Fun New Idea: Watermarking Chapters

Ace_Arriande

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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.

(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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NiQuinn

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I remember a web author being able to defend her work by subtly changing the letter 'i' every few words. The font change was subtle. If you didn't know about it, you wouldn't really notice it. She knew the number of changed 'i's though so it was a slap in the face to the pirate.

But yeah...watermarking seems to be the more direct form to show ownership.

Edit: I think genius.com also did this because Google used to automatically grab lyrics from them and they didn't like that.

Another edit: Genius changed apostrophes and not letter 'i's. Here is the link to the story.
 
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Owl

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It would be cool if scribblehub had safety measures against that... I dont know how translation sites usually do it :blob_hmm:
 

HURGMCGURG

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If I was running Scribblehub, I would fix it by making it impossible to copy and paste the text. That way, the pirates have to write the entire thing.
 

NotaNuffian

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Well, this is a real shitter. I am so going to abuse the watermark (I am not planning to make dilladollars but still...) and use them as timeskip lines.

Also, from how I just easily copied the entire chapter of a novel I just read and paste it in docs, doesn't that mean that the watermarks can be easily removed as well?
 

binarysoap

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Well, this is a real shitter. I am so going to abuse the watermark (I am not planning to make dilladollars but still...) and use them as timeskip lines.

Also, from how I just easily copied the entire chapter of a novel I just read and paste it in docs, doesn't that mean that the watermarks can be easily removed as well?
You are making the interesting assumption that most people will read what they are copying. So unless your work is really popular, the reason why your story is copied is someone doing the shotgun approach, which means they definitely won't be trying to read watermarks. And if it's a bot doing the job (which more likely the case), then it definitely wouldn't really notice.
 

Daitengu

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You are making the interesting assumption that most people will read what they are copying. So unless your work is really popular, the reason why your story is copied is someone doing the shotgun approach, which means they definitely won't be trying to read watermarks. And if it's a bot doing the job (which more likely the case), then it definitely wouldn't really notice.
Yep, seen alota chopped/teaser part only chapters on shitty bot aggregator sites. Some of them sites give no fucks.
 

NiQuinn

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Some of them sites give no fucks.
Some? All aggregator sites I've seen are literally copy pastes and have no form of link back to original sites. They even copy paste translator notes/author notes. They do not care. At all.
 

NotaNuffian

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You are making the interesting assumption that most people will read what they are copying. So unless your work is really popular, the reason why your story is copied is someone doing the shotgun approach, which means they definitely won't be trying to read watermarks. And if it's a bot doing the job (which more likely the case), then it definitely wouldn't really notice.
...I can never understand people just randomly copying someone's work and fake it as theirs. The same with people using bots to plagerize others. Feels so cheap of you to do that.
 

GDLiZy

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I don't do it because I'm not famous ( Salt ) and from the first-hand experience, I knew that randomly coming across "If YoU rEaD iT oN bado bado" is extremely sexing annoying. I almost dropped many novels from that alone.

Dun do it pls, I hate it.
 

Ace_Arriande

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I don't do it because I'm not famous ( Salt ) and from the first-hand experience, I knew that randomly coming across "If YoU rEaD iT oN bado bado" is extremely sexing annoying. I almost dropped many novels from that alone.

Dun do it pls, I hate it.
I'll gladly not do it if you can figure out a better alternative that saves time, informs me of everybody stealing my works, and stops people from stealing content in general.
 

GDLiZy

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I'll gladly not do it if you can figure out a better alternative that saves time, informs me of everybody stealing my works, and stops people from stealing content in general.
I don't know. I also think that this idea also did not prevent people from stealing content, too. I simply don't care if they steal it and treat it as free advertisement.

However, if I wanted to know if someone stole my works, I'll just google it. It required little to no effort and would not annoy my readers.
 

Ace_Arriande

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I don't know. I also think that this idea also did not prevent people from stealing content, too. I simply don't care if they steal it and treat it as free advertisement.
1. This can screw you over from publishing to Amazon KU, and purposely not protecting your IP has a ton of its own risks associated with it.
2. Thieves tend to not include links back to the original sources nor Patreons.
3. It's not a free advertisement if nobody is learning who you are. It's just theft. You're not benefitting from it in any way.
4. It's not about preventing theft, it's about making it easier to find it since it informs people that it is stolen. If even one out of a hundred readers sees the watermark and takes 2 minutes to email me about it, then it's doing its job.

However, if I wanted to know if someone stole my works, I'll just google it. It required little to no effort and would not annoy my readers.
I'll just post what I did in the OP again.
"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. "
Googling it does nothing if somebody changes your synopsis, title, and cover. You literally cannot find it if they do that unless you plan on going through every single new Amazon release, or if you get extremely lucky like me and have a reader who basically does that, recognizes it, and informs you. The contents of the books won't show up on Google. I've tried.
And if readers get so annoyed and upset that the free content they have been getting is, god forbid, watermarked, then they're not readers worth having. They're getting to read for free. They can deal with it.
 

Tycos

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On one page, I saw that the author makes this note "invisible" by making the font colour the same as the background. If someone just copies the text, it should work the same way.
 

NiQuinn

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1. This can screw you over from publishing to Amazon KU, and purposely not protecting your IP has a ton of its own risks associated with it.
Any publishing, period. I used to read stories from an author that couldn't publish her stories due to a technicality in her country when she found her stories were plagiarized. Don't know what happened since but that was a few years ago. She might have found a work around about it by now.

3. It's not a free advertisement if nobody is learning who you are. It's just theft. You're not benefitting from it in any way.
I find that the lackadaisical view of seeing it as free advertising to be...more harm than good. Thieves would take any advantage they could. Why would they 'advertise' the original author? And yes, no way is the original author benefitting in any way. I do find adding watermarks can be irritating but if the original author thinks he needs to do it to protect his/her content, then I say go for it. Heck, the author spent hours on the story. Let him/her do what they want.
 

GDLiZy

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1. This can screw you over from publishing to Amazon KU, and purposely not protecting your IP has a ton of its own risks associated with it.
2. Thieves tend to not include links back to the original sources nor Patreons.
3. It's not a free advertisement if nobody is learning who you are. It's just theft. You're not benefitting from it in any way.
4. It's not about preventing theft, it's about making it easier to find it since it informs people that it is stolen. If even one out of a hundred readers sees the watermark and takes 2 minutes to email me about it, then it's doing its job.
I agreed with everything you just said except. However,
I'll just post what I did in the OP again.
"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. "
Googling it does nothing if somebody changes your synopsis, title, and cover. You literally cannot find it if they do that unless you plan on going through every single new Amazon release, or if you get extremely lucky like me and have a reader who basically does that, recognizes it, and informs you. The contents of the books won't show up on Google. I've tried.
And if readers get so annoyed and upset that the free content they have been getting is, god forbid, watermarked, then they're not readers worth having. They're getting to read for free. They can deal with it.
If someone is going to steal my work and publish it on Amazon, I would have no way of knowing it, as the thief would likely delete the watermark. The only case it would work would be the dumb copy and paste bot, which also could delete the watermark.

About googling it, I can use the quotation feature and just copy a passage of my story into it, and google would scan to see if there's any matching passage anywhere. Of course, it could only work if the stolen story is not behind any walls, but, if it is, then there is a much higher chance that someone is manually copy-pasting the story, which also meant that the watermark would likely do nothing.

And about the readers, maybe I'm exaggerating, but I, as a reader myself, feel annoyed at the watermark appearing in the middle of the story. Dropping? Maybe too harsh. Breaking the tension or immersion? Definitely.

To be fair, using the transparent font to watermark is the best possible way to do it, imo. However, it's still up to the authors to decide. For me, I only write as a hobby, so I'm not that serious about trying to make a living out of it. Maybe I'll try if I think my skill is up to par, but now, let just keep it fun and simple.
 

Ace_Arriande

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If someone is going to steal my work and publish it on Amazon, I would have no way of knowing it, as the thief would likely delete the watermark. The only case it would work would be the dumb copy and paste bot, which also could delete the watermark.
Amazon thieves aren't much smarter. The smartest thing that one of them has done was, after having my one story taken down, they find-all-and-replaced the main character's name. Not even the name of his avatar that he uses 99% of the time, just his real-life name since that was the one mentioned in the first chapter. The other time, the bot copy-and-pasted everything with absolutely atrocious formatting issues that no human would have purposely made. They don't even check the content of what they're stealing. They find something popular, copy it, post it, and then only change anything after they get removed for it and even then, they do the absolute bare minimum. Now, if they're actually smart about what they're doing, you're right - a watermark isn't going to work. Fortunately, the vast majority of people who do this are lazy and they focus on quantity rather than quality.

About googling it, I can use the quotation feature and just copy a passage of my story into it, and google would scan to see if there's any matching passage anywhere. Of course, it could only work if the stolen story is not behind any walls, but, if it is, then there is a much higher chance that someone is manually copy-pasting the story, which also meant that the watermark would likely do nothing.
Yes, this works for anything posted for public reading, but it's not going to scan anything behind walls which doesn't fix the Amazon problem. While there are usually public previews that can be manually checked, the contents of these public previews don't show on Google. As for the walls thing and them probably being smarter and manually copy-pasting: see my above paragraph. If these people weren't lazy, they wouldn't be trying to profit off of stolen web novels.

To be fair, using the transparent font to watermark is the best possible way to do it, imo.
The problem with this is that it's kind of dependent on what theme the user is using. If you make a font transparent for dark theme users, it's going to still stick out for regular users and vise-versa. Also, if it's transparent so that no users can see it... how is anybody going to see it and know to report it? The whole point of the watermark is so that it is visible.
 

GDLiZy

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The problem with this is that it's kind of dependent on what theme the user is using. If you make a font transparent for dark theme users, it's going to still stick out for regular users and vise-versa. Also, if it's transparent so that no users can see it... how is anybody going to see it and know to report it? The whole point of the watermark is so that it is visible.
The point of getting the watermark transparent is that when the bot copy-pasting everything, it would be changed to the default colour, and so, the watermark would appear without annoying the readers.

Without careful proofreading, the watermark would slip through.

I'm not really knowledgable about the thief method so I just assumed the worst, but thank you for the explanation.
 
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