Night Shade has stolen the ebook rights to The Mall of Cthulhu. They do not own them and are offering an electronic edition for sale through webscription.net, which is affiliated with Baen Books, a real publisher who should know better. Nine months ago, Night Shade made a verbal offer to pay me a small sum for the rights. I agreed. They’ve never paid me. They claimed their unauthorized edition was an oversight, and that was somewhat credible at the time. Nine months later, it’s clear that this is not an oversight. It’s a theft of my intellectual property.
I’ve given away the ebook of Mall of Cthulhu in hopes of cutting the legs out from Night Shade and webscription’s piracy of my work. (Guess what, Cory Doctorow? My problem is piracy and obscurity!) If you’d like a free electronic copy, scroll down here, or go to scribd. If you like it, please consider buying the Kindle edition, published by me and sold by Amazon, who pay me regularly for the copies I sell through them. (It’s only 3 bucks! Less than a latte!)
I find it interesting how empowering the new e-book market is for authors. If a print publisher screwed an author over on royalties and printed 100,000 books do you think that the author would go ahead and print and distribute the book on their own and give it away for free to "cut the legs out" from the publisher?
Apparently Night Shade and Cooper have reached an understanding and the royalty check is literally in the mail. The fact that Seamus Cooper (Brendan Halpin) can play hardball with the publisher in the marketplace, as well as getting public support and visibility from bloggers and fellow authors is indicative of the kind of publishing environment we'll see in the future.
Besides, a little controversy on the internets is never a bad thing. I've put the book on my reading list (I figure I'll have a little Cthulhu month-- read China Mieville's Kraken, and maybe re-read some H.P. Lovecraft.
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