Ace_Arriande
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2019
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Feel free to steal this and replace the information/email with stuff relevant to you. Anyways, since it was recently brought to my attention that one of my less popular series is currently on at least five different websites that I didn't even know existed (with hundreds of thousands of views), and this is after having to file copyright infringement reports due to people stealing my novels and putting them on Amazon three times in the past couple of months without my consent, I'm going to start watermarking all of my chapters.
I suggest putting this in every first chapter and then every latest chapter, or perhaps every other latest chapter. I'll personally be including it in all chapters from now on. Maybe switch it up every now and then, too, in case somebody catches on and does a simple find-and-replace to remove it or somethin'.
As for why this sort of thing is important aside from the obvious reasons, if you ever plan on posting to Amazon with Kindle Unlimited, you're not allowed to have more than 10% of what you post to Amazon available anywhere else. So, if the story you post to be exclusive with Amazon KU has 100% of its content available on a bunch of pirate sites... yeah, that ain't going to go too well for you if it gets reported. Or in my case, if somebody steals your story and posts it to Amazon with a different cover, title, and synopsis, this might be the only way of finding out if it was stolen or not since you won't be able to find it manually unless you plan on reading every single new release on the 'zon.
tl;dr: protect yo'selves and watermark your shit. Just put a random watermark somewhere in the middle of your chapters. If readers complain that it breaks the flow or whatever, tell them to read on Patreon or whatever where it's not watermarked. Also, regular readers will get used to this within a couple of times and learn to just skip over it without missing a step, so I doubt that immersion will be affected more than once.
EDIT: Also, if you post to multiple websites, I suggest putting the watermark in at different spots (I'm just randomly throwing them into the chapters) for each site. That way you can tell which site that it's getting taken from by where in the chapter the watermark is.
(This series is only officially posted to: scribblehub.com, (your personal site here), (your patreon here), and royalroad.com (or any other sites here). If you are reading this series on any other website, please send me an email at (your email here). If you have paid money for this on Amazon, email me, file a report, and request a refund as it has been stolen and illegally published.)
I suggest putting this in every first chapter and then every latest chapter, or perhaps every other latest chapter. I'll personally be including it in all chapters from now on. Maybe switch it up every now and then, too, in case somebody catches on and does a simple find-and-replace to remove it or somethin'.
As for why this sort of thing is important aside from the obvious reasons, if you ever plan on posting to Amazon with Kindle Unlimited, you're not allowed to have more than 10% of what you post to Amazon available anywhere else. So, if the story you post to be exclusive with Amazon KU has 100% of its content available on a bunch of pirate sites... yeah, that ain't going to go too well for you if it gets reported. Or in my case, if somebody steals your story and posts it to Amazon with a different cover, title, and synopsis, this might be the only way of finding out if it was stolen or not since you won't be able to find it manually unless you plan on reading every single new release on the 'zon.
tl;dr: protect yo'selves and watermark your shit. Just put a random watermark somewhere in the middle of your chapters. If readers complain that it breaks the flow or whatever, tell them to read on Patreon or whatever where it's not watermarked. Also, regular readers will get used to this within a couple of times and learn to just skip over it without missing a step, so I doubt that immersion will be affected more than once.
EDIT: Also, if you post to multiple websites, I suggest putting the watermark in at different spots (I'm just randomly throwing them into the chapters) for each site. That way you can tell which site that it's getting taken from by where in the chapter the watermark is.
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