My reader magnet has been pirated!

For no special reason at all, I googled my reader magnet. And, lo and behold, I’ve found it on one of these sleazy sites. So what am I going to do? I’ve long learned not to feed the trolls, and demanding them to take it down might feel like feeding them. How am I supposed to know how a stealing troll feels?

But they’ve taken my book. My *book*!

So I asked my author tribe and have been given the advice to do something. So I did. I looked for the DMCA link on that website. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires them to have such a link to complain about copyright infringements. Some of them don’t. In that case, just write to their contact address. This isn’t the most important step as they know what they’re doing and obviously don’t care about abiding to the law. But just to prove myself diligent, I wrote them and made sure to include the phrases that they demanded me to. I am not fluent in Legalese and could not have put it this way myself.

Dear Sir or Madam,
I am the sole copyright holder of a book that you offer for download. Please take it off your site immediately.
I hereby state that the complaining party (i.e. me) in good faith believes that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or law and that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is infringed.
The book in question is this: Ella Braeme, So Many Steps
Kind regards,
        Ella Braeme

In hindsight, I think that it might have been better to search for a template that sounds more like I knew what I was doing. But hey, I still don’t.

So either they take my book down or I will send a letter of this sort to their website provider (they care) and to Google (they can make sure my book, albeit ready for download, cannot be found). Fun times.

And now I’m off to find out about Bookfunnel’s watermarking option.