Steve Lieber discusses Underground piracy sales

Mike Masnick on Techdirt had a longer article yesterday about the comic book piracy incident I mentioned the other day, where artist Steve Lieber found that his entire graphic novel Underground had been scanned and posted to a 4chan web forum. There’s too much interesting stuff in the article for me to summarize easily, so I’ll just hit a few points.

When Lieber was notified his book had been pirated, he assumed he’d just find a link to a zip file somewhere. Instead, he found that it had been posted page by page.

[The poster] had to hit "browse" and "upload" over a hundred times to post the book, and all throughout, he was talking about how great it was, nagging people to read it and discuss the story with him. That didn’t feel like a pirate. That felt like a fan. And indeed, some people were starting to talk about it. So I did what I always do. I joined the conversation.

Steve noted that not only did they sell over 150 copies of Underground via Etsy in the days that followed, but their Amazon rankings also “skyrocketed and stayed there for days,” hitting as high as #7 on Amazon’s Manga chart—the only book from their publisher to chart apart from volumes of The Walking Dead (which is currently popular due to its AMC TV series). This is a big boost for the book, which despite receiving excellent reviews premiered to lackluster sales at best.

Due to this experience, Steve said, he is going to make more of his comics downloadable and sharable, at least in situations where he has the right to do so.

Mike Masnick points out:

The moral of the story was not "gee, ‘piracy’ is good." The moral of the story was that engaging your fans in intelligent and meaningful ways, often where and how they want to engage can help you do much better than you would have otherwise. It doesn’t mean "engage and you’re an automatic success." It doesn’t mean "engage and you’ll never have to work again." It means "engage and you’ll do better than you would have otherwise."

We’re living in a more social world these days, and sometimes social networks and forums can promote works in unexpected ways. Or even, as in the case of the Cory Doctorow book I mentioned a couple of hours ago, expected ones. And freebies can often sell paid copies—even if you didn’t post the freebies.