Piracy Part 2

If you read my Golden Dawn blog, you have read some of my thoughts about the file sharing (torrent) community.

It may come to a surprise to several of you that I decided to commit piracy today. Yes, I have created a torrent of a book and posted it to one of the private torrent trackers (The Occult Bz).

In my defense, it is my own book that I decided to pirate. I own the copyright; I can give away copies if I want to.

Before finding the request last night for Golden Dawn Rituals Volume One: Neophyte Ritual Three Officer Version, I actually kicked away making a PDF of it and uploading it to that particular tracker. I always hesitated. I figured it would be viewed more as spam than legit until I saw that five people thought it would be a good file to share.

Honestly, part of it is that I wanted the upload credit. It is not much, but every little bit counts.

Then is also the fact that I got annoyed when I went to revise the book recently (spelling and grammar), and got nailed with the "Your book is 48 pages too short (because we have changed the rules) for the format that it was originally published in. And no, we are not going to let you chose a different printing style!" notice.

Plus, I suspect that the useful shelf life of the book is already over. Sales have dried up (though that might be because the book could not be printed, and no one thought to inform me).

Nevertheless, I wanted to keep that particular version of the Neophyte Ritual available, which is why I published it in the first place.

There is also the fact that I have noticed that the first PDF made of a book tends to stick around. Very seldom do you see an improved version of a file that entered the file sharing community.

And that is the really important part about what I did today.

When I made the PDF, I included a couple of links to my writing blog, my Golden Dawn blog, and to the lodge's (Bast Temple, BIORC, Denver Colorado) website. It is a trick I recently picked up.

If you are going to give something away, make sure that there is an ad inside the item.

I am not just a pirate: I am a self-promoting pirate.