Melville House Books

Tess Gerritsen: Thinks she'll survive

Bestselling thriller writer Tess Gerritsen was intrigued when she noticed stories about an Attributor study in which “publishing losses from illegal downloads are estimated to be three billion dollars” (see the earlier MobyLives report). So, as she explains in this post on her website, she went to one of the download sites mentioned in the report ….

…. and checked out how many Tess Gerritsen books were available for free downloading. I found over ninety files available, in a variety of languages, including the entire Jane Rizzoli series. The site tells you how many times the files have been downloaded, and at least 4,000 copies in English have been downloaded. That’s 4,000 book sales I never made. And that’s just the English titles, on just one site. Were I to track down every site on the web that offers free downloads of my books, I’m guessing the number would be many times that number. Thousands and thousands of book sales that never happened because readers got the stories for free.

So what’s her constructive advice? Well, she doesn’t have any. We’re all fucked, it seems. “We want to believe that the print book will always be with us, that our children and grandchildren will prefer a real book, just as we do. Buggy whip manufacturers probably thought the same thing.”

Don’t worry about Gerritsen, though — see, she has this friend who is “a legendary singer/songwriter, a man who wrote one of the defining songs of our generation. He made a fortune in the music business and is still very much in demand on the concert circuit, but he says that with rampant illegal downloading of tunes, there’s no way he would be able to achieve that success today.” And Gerritsen, see, is just like him, so she’s going to be fine. But as for the rest of us …

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.