My yahoo email account was hacked a few days ago, which resulted in everyone in my address book being spammed with a virus site. Of course, being on the other side of the world from nearly everyone else in that address book, I was asleep when it was happening, so woke up to quite a few ‘what the hell…?” and ‘you’ve been hacked” emails. As a result, I had to spam just about everyone myself to warn them not to open emails from me that don’t have a subject line or my yahoo signature (which is a list of 2011 book releases). Hence the ‘hackers suck’ part of my post heading.

But in the course of this, I started chatting with S K S Perry an old (well, he’s not old in the age sense. lol) writing buddy. Steve writes fabulous (and fun) fantasy novels. Unfortunately for him, that’s not what the market seems to want at the moment, so he went the self-publishing route, and offered his Darkside Novels via PDF download from his website. With the success of Amanda Hocking’s kindle books rocking the epublishing world, someone suggested Steve make his Darkside books available via Kindle. Steve thought this a great idea. Obviously, so did someone else, because when Steve went to load Darkside on Amazon, he discovered it was already up there. The thief had stolen his PDF, loaded it up as S K S Perry, and was collecting the sales in his name. And did Amazon make it easy for Steve to have the thief’s version taken down? HELL NO! I mean, this is Amazon–as long as they make sales, what do they really care? (hence the pirates and Amazon suck part of the header.) Amazon did eventually right the wrong, but it took 9 days and a DMCA takedown notice for them to actually act.

If you’d like to read the whole tale, head on over to Steve’s blog (you’ll have to scroll down the page and hit previous 10 entries to start at the beginning). And if you’d like to show some support–and read a fab, fun book in the process–head on over to Amazon and purchase a legit copy of Darkside, which can be found at both Amazon US and Amazon UK. And if you love Darkside, you can purchase the sequel Darkside: Waking the Dead, at both sites 🙂