Scribd.com Apologizes

It's been almost a month since a reader informed me that Scribd.com had begun scamming their users into paying to download the e-books I've provided for free for the last ten years. Much uproar followed.

If you missed the debacle, it was pretty short-lived on this end. I don't associate with scammers, so I yanked all my e-books off Scribd.com and deleted my account. I also went through my entire blog archive to mark every single post where I've mentioned Scribd.com with a link to my post about the scam. Then I paid for a file storage account with Google Docs to temporarily host my library while I explore other options. Took me about a week to get it all done -- and that's all I did.

News of people getting ripped off by an online publisher tends to go viral, and so my post started making the rounds. I understand that Scribd.com responded to it indirectly by soft-selling their scam on the Huffington Post. GalleyCat evidently also defended them. Disclaimer: I've not read the posts. I was not interested in Scribd.com's excuses for ripping off readers. I was done with them.

Since I'm now being regarded as the one who blew the whistle on them, however, it's only fair that I post a link to Scribd.com's public apology for their greed. Here's the gist: they have not shut down the scam, but they've provided some ways for their authors to opt-out of it, and they are very sorry we misunderstood their intentions.

I'm not buying it. If daily operations actually have gotten too expensive for Scribd.com (this was the excuse they gave me when I e-mailed them about why they were using my content in their scam), they should have come to me and asked me to pay for the space I was using. I'd have been happy to pay them a reasonable annual fee for hosting my little online library. I now pay Google Docs $5.00 a year for 20 gb of file storage space; I pay Photobucket $40.00 a year to host my online photo archive. But instead, they chose to violate my copyright and non-profit distribution notice in my e-books to rip off readers for something I have always given away for free. They are very sorry about it, though.

And now I am done with Scribd.com.

Scribd.com Gets Greedy

It's been brought to my attention that Scribd.com has begun charging people to download my free e-books hosted on their site. To get around my copyright and the free distribution notice I've placed in each e-book, they are using an archive subscription scam to make their money (this also neatly avoids them having to pay me any royalties on the profits they make.) Evidently all the money they've been raking in from the Google ads they've posted on my e-book pages hasn't been enough for them.

I was not made aware of this new policy by Scribd at all; a reader kindly brought it to my attention. If you have free stories or documents hosted on this site, chances are they're doing the same to you.

I immediately contacted Scribd.com and demanded an explanation, which they provided at their leisure. Basically they washed their hands of any liability and ethics by telling me it was my problem, not theirs. In order to prevent Scribd from further profiting from my free books, I have to remove each e-book individually from their archives (for instructions on how to do this, see Scribd's instructions here.) As I discovered this morning this is going to take a considerable amount of time for me to accomplish, and it's not a permanent solution; they tell me I'll have to check the documents regularly to see to it that they aren't arbitrarily returned to the archive, where Scribd can then again start charging people to download them.

I find the situation particularly ironic, as anyone can bootleg my work on the internet with no problem, yet when I try to give it away for free, greedy people still try to make a buck off it. Writers just can't win.

Honestly, I do not want to deal with this garbage right now, and I'm tempted to delete the entire library this morning and say the hell with it. However, I've been giving away these books for ten years, and I'm not going to allow the greed of others hoping to make a surreptitious buck off my name to defeat me.

I may still have to take down my library of free reads. For now I will be researching other options, removing my free e-books one by one from Scribd's archive scam, and see if I can find a solution that doesn't cost my readers anything or make my head explode.

In the meantime, please do NOT pay Scribd.com to access or download my free e-books. If you are asked to pay ANYTHING for any of the thirty e-books I have on Scribd, and you can't wait until I find a solution, contact me at LynnViehl@aol.com and I will personally send you a free download of whatever you'd like.

Added: I think I've found a solution, but I still have to test it out and make sure it works. Unfortunately I have to finish some revisions to meet a deadline first. Please be advised that I will be removing my library of free e-books and documents from Scribd.com as soon as I get everything transferred over to the alternative site and make sure the links work. This will happen probably within the next couple of days.

Added 9/2/10: I've temporarily transferred my free library over to Google Docs, which allows anyone to read them online or download them in .pdf format for free. I tried to delete my documents and account on Scribd, but despite numerous attempts their web site was unresponsive, so I've contacted them and told them to take it down. Hopefully they will do so quickly; in the meantime please use the Google Doc links listed on the Freebies page here and please do NOT pay Scribd.com anything to access my free e-books.

Two Years on Scribd

This week marks the second anniversary of moving my virtual library over to Scribd.com*, and while last year I had a lot of positive news to report, much changed with the site over the course of 2009 that didn't improve the service. The two primary changes that happened last year: 1) Scribd Twitterized itself, wiping out the helpful e-mail correspondence service it provided for me and replacing it with social media "scribbling" that I can't use because it's incompatible with my VRS, and 2) Scribd became an online publisher ala Amazon.com's self-pub via Kindle store.

As an experiment I did test Scribd's self publishing for profit venture by putting up Way of the Cheetah for a couple of months at a token $1.00/copy. It's safe to say that the only copies that sold were due to my announcements here and other writers who supported it on their blogs. I have not yet been paid for any of the copies that were sold on Scribd (evidently they hold onto the money until you earn $100.00, and since I don't intend to sell anything else on Scribd I'll probably never see a dime.) Since Scribd refuses to sell documents to overseas readers, I won't be using them again. Still, in good faith I have donated an amount matching what should have been my portion of the WotC Scribd profits to help out another writer with a legal battle (100% of my profits from WotC, btw, have been used to assist other writers and aspiring student writers.)

The few times I contacted Scribd's staff about a problem in 2009, I received mildly indifferent to moderately hostile responses. Which I find as puzzling as the aggressive tone of the unsolicited e-mails they've sent me. I'm fairly approachable, I think, and I always try to be polite, but I really don't care for some marketing person telling me to start immediately responding to messages from the twelve thousand people Scribd decided to give access to the "scribbling" area sprawling down the center of my home page -- this without even asking me if I wanted to participate in this social media blitz. In Scribd's defense, they obviously didn't know about my unusual situation or how much I depend on VRS now.

Also, when I politely asked that they remove my name off whatever star-studded author list they put me on (which I assume resulted in the flood of scribblers) they did finally stop the tsunami. The person handling that was very terse and unpleasant about it, however, and did not to restore my old account as it was, so I felt that wasn't resolved appropriately. A friend suggested I manually unsubscribe from all the unwanted scribblers, but I didn't subscribe to them in the first place; I don' feel it's my job to go through the unsubscribe process 12,000+ times (plus how do I pick and choose?) So now the few but helpful comments and messages I was getting from my readers on Scribd are lost among the thousands of irrelevant messages, spam, and other crap flooding my account (and I apologize to anyone whose comments or questions on Scribd that I missed since last August when they did this to me.)

On the plus side, Scribd remains (for now anyway) a free hosting site, and I'll probably keep my virtual library with them for as long as they don't try to charge me for the service. I don't know if I will upload any more free books to the site, though; I'm not really a fan of their staff or how they're doing business. I might talk to the guy over at LibraryThing (which is more my style anyway) and see if I can work out some kind of hosting thing there. I think with the direction Scribd is taking, they're going to eventually be gobbled up by Google or Amazon anyway, so it's probably best I start looking for some new accommodations for my freebies.

*Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I no longer recommend using their service. See my post about this scam here.

WotC on Scribd

My how-to writing guide, Way of the Cheetah, is now available for purchase at Scribd.com's store. Since I'm doing this mainly as an experiment to see how this process and Scribd's service works, I've discounted the e-book to sell for $1.00 U.S. Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I no longer recommend using their service. See my post about this scam here.

People have asked me when I'm going to start selling my fiction work this way, and the truth is that I have mixed feelings about authors who are using online services like Scribd's store to sell their work directly to readers. While this can help supplement the author's income, I think it can also create conflicts of interest. My primary market is still print, and while the major publishers are having ongoing problems embracing the E-future, I still have hope they'll catch up with the internet and see the wonderful opportunities electronic format offers.

Anyway -- if you'd like to get the book at a drastically reduced price, I plan to leave it up for sale on Scribd.com through January 1, 2010.

News

One of my friends over at Scribd gave me a heads-up on a freebie that gives a broad view of how to use the site to make money: 7 Little Known Secrets for Making Money and Saving the World on SCRIBD by Jed Diamond Ph.D. Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I no longer recommend using their service. See my post about this scam here.

I read it off the screen because the print option didn't work, but it's only eight pages so that didn't fry my eyes. It's a decent overview, but more geared toward nonfic writers; I don't think it's not going to set your fiction writing career on fire. It does contain a few helpful tips for those of you who are interested in self-pubbing/selling your stuff online.

I also heard from the senior editor of Artful Blogging magazine, who stopped by here and asked if they can use an edited excerpt from my Journaling Hardware post in their next issue. I said yes, of course; I love the magazine and I probably wouldn't have a photoblog if it wasn't for all the terrific articles and insight I've gleaned from every issue. This also makes me very happy, because now I have the perfect excuse to buy a bunch of copies and hand it out: Look! I'm in the Buzz section! Now put down that cell phone and read!

Finally, Guideposts sent me some trade paperback reprint copies of Going to the Chapel, my first Grace Chapel Inn novel, which they'll be selling in a two-book set along with Melody Carlson's Back Home Again. Melody and I are being featured because we were the authors of the very first two books of the series, and I imagine the two-book set is a commemorative thing (to date over a million of the Grace Chapel Inn books have sold by subscription service; I wrote six of the thirty-one books in the series.) The editors are also including with the set a neat little booklet of 30 recipes from the series books which has my strawberry popovers recipe in it. The book set will be on sale at the Guideposts web site sometime in the near future; I'll post a heads-up when it's available.

Twitting Scribd

A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from the folks at Scribd* telling me about their latest new venture; a real time notification thing like Twitter. They're calling their version "social publishing pages" that have "fun features that make it easy for you to share what you're reading and publishing with Scribd's community."

For the launch, they put together a list of prominent Scribd users that they encouraged people to start following. I've yet to see this list, but the e-mail claimed it included me. I was also issued somewhat ominous instructions for me to "log into my Scribd profile" and "respond to my Scribd readers soon."

While I was flattered that they consider me a prominent user, at no time was I consulted about any of this, or even asked if I wanted to participate. I guess because most authors jump at any promotional opportunity they assumed I'd hop right on the bandwagon.

I don't have "cripple" listed on my bio, so Scribd can be forgiven for not knowing I can't type or text. Even if I could hook up the Dragon to a feed of some kind for their new venture, to add that workload to what I already do on the internet would stretch me too thin. I give an hour a day to the internet; I can't spare any more time than that from my work schedule. But since this was a new thing, I thought I'd be supportive of Scribd's launch, see if I could get the Dragon to interface with that little box, and respond to a couple of twits. Until I went to my new Scribd home page, and how many "followers" had subscribed to my account:



I can't count how many new notifications I've received -- from all the pages I've waded through, about half of them look to be SPAM -- but as of the writing of this post, 8,516 people can twit me and it shows up on my home page (1,362 more than I had when I took the screen shot for this post a couple days ago.)

Obviously the promotional value of this new venture is attractive for an author, because who wouldn't want to text nearly nine thousand interested readers about a new release hitting the shelves or some other bit of marketing? But as with Twitter, the new social stuff is supposed to be reciprocal -- they twit you, you twit them, lather, rinse, repeat. I can't do that and have enough voice left over for the writing I get paid to do.

As with anything that threatens my writing time, I've grown extremely wary of this new social media fad. It appears to be as addictive as it is time-intensive. Writers I know have complained to me that they now spend upwards of four hours a day twitting or twitting back to people who twit them. By the time they try to do some actual writing, they're mentally exhausted.

I know the lure of all that "What did she say about me? What did he say about her? Know what I said about them?" is seductive, but it doesn't pay the bills. For example, this week I didn't produce a single twit, but I did sell two books for major money and I condensed a pitch for another interested editor who might be buying three more from me. I also wrote five new chapters of my novel and cleaned most of my house. Go ahead, hate me.

I've notice a few writer blogs out there have been converted to Twitter feeds, and this depresses me. While some people like to read one-sided conversations, for me it's about as interesting as overhearing one side of a cell phone call. Honestly, I'll change lines at the grocery store so I don't have to listen to that. Come back to your blogs and write something real once in a while, please.

I really don't want to tinkle on the Twitter parade any more than I wanted to mock the MySpace trend or make fun of the FaceBook furor. I think (like all indulgences) twitting is probably good for writers in moderation (or at least partially justifies what you're paying for unlimited texting.) The upside to Twitter (and now Scribd's social notification feature) is that it requires writers to actually do a little writing. Until they figure out a way to hook up some feed to their Twitter account that doesn't require any keyboard time . . . .

**Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I no longer use or recommend using their service. See my post about this scam here.

A Scribd Observation

*Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I have removed my free library from their site, and no longer use or recommend using their service. My free reads may be read online or downloaded for free from Google Docs; go to my freebies and free reads page for the links. See my post about this scam here.

A few weeks ago I passed the 100K mark on views of my online library of free reads over at Scribd. While my free fiction has done well, more than 15% of the total views were for my writing how-to, The Novel Notebook, making it the most popular e-book I've posted.

I've also had a healthy number of hits on The Ten Point Plot Template, The Blank Novel Wiring Diagram, LB&LI 2007, and John & Marcia ~ The Novel Crash Test Dummies.

The numbers surprised me. Frankly I thought sites like Scribd were mainly used by readers looking for free fiction, but it seems more writers are hanging out there, too. While I know a lot of you guys are responsible for beefing up those nice numbers, I've had enough contact from other writers who didn't know me or PBW before reading something on Scribd to attribute at least half of the views to new-to-me visitors.

Scribd also provides search engine indexing info over on the sidebar of the documents; almost nine thousand hits on The Novel Notebook came from Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. You also get a list of handy search terms that led the bots to your document, which can help you when you're making up tags.

Anyway, if you publish how-to books on writing fiction and want to expand your readership, or you have a writing how-to blog or site on line and want to increase your traffic, you might consider posting a free how-to e-book on Scribd. It doesn't have to be a huge, involved deal, either -- the short documents seem to do as well as the lengthier ones.

Another suggestion: if you decide to do a freebie how-to, use real, original examples and full-length material versus excerpts and teasers, or copying your existing blog posts into e-book form. Fresh content that has no strings attached always does better than thinly-veiled promo and cut-n-pastees.

A Year on Scribd

*Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I have removed my free library from their site, and no longer use or recommend using their service. My free reads may be read online or downloaded for free from Google Docs; go to my freebies and free reads page for the links. See my post about this scam here.

Today marks my first anniversary of posting my free e-books on Scribd, a public document hosting site which provides free reads to everyone on the planet.

From the beginning I was impressed with how easy the site is to use, and how quickly I could publish an e-book by using their upload service. I started with about a dozen of the e-books and stories I'd already written, and in a few days created an instant virtual library.

Scribd also provided me with hard numbers in the form of statistics, such as running totals of views, downloads, global geographic locations of my Scribd readers and approval citations. When one of my documents proved very popular in a short period of time, Scribd gave me a nice reward by listing it on their Hot List, or featuring it on their home page, which brought in even more readers.

The comments and e-mail I received through the site were immensely helpful. I had over four hundred exchanges with readers interested in my print work and other writers who had questions about electronic publishing, copyright, promotional e-books and related subjects. That helped me expand my horizons, pick up some new readers, and also pass along what I'd learned.

PBW benefitted from Scribd as well. I was able to use the site to host my diagrams, workshop e-books and other materials I used to teach, which came in very handy during my virtual workshops last summer. The most popular document I have on Scribd to date is, in fact, my Novel Notebook, with over ten thousand views in nine months. NaNoWriMo'ers also stopped in by the hundreds in November to check out and download my Ten Point Plotting Template, and I hope that proved helpful to all the first time novelists out there.

The only downside to using Scribd were a few obvious troll and SPAM messages (can't escape them no matter where we go.) Some writers have contacted me and expressed their displeasure with the project, as they still believe that garbage RT published about me. What I'm doing is no different than an author who hands out free books at writer conferences -- my way is just more efficient, doesn't cost anything, and reaches a much wider, more interested audience. I also don't have to travel, pay con fees, stay in strange hotels, eat mystery chicken or have my immune system compromised while I'm at it. Furthermore, I'm not posting or handing out copies of my print work; my e-books on Scribd are all self-published, not-for-profit original content, and they're not available anywhere else. That = exclusive content readers can't buy in stores.

At the moment advertising may or may not become an issue. A couple of days ago I did ask Scribd to take down the Random House picture ad for Tess Gerritsen's novel The Surgeon that was placed on my doc page for Incarnatio, as more than a few people thought I'd put it there myself. As it happens, I've never read the book, nor was I consulted about the ad placement. I receive no compensation for the ads Scribd lists on my doc pages, nor do I want any. While I admire Ms. Gerritsen's success and wish her only more of the same, I feel it's inappropriate for her publisher to use my free e-book pages in this manner. Readers can and already have mistaken the ad as my personal endorsement of the book. I explained this all to the guys at Scribd, and as far as I know the ad has since disappeared, so hopefully this won't happen again.

Overall the problems were few, and Scribd in essence allowed me to distribute in a one-year period over seventy-five thousand copies of my free stories, novellas, novels and nonfic materials. I never had to solicit the readers or SPAM them. If the reader wanted an electronic or printed copy, they took care of it from their end. I didn't have to ship anything or purchase expensive advertising. My Scribd virtual library is self-sustaining and, once an e-book is uploaded and made available, requires no maintenance on my part whatsoever. There was no fuss with international rights or making my stories available in countries that will not import or publish my print work. People looking for the sort of stuff I write found it through site searches. They are readers all over the globe looking for something to read, which surely is the most valuable market out there, and Scribd is a direct conduit to them.

I can't say how many folks who read my work on Scribd later went out to buy my print work -- there's just no way to know that. However, last year the print books I published showed a significant boost in sales numbers. Since I continue to receive little or no promotional support from my publisher for my books (which is fine, because I've been around a long time and I have an established readership, and they need their advertising budgets to help out new writers) and I haven't done anything differently except put my e-books on Scribd, I'm going to give Scribd credit for helping to expand my readership in 2008.

Best of all Scribd remains 100% free, so readers who may not be able to afford print books right now can still find plenty to read on the site. Given the current state of the economy, we need that kind of resource. As for writers, as long as you agree to Scribd's terms of use, anyone can create an account and upload their documents. I don't think you can find a better deal than that anywhere, on or offline.

The First Free Novel of Fall

One of my favorite dark fantasy/horror/vampire fiction writers, Douglas Clegg, is making his novel Afterlife free to read online at Scribd* for a limited time (or, if you'd rather have it in print like me, you can purchase the deluxe hardcover edition from Cemetery Dance Publications here.)

This is the first time I've ordered books from Cemetery Dance, actually, and I'm impressed. They didn't slut themselves all over me or bug me to buy more stuff like the online chain booksellers do. They didn't offer me a gift card to sign up for their credit card with the sky-rocketing rate, or 40% off Oprah's latest nit-lit-pick, or try to tell me what else I should buy from them by making unsolicited suggestions.

Nope, it was all very simple and clean: click, order, fill out the ship-to-bill-to and pay. That's all, just like in the old days of buying stuff on the internet. Made me tear up a little, to be honest. Thank you, Cemetery Dance.

*Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I have removed my free library from their site, and no longer use or recommend using their service. My free reads may be read online or downloaded for free from Google Docs; go to my freebies and free reads page for the links. See my post about this scam here.

Wanted Changes

*Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I have removed my free library from their site, and no longer use or recommend using their service. My free reads may be read online or downloaded for free from Google Docs; go to my freebies and free reads page for the links. See my post about this scam here.

The link for my Darkyn short story Wanted has changed as the old one no longer works (long story); I've corrected the link on the sidebar. Vampirechick, if you're out there, you should be able to access it now with no problem.

Scribd has also selected the new upload of Wanted as one of the documents in the Featured section of their homepage. According to the site info, featured documents are "documents that our editors have deemed to be high quality, and adds significant value to Scribd's collection of documents." Thank you for the very nice compliment, Scribd editors -- hopefully the story lives up to that sterling rec.

Also, I know I promised you guys Ravelin, and it's almost ready; I'm quibbling over a couple of details, story order, and whether to make it one volume or two. I've already got five stories, one that's almost a novel by itself, and there are four more I'd like to add including an almost-finished sequel to Red Branch (this if I can squeeze in a little recreational writing this week.) I didn't realize if I put together all the Ravelin stories I think are worth reading that the final e-book would be 500+ pages in length, but it is. Since I know that will take forever to upload/download, I'm thinking two volumes might be a bit more manageable.

Now a question -- for the Left Behind & Loving It workshops at the end of July, I plan to give away my usual goodie bags of books and stuff, but shipping is getting outrageously expensive, so I thought I might try an alternative to get more for my bucks. What do you all think if I give away some online bookseller e-mail gift certificates this time, say for half of the workshop giveaways?

Together Again

Now available as a free e-book over on Scribd>*:



As with the first John and Marcia collection, I've also added in some articles after each post in the e-book on how to avoid, combat and/or handle the writing problems involved. Click on the cover art to go to the Scribd document page.

*Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I have removed my free library from their site, and no longer use or recommend using their service. This book and all of my free reads may be read online or downloaded for free from Google Docs; go to my freebies and free reads page for the links. See my post about this scam here.

ND Up

I've added a couple of exclusive excerpts from Twilight Fall and Stay the Night to this one -- click on the cover art to go to the Scribd document page and read online or download in various formats.*

*Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I have removed my free library from their site, and no longer use or recommend using their service. This e-book and all of my free reads may be read online or downloaded for free from Google Docs; go to my freebies and free reads page for the links. See my post about this scam here.