When Dragonhearted came out, I was pretty sure that no one would want to pirate this book because it wasn’t from an international publisher or anything like that. But a few months after it was out, my book was found on a website that enabled you to pay some third party or whatever with your credit card in order to get it. As far as I knew, this party was not sanctioned by my publisher and I brought it to the attention of my editor. Besides me, the other Asian Book finalists also had their books pirated.
This is not OK.
Even as I write this, I know someone out there may have my book pirated. This is tough for me and all parties who invested so much time and energy into making my book possible. My publisher needs the money to put out more Asian voices. People who work for my publisher need to eat, too. I need to eat. And although I don’t make money by selling the books, the royalties I get all go to a rainy day fund.
Creators go against capitalism because we know that if we don’t create, we die a slow and painful death on the inside. We’re trying to preserve our souls and stories when we create. All of this takes time, money, and investment. If we make it look easy, this is because we’ve had practice and experienced rejection. You see our final products out in the world, but it takes a lot of time and craft and staring crankily at the computer screen to make it work. Even if we enjoy it, it is still work for us and we should get paid.
If you cannot afford our books, go to the library. Borrow it so that the library will still keep bringing in our books. If you really like it after reading it, please make an effort to buy it. If you have money but don’t want to spend so much, wait till when the bookstore has a sale and buy it at a discount. Every little bit helps. Trust us.
If you like a creator’s work, support them. It takes you 5 seconds to read a comic and 2 hours to read my book, but for us, it takes a lot of skill, thought and planning to execute something like this. As creators, what we want is to make a living while creating. It looks like it’s impossible but it becomes possible with people who support us.
You can buy my book at LocalBooks, Kinokuniya, or even search for it on Carousell.