[jasonzc]

Six or eight of my ebooks have made it out into the wild, being torrented on thepiratebay.org. Good for them. They're budget titles, for the most part, and they have links to my other books in them. When I got into this, I wanted readers, not money, as such.

But I've noticed that it's a good way to examine the popularity of individual titles, or rather, interest in them. The scary thing is, the self-publishing book is getting twice the downloads of the fiction titles. Does everyone really still want to be a writer, now?

The downloads are the inverse of what I expected:

Pirate Bay:
Self-pub book > POETRY > Short Stories > Novellas.

Amazon:
Novellas > Short Stories > Self-pub > Poetry

I realize this is hardly a scientific survey, but it is sort of eye-opening nevertheless. I wonder if it's because of the international reach of the site, or some other factor that I'm overlooking? It's not about blurbs and covers, as there are no covers involved, and the blurbs for my poetry book and short stories are pretty sparse. It's not timing, as they all seem to have been uploaded at the same time.

Every time I think I'm beginning to understand things, I learn something new that forces me to reexamine what I thought I knew.

 

[Saul Tanpepper]

The fact that the d/l rates differ tells me there's no correlation. I think there's always going to be direct comparison between breakout books and pirate activity, but for the rest of us, it's more a matter of someone happening to come across the book and uploading it to a torrent site.

 

[dalya]

They see only the filename, so expect higher torrents on some things solely based on the title.

For example, I have one freebie on iTunes (which is not torrents, but illustrates my point) that gets WAAAAY more downloads. If you just hear the title (Lexie's First Time) it really sounds like porn. It's definitely not family-safe, but it's not the *sort of thing* I think many people downloading it think it is. Still, I hope they like it.

But, yeah, point being ... it's all about the filename.