It has come to my attention recently that more and more occult forums are passing along links to illegal downloads of magical books that are still under copyright and are still in print, my books included. It is a difficult topic as there is a need for freely available work that people can get their teeth into, but on the other hand, without some form of financial come back or help, many magical writers would not able to make work available. Many authors find this balance by writing books to be sold, along side making text freely available. The occult market is a niche market, which means unless you are willing to write complete tosh for a mass market, you are going to make very little in financial terms, but often that little bit can go a long way, so it is very important. When that little bit of financial income gets stolen, then it becomes a problem for magicians in general. Why? Here is why. For the last fifteen years I have made magical texts freely available on the net for people to use, and when someone has been in dire need, I have been very happy to personally send them whatever they need, freely. In the past I was able to do that by having a full time well paid job, so income was not a problem for me. I live very frugally which means my needs are minimum. When I started having my books published, I did not need the income so I donated my royalties to occult projects and magicians who were in financial distress. More recently I lost my full time income so I needed to start taking the royalties in order to eat. I work small part time jobs as I can get them and between those, selling things on line, and book royalties, I manage to make ends meet, which is all that I need and all that I wish for. This in turn enables me to continue writing and to also help magicians in their training, and when they are in distress. I keep a balance between making work freely available on my websites, and also publishing some work in order to bring in some income. If those books are pirated, I lose a section of my small income, and because my income is already small, any loss has a significant impact on me. Many may not be aware that most authors, particularly of small presses, make between fifty cents to a dollar on each book that is sold, and most occult books tend to sell a couple of hundred copies a year, not thousands: it is a very small market . The small royalties are not because the independent publishers are greedy, but because the production and distribution is expensive. Companies like Amazon take a massive cut of the cover price so what is left over for the publisher and author is small indeed. If an author chooses to go with a mainstream major publisher, they may get more income from the books they write, but they lose control of how the content is presented, what the content actually is, and worst of all, they are often quickly remaindered and taken out of print. The author also often has to contractually agree not give away free text or offer chunks of the book for free. Because of these issues, and to support the wonderful work that small presses do, I prefer to stay with the small independent publishers. For them it is often a labor of love, and their work ensures that the more unusual, obscure and cutting edge writers are brought into print; often these writers are not acceptable to main stream publishers for obvious reasons. So how is one to navigate their way through this? As a writer and teacher, I feel it is very important to ensure that magical works are kept freely available, alongside published works that are sold. This keeps the work alive, dynamic and reaches people who would not have the financial resources to continually buy books, and the sale of books helps to keep the author fed and gives then a bit of time to write. For the readers, if you find an author who is willing to put work out there for free, help support them buy buying their books if you can afford them. But to pirate a published book is effectively taking the food out of the mouth of the authors. It takes a lot of time to write a book: it is months of hard work. Royalties from my books add up to two months income a year, and they help to keep me going, but they do not represent even a fraction of the amount of time I put into them. So when people pirate my books, and my income drops even more, it is no longer worth my while to write a book for publishing. I don’t mind making sacrifices to put work out there, but if my income drops any further, then I simply will not have the time to write those books – my time will be taken up with more part time jobs in order to pay rent and buy food: I already live off of an income that most people would not even consider trying to live off of, particularly a person of my age I will never stop writing; it simply means I will have even less time to write, so the work will dribble out very slowly over many years, rather than appearing in months. So for those smart young people in those occult forums (Wizard forum et al) who do this sort of pirating and passing on of pirated books, understand that you are cutting off magical development and the future of magical writers by doing this sort of thing. If you are broke, I have a lot of free magical texts up on various websites to make sure you can access what you need if you are willing to look.

I have changed the last paragraph of this blog as I ended it with a sarcastic English bit of dark humour. It seemed to go over the heads of many and was taken the wrong way, so I have removed it. Sometimes culture does not travel well.

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