors just starting out in self publishing will be not getting distracted and chasing too many goals at once. For example, I have one title that is used as a textbook, and the options for textbook publishing are exploding. The new Apple Textbook option is a perfect match in terms of price and interactive capabilities, and the iPad screen is the ideal size for my flowcharts and color photos. But if Apple requires I sign up all of my eBooks, it won’t be an option. Amazon has been offering textbook rentals on Kindle since last summer, but I don’t publish my flowcharts books on Kindle due to the small screen size of most of those devices.
Something borrowed has been the big buzz in the Kindle universe this month, since Amazon announced the December payout for Kindle Select participants would be $1.70 per title. The main obstacle for self publishers who want to participate in Select is that the titles must be exclusive to Amazon while included in the program. So if you rushed to get your titles set up with Barnes&Noble and Apple , you can’t include them in Select. Kindle Select has proven to be a powerful way for self publishers to get more exposure for their titles and, for 99 cent titles, to earn more money by giving the books away than by selling them!
Something blue for my self publishing efforts has been copyright infringement and the impact it had on the Internet publishing portion of my business. The guide to fighting copyright infringements I published on Kindle last week drew over 600 downloads during its five day free promotion, though Amazon has declined to keep it free in return for my accepting no royalties. In the meantime, I’ve been moving some of the most popular pages off of my FONERBOOKS website, in part to give them a chance to recover from Panda and in part to segregate subjects so it will be easier for me to sell or give away those parts of the business.
My direct eBook sales declined around 70% over the last year due to the loss of website visitors and to higher search visibility for pirated copies. And my Adsense earnings declined to zero last year when I removed ads from my website in protest over Google’s promotion of piracy. Since then, I’ve become a big fan of Google’s DMCA Dashboard, and I’ve seen positive signs that they are finally getting proactive about copyright infringements on some Google properties. For example, they recently disabled a Google Sites account that existed to channel search users to piracy sites after I DMCA’d a single page. I might be better off putting some Adsense back on my non-book pages and saving the money in a special pot for litigation:-)
The wedding day outfit for new brides concludes with “and a sixpence in her shoe.” I can’t think of better advice for self employed authors than to save some money for a rainy day, because partners like Amazon, Apple and Barnes&Noble don’t stay married to the likes of you or me when something better comes along.
I just published a copyright enforcement guide for authors and publishers who are fed up with seeing infringements destroy their livelihood. By including the eBook in Kindle Select, I was able to run a five day promotion where it will be free for anybody, providing they own a Kindle or have the Kindle reader installed on their computer, iPad or phone. [update] The free period ran out, over 600 copies were downloaded. I hope to convince Amazon to add the guide to their permanent free collection, sent them an e-mail on Friday.[update]
My preference would have been to simply hand it out as a free PDF, but around a third of the material in the eBook is from blog posts published on this site, and the last thing I need is more potential duplicate content problems with Google. I took a non-traditional approach for what amounts to a how-to book by saving the why-to for the end. The first half of this short guide starts right off with the tools and techniques for fighting online infringements. My assumption is that authors and publishers who are looking for help fighting copyright infringements already know how copyright law works (and doesn’t work), so I wanted to save them a lot of page flipping. The second half of the guide starts with the basics of copyright law and why copyright registration is important, and closes with a discussion of who is driving copyright infringements and how turning a blind eye to online copying can come back to haunt you.
I went with “Version 1.0″ for the edition number since I hope to make this a living guide, updating it on a regular basis as the both Internet and tools for fighting infringements evolve. I’m very interested in hearing feedback about approaches other authors and publishers are trying, and I’m willing to turn the guide into an ensemble piece if that makes sense.
It’s clear to me that the only way authors and publishers can hope to defend our rights is by making our presence felt. In the corporate world in which we live, that means targeting the bottom line of those who enable the business of infringement by forcing them to spend money complying with the law. If the cost of responding to copyright infringement complaints rises above the profits earned through promoting infringements, the corporations who claim their activities are “protecting” the Internet will change their song. They are in it for the money.
[Update] Amazon replied to my request to make the book free:
Due to operational costs, it isn’t possible to select a $0 price for your book at this time.
It went on longer than that, but the first line was all that matters. If you have Prime membership, you can borrow it for free, otherwise it’s going to cost 99 cents unless you wait 90 days for the next five day promo.
http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Internet-Copyright-Infringements-ebook/dp/B006WG0T0W
[ end update]
I rarely do news posts, but this Amazon Press Release is worth announcing.
The top line is that they are paying publishers $1.70 for each Kindle title borrowed by Amazon Prime members in December.
Only 295,000 titles from KDP publishers were borrowed in December. Whether that’s because large trade publishers aren’t in the KDP program or because most Prime members with Kindles never got around to borrowing a book isn’t clear. But my bet is that most Prime members used their free borrow on books from big trade publishers. When you think about it, 295,000 titles borrowed from self publishers is pretty impressive and has no doubt helped many finction writers reach new readers.
Since Prime Members borrowed around 1,800 copies of my eBooks in December, I should earn just over $3,000 for the month. It seems strange to me that Amazon will pay me $1.70 for each $0.99 title loaned out, but a lot of things Amazon does are strange.
Amazon announced that they will raise January’s pot of money to $700,000, up from $500,000 in December.
One key ingredient still missing from the self publisher’s arsenal is the cash advance. Only a miniscule percentage of self publishing authors will see their first novel become the instant hit that removes all economic barriers from their future writing careers. Compare that to moderately fortunate trade authors who stagger from advance to advance until they acheive a hit or the advances dry up. Essentially all self publishing novelists have to finance their writing through day jobs or through family support.
Self published fiction eBooks, especially on Kindle, has become a recognizable business model. But the competition is fierce and the odds against a break-out success are long. As J. Konrath has pointed out on his blog, it can take a long time to break through and begin earning a living from writing fiction, if it ever happens at all. The only advice he can offer is to keep writing and publishing.
The question I’m posing today is whether there’s a solution for self publishers, akin to the traditional publishing industry advance, that can keep promising authors financially afloat and working at their craft until their earnings reach critical mass. This is particularly applicable to the Kindle model, where low priced titles, often anchored by a free or 99 cent loss leader, are the driving factor in raising both the visibility and the eventual income of a self published author. How can fiction authors who get off to a promising start obtain financial backing to give them the freedom to write full-time?
I think one answer could be selling percentage points in the future profit of a given work in progress. An author whose titles on Kindle are generating a reasonable number of sales per month, somewhere in the low thousands of copies at the 99 cent price point, has proven commercial viability without rising above the poverty level. Investors and fans earning 0.01% on bank deposits might be willing to gamble on buying a piece of the profits for that next book, enabling the author work full time at writing.
Assuming that fiction authors would be willing to sell a percentage of the rights to their next title in return for an upfront payment, who would run the market and how would the price per percentage point be set? Perhaps pricing would happen through competitive bidding, which makes eBay auctions an option for conducting the market. But authors would need a method to promote the auction to draw the maximum number of bidders.
A better model for authors to sell shares in their self published fiction would be through existing genre fan sites for science fiction, romance, Christian fiction, etc, which would have to implement the markets for a share of the take. A prospectus for a novel underway would be prepared, including the author’s audited sales history on Amazon for existing titles and the first few chapters of the work in question.
 It shouldn’t be too hard to pool micro-investments in future book sales into synthetic securities which couldn’t do any worse than the Wall Street mortgage backed securities. Pooling micro-investments from strangers to buy a percentage of a novel’s eventual profits makes more sense than asking authors to deal with selling fractions of a percentage point of book rights. Fifty casual genre fans tossing in $10 each would create a $500 share, which would be enough to purchase one point of future income from a single title for most struggling authors. The stronger the prospectus, the more fans and investors would be willing to pay, but authors would need to have realistic expectation as well.
If a $10 investment included a free copy of the eBook when it’s completed, it would be a pretty compelling investment compared to keeping the $10 in the bank and earning less than a penny a year in interest. The only complication is that investors might be tempted to give the book inflated positive reviews on Amazon to goose their investment returns, but that’s not really the author’s problem.
Authors with a popular FaceBook page, blog, or legions of Twitter followers might try using PayPal or eBay to sell shares in a future novel direct to their fan base, though I suspect it might be necessary to get legal advice at some point to avoid violating securities laws. Simpler is likely better, so maybe we better skip the synthetic book futures royalties backed securities and not even get involved in the fractional movie rights to Kindle published novels derivatives market. But it may be a good time to buy the domain name FICTIONFUTURES.COM.
Overall, I believe that selling shares in future income from unwritten books could give a whole new meaning to the term creative destruction.
I originally titled this post, Amazon’s Free eBooks Outsell All Other Amazon Books Combined, but I think people will be more interested in the paid book comparison on the graph. The graph is from my page on Kindle eBook sales which I updated yesterday. The main caveat is that January 2nd isn’t a typical day since many people must have received Kindles and iPads for Christmas and are still excited about buying eBooks. The graph shows paid Kindle eBook sales vs all paper book sales, and I’ll pick a few points off for people who don’t read log-log graphs: First, the oval green data point at the top couldn’t be narrowed down any more because at the time I checked the category bestseller lists, the #2, #3 and #4 bestselling paper books fell between the #21 and #68 bestselling paid Kindle books. So the very top of the curve can move a little to the left or the right but it doesn’t really matter much as we’re only talking about a handful of books that would be affected.
The break-even rank where paper book sales are roughly equivalent to paid Kindle sales doesn’t come until around 20,000. Another way of putting it is that on January 2nd, 2012, the top 20,000 paid Kindle eBooks were outselling the top 20,000 paper books by a wide margin. An easy point to read on the graph shows that the 300th most popular paid Kindle eBook was selling around the same number of copies as the 20th most popular print book, more than an order of magnitude better. The 3,000th most popular paid Kindle eBook was selling around the same as the 750th most popular paper book, four times as many copies. The curves continue to draw together until the cross-over point at around 20,000, where print books of that rank slowly begin selling more copies of paid eBooks of that rank.
The reason I keep referring to paid Kindle eBooks is because free Kindle eBooks are ranked apart from paid. In the middle of the range for the top 1,000 Kindle books, it appears that free eBooks “outsell” paid eBooks by a ratio of more than 5:1 .[UPDATE] Amazon reported last May that Kindle eBooks were already outselling paper books in this press release. But the gap has grown more rapidly than I expected.[UPDATE]
So with paid Kindle books outselling, and I’d say, way outselling paper books, and free Kindle books being five times as popular than paid Kindle books near the top of the curve, it means that “sales” of free Kindle eBooks are greater than all other Amazon book sales combined, at least for the top 10,000 titles or so.
Since availability of free eBooks peters out in the mid tens of thousands, by which point they are pretty obscure, it’s possible that the long tail of all the other book formats adds up to enough to overcome the sales advantage of free. But given the growing use of free Kindle eBooks for promotional purposes on Amazon, I wouldn’t be so sure. I spend the weekend looking at free Science Fiction books on Kindle, and nearly every new popular series leads off with a free title.
Amazon Select raised the number of free titles available in December with their one free copy a month for Prime members program. I’ll write up my conclusions about Select in a week or two, but I can tell you now that a three day free promotion for one of my titles doubled the sales for the three days after the trial, so even though I gave away more copies in a day than I’d normally sell in a month, I sure didn’t lose by it. But I remain baffled by why over 1,500 prime users wasted their one borrow for December on one of my 99 cent eBooks rather than a more expensive title.
It’s all about discovery for self publishing fiction. Give the first one away for free and sell the sequels. Even the trade publishers are figuring it out.
I’ve been fighting duplicate content problems for many months now, primarily by filing DMCA complaints. What came as a genuine surprise to me is how little “legitimate” copying I detect. An example of borderline legitimate copying would be a site that reworded four of my top drawing pages and redrew the flowcharts that went with them a few years ago. It would have made an interesting copyright infringement case, but I let it slide and it now outranks my site for related searches. Most content theft is cut-and-paste, automated rewrites or quick edits by people who aren’t fluent in English. The snippet below is from one of my illustrated laptop web pages:
And now a rewrite which I assume was automated because the whole page went on in the same vein:
I could easily have knocked down the infringement with a DMCA complaint, but this particular page of mine was so heavily infringed and syndicated that I just got sick of trying. And I’m not convinced that chasing the infringements out of the search engine’s public index removes them from the data pool for analysis. Since the prose was hardly a labor of love to start with, I decided to reword the entire page and abandon the original text to the thieves. Now that paragraph now reads:
This is the sort of activity I swore I’d never waste my time on since it has nothing to do with readers, it’s simply an attempt to get out from under a duplicate content penalty from search engines. It makes good business sense since my self publishing business remains highly dependent on discovery through Internet search, but it’s a miserable state of affairs.
If you’re wondering why so many people stole the text (and sometimes the photographs) from this particular page, it’s because they were trying to promote eCommerce websites selling laptop batteries. They would find my page while searching for content about battery problems, stick in a few keywords related to the brands they were trying to sell, add a link to their website and then syndicate the result on “free” article websites. Everybody involved, the thief, the article website, and the advertising services used by the article website, make money. And as long as they respond to DMCA takedown requests, there’s nothing a self publishing author can do about it.
At this point, my plan is to collect a list of unique phrases from the pages that are most attractive to content thieves and make a point of checking them every week or so, quickly filing complaints in DMCA Dashboard as needed. Maybe it will prevent the unbridled spread that occurred when I left things to take care of themselves for a few years.
Just a couple years ago the Borders bookstore chain accounted for around one in six trade books sold in the United States. I’m not including textbooks, professional books or religious books here, just the fiction and nonfiction you would expect to find in a bookstore, supermarket or other retailer with bestselling books. Borders is completely gone now, yet watching the sales numbers for Barnes&Noble and Amazon and listening to book retailer buzz at large, it’s beginning to look like a double digit percentage of the book market from the Harry Potter era is simply gone.
If eBook sales were picking up the slack, I wouldn’t bother writing about it since everybody now expects eBooks to replace paper books as the prime distribution method for books in the near future. But eBook sales, as fast as they are growing, aren’t making up for the steep decline in print sales. Who would have believe that in the quarter since Borders shut its doors, book sales at Barnes and Noble bookstores have actually dropped a little?
The title of this post should make it clear that I think those book sales have gone up in electronic smoke. The cold truth is that most trade book reading is recreational, a form of entertainment. Kindle started the fire by proving that reading is an immersive experience of engaging with text. Most readers just didn’t give a damn about book design, font selection, layout, the sensual experience of handling and acquiring paper books that so many pundits were babbling about a few years ago. Readers are in it for the entertainment value and don’t really care how they get it as long as it doesn’t cause eyestrain.
Now, as it turns out, a chunk of the book reading public were readers of convenience rather than vocation. It wasn’t the core properties of a book, a serial presentation of ideas or scenes with a beginning, a middle and an end that made them readers. It was the convenience of having on-demand entertainment that could be taken into the bathroom or enjoyed on a train or in a bed that drove many people to keep reading. Then along came iPad and blew a hole in the time previously devoted to reading books.
Part of the time that would have been spent reading books is now being spent with FaceBook, Twitter and other social media consumption. The balance has shifted to consuming professional video content, films and TV programs. I probably watched a movie a day during the free month of Prime membership that came with my Kindle Fire. I mainly caught up on foreign films, most of which weren’t very good, and I probably pulled the plug on around one in two movies after I started watching. But the point is, I did it sitting in the same chair where I do most of my reading, and in truth, it didn’t feel all that different.
I’m not a candidate for giving up on reading in favor of video, I quit watching TV years ago and the compulsive movie watching was more about getting something of my Kindle Fire while the getting was good, and free. But I wouldn’t be surprised if ten years from now, fiction sales by unit (print and electronic) have fallen by half over their peak. It may be that the universal adoption of much lower pricing for trade eBooks would slow the process, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
The iPad more like a next generation phone that’s bad for making voice calls than an enhanced eBook reader or a stripped down computer. It’s the connection aspect that sells iPads, the quick interface to friends, family and even work, with the added advantage that the iPad version of touch typing gives people an excuse to keep it short. A device that maximizes the instant gratification value that can be derived from your full range of relationships, from the most casual to the most intimate, while offering a storefront for all the professionally produced entertainment you can consume when things get slow.
The iPad isn’t a device at all, it’s a metaphor for modern society.
Update: See the comments for the details of the lending program.
Three months ago I wondered whether Amazon’s eBook lending program for Prime users would leave self publishers out in the cold. Last week I got the answer and immediately signed up to make my qualifying Kindle titles available through KDP (Kindle Desktop Publishing) Select. I want to make clear at the start of this post that I didn’t read any of the small print for the program, and I might have skimmed over some of the large print as well. I’ve skipped participating in several Amazon programs in the past because I didn’t like the contract terms, but as I really wanted to give eBook lending a try, I figured I was better off not reading the details.
Amazon Prime customers borrowed close to 160 copies of my eBooks over the long weekend, which I measure from 3:00 PM Friday when it occurred to me to write down some data points, to 3:00 PM Monday, for a 72 hour weekend. Here’s how I think the program works, based on what I read about it a few months ago in the press. If I have it all wrong, feel free to pop my bubble.
For each copy that is simultaneously out on loan, I assume Amazon buys a copy from the publisher, me. After a flurry of initial sales, Amazon will own enough copies to cover all future simultaneous lending needs, and that will be the end of my KDP Select library sales. Since Prime members are only allowed to borrow one Kindle book at a time, they are highly motivated to return eBooks they aren’t actually using.
I assume this will work against me with my genre lists of free classics on Kindle because readers will simply load up the free classics they want at the moment and return the eBook knowing they can borrow it again later. But it may work in my favor for the Hebrew flashcard eBooks I published, since readers who find them useful would likely want to own them.
One of the missing variables for me in making the decision is the percentage of Kindle owners who are also Prime members. If the participation rate is very high, I suspect my future eBook sales will drop very low. But if only a quarter or a third of Kindle owners are Prime members, it may help discovery for the eBooks without destroying future sales.
I think that fiction writers who are trying to build a reputation can only benefit from adding their first novel to the lending library and not worrying about sales versus lending. I wouldn’t fool around with raising the price before joining in order to make a windfall profit from Amazon, it will only depress regular sales, and price remains one of the critical factors driving fiction purchases from unknown authors. But I’m sure some people will fool around with publishing high priced eBooks strictly for the lending market.
Amazon does hold out the carrot of divvying up a pot of money ($500,000) every month according to the popularity of each eBook. This resembles the solution to eBook piracy that my cousin suggested earlier this year, that eBook popularity should be tracked by a government agency which then splits up a pot of money raised through taxes to compensate publishers. The main difference is that the Kindle store is a proprietary platform where it’s easy to track everything and self publishers have the right to opt in on a title-by-title basis.
I discovered the opt-out this morning after making the blog post by clicking the “info” button for a title I had included in the lending library. I’m not really sure why Amazon offers the opt-out, it could me that I have the model completely wrong and they aren’t buying eBooks in order to lend them out. And if they are buying the books, would they throw them out at the end of 90 days and start buying fresh copies for lending, to mimic the wear of paper books at real libraries? I can see where not having read the contract is turning into a real liability:-)
So the Kindle publisher gets the chance to opt out of the lending library on a quarterly basis for each title.It isn’t clear whether Amazon would continue loaning out the book it was unpublished (versus opted out) for legal reasons such as libel or copyright infringement. I wonder if brick-and-mortar libraries are obligated to stop lending paper books in such cases, or if the publisher is required to buy them back?
Financially, my guess is that lending eBooks is a great model for new fiction writers due to the discovery aspect, and a bad model for most nonfiction writers, with the possible exception of literary nonfiction or self-help type books. The problem for most nonfiction, travel, how-to, etc, is that many readers are only interested in specific bits of the book. So many of those books will be borrowed and returned quickly, and a low percentage of readers will feel the need to purchase them outright.
This past week, I stumbled across a young American who had purchased a ready-made website from a company in India that consisted of pages taken from my Foner Books website. The turn-key package also came with a computer repair eBook to be sold for $49.00 which was largely mine as well. To top it off, he paid $1,600 to an SEO company in the UK to create links to “his” site. Rather than pursuing pointless legal action, I gave him some advice which I’m expanding upon below in case you know a young man who is looking to make an easy killing online.
My Dear Friend,
I know of no legitimate way to earn money online and satisfy your desire for income, other than working hard at something for which you actually have an aptitude. The advantages you refer to in purchasing a turn-key website and paying a black hat SEO company to provide you with links are small in comparison with risks of failure for both your business and your soul. A man without a trade is only half a man, and trying to purchase a trade from scammers is about as wise as going hiking in the winter with just one boot.
If you believe that you must choose a career on the Internet despite having no skills in the creation of content, programming, or building social networks, my advice is you stick to the oldest profession – retail. You may think this a paradox, my recommending buying and selling online right after telling you it’s impossible to buy a legitimate turn-key business, so let me state my reasons below:
- There’s always a need for middlemen in retail, so why not you?
- Retail is seen by many ambitious young men as boring. If you work hard and learn everything you can about a small niche, there’s every chance you’ll eventually become knowledgeable enough to succeed.
- As long as you behave ethically – legally acquiring your goods, properly describing them to potential customers and delivering as promised, nobody can accuse you of being a crook.
- There are established retail platforms like eBay and Amazon Marketplace that provide all of the infrastructure you need for handling money, tracking inventory and shipping goods.
- Every animal that walks upright is always shopping, though the ascetics prefer to shop for donations.
- The sin in profiting excessively on a sale is less than the sin of fooling somebody into giving you money for nothing in return.
- You won’t lie awake at night wondering about the people you conned out of their hard earned cash with your fake eBooks.
- Lastly, when you serve your customers well, you’ll actually make some of them happy.
So much for my reasons, I still advise you to look for a job in the bricks-and-mortar world you know something about rather than chasing gold online.
My thanks to Benjamin Franklin and his “Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress” for the template.
As to the company in India that’s been selling my work, fortunately their parent company is ISO 9000 certified, which gave me a little leverage in demanding they clean up the mess. It’s not important to me whether the plagiarism was done by an outside writer as they claim or by a full time employee, I just wanted it off the Internet. They immediately replaced it with another product that appears to me to have been stolen from another writer, who I’ve e-mailed.
The generic term for these scams is PLR, Private Label Rights. The seller claims to have authored an acceptable eBook, one that won’t create a 100% return rate from angry customers, and then sells the rights to re-label that eBook to suckers who believe it’s a great way to get rich. Often, a turn-key website is sold along with the PLR eBook as a marketing platform. The recipe calls for adding paid links, waiting for search engines to send visitors, and going into the business of selling advertising and selling eBooks.
That anybody thinks this can be an ethical or socially useful business model just boggles my mind.
There aren’t any copyright police. When somebody takes your work and reuses it on a web page or in a published book, there are no criminal penalties and no law enforcement agencies you can look to for help.
The three risks faced by copyright infringers are relatively minor: their good reputation – but they don’t have one, their investment – but there’s no investment cost to online publishing infringements, and getting sued - but the DMCA offers blanket protection in most cases. And since most writers self publishing through their own websites don’t bother registering copyrights for the website every three months, they would normally be unable to recover legal costs or claim statutory damages, making any lawsuit an expensive Pyrrhic victory.
Given that there’s little fear of facing copyright enforcement actions on the part of the infringers, the next question is whether or not it makes any business sense for self publishers to invest time seeking out and combating copyright infringements.
For starters, most authors will want to protect their intellectual property when they see infringers selling infringing works. This year I’ve had two books removed from Amazon Kindle for copyright infringement, one which included an entire published eBook of mine and another which infringed on several web pages. This was easily accomplished through e-mails to Amazon’s legal department. I’ve also had two books removed from Google Books for copyright infringements by filing DMCA requests with Google Books.
It also makes sense for authors who rely on web-published book excerpts to market their work to combat the infringements that can lead search engines to penalize the author’s website. Since the vast majority of the websites responsible for copyright infringements are protected from legal action by the DMCA as long they respond to DMCA complaints, this puts a heavy burden on the self publisher. Within the realm of DMCA enforcement, there are two ways to go about it.
The traditional model is to look up the information for the website owner and file an individual DMCA complaint for each infringement you find. Drawbacks to this system include the requirement that you supply your personal contact information to people who’ve already proven they are ethically challenged, that you have to spend appreciable time researching and assembling each complaint, and that you have to carefully track and follow up each complaint to make sure that action is taken. If all goes well, the infringing page or content will be removed from the Internet, but under the DMCA law, it can reappear on the same website the next day with no liability to the site owner as long as the letter of the law is followed. For these reasons, I only resort to direct DMCA complaints these days when I’m really annoyed or when I see the infringing site is ranking well in search engines, especially for queries including my book titles.
Google recently added the DMCA Dashboard to their WebMaster Tools which allows you to get infringing pages removed from Google search results much more efficiently. I can easily get fifty infringements removed from the Google search results in the amount of time it would take to research and file a single DMCA complaint with a website owner. But there’s a problem in this DMCA paradise because Google doesn’t remove the content their search engine index, they just filter it out after the search is performed and don’t include it in the results.
 The rejected URLs are actually Blogspot posts that are passed to Blogger for removal How do I know this? Because if you search for random exact phrases from pages that have been removed from the search results, Google is happy to tell you that these pages have been removed due to DMCA complaints. The only way they can know this is if they are preserving those pages in their search index. What this means is that they are probably still be using those infringing pages in their algorithms for detecting duplicate content and in many cases, labeling the author’s original web pages as syndications or copies.
It’s still worthwhile using the DMCA Dashboard because when the infringement is hosted on other Google sites like Blogspot, they pass the complaint to those sites for actual removal. And in some cases, the DMCA complaints are getting passed on to other website owners as well. I don’t understand how this part of the process works, perhaps they only do it for websites participating in Webmaster Tools or websites with publicly available contact information. I do know that if I go back and click through the URLs in a DMCA Dashboard complaint after a week or two, some of the infringing pages from larger sites will have been removed from the web.
Technique is important if you want to use your enforcement time efficiently. The first trick I learned is to use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, because it’s faster and it doesn’t lock up as often on funky sites. Secondly, don’t try to paste URLs you’ve visited directly from the browser to an open DMCA complaint in another window. Use Notepad to save up a list of all the infringements you find on a particular page using an unique search phrase in quotation marks. When you get to the final page of the search results, Google will display a message like:
Click on “repeat the search with the omitted results included” and visit the URLs you haven’t checked yet, which FireFox will display as blue rather than purple. When you’ve finshed with all the results for a given phrase, choose a different unique search phrase from the same page to find more infringements, because Google does not return every last page in their index for every search.
When you’re ready to file the complaint, just copy and paste all the URLs from Notepad into the DMCA form. You wouldn’t believe how many hours I lost through accidentally hitting the “back” button on an open DMCA form while navigating back and forth before I adopted the Notepad approach. It’s also a lifesaver if the browser locks up, and you can’t close Notepad by mistake without a prompt to save your work.
For “serious” infringements, like entire eBooks appearing in ScribD, you’ll probably want to go back and use Google’s URL Removal Tool to flush the cached version, because large sites redirect removed pages rather than returning 404 “page not found.”
You should also keep a second Notepad file open at the same time to save up infringing pages that display Adsense so you can file a separate DMCA complaint with Adsense. I only started doing this a couple days ago and it’s hugely satisfying because an Adsense DMCA complaint can really ruin the day of a copyright infringer.
If you’re really serious about cleaning up the web, it’s also helpful to install the Live HTTP Headers add-on to Firefox. It allows you to capture the intermediate URLs of pages that are redirected so you can file the DMCA complaint and so you can notify the site owner in cases where the site has obviously been hacked. I see this quite a bit when I’m chasing infringements on my financial writing, so I get on the phone and let site admin know. In the example below, pages on the Vanderbilt Library site were being redirected to a phony mortgage site running ads:
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