Raven Cycle Author Deploys Trick to Foil Piracy

There’s no getting around it: book piracy hurts sales, which hurts authors. However, Maggie Stiefvater refused to take this lying down. When her new book The Raven King came out last year, she and her family uploaded “dozens and dozens” of dummy PDFs to the internet, spreading them all over the place to pollute search results among pirated ebooks. Pretty much everyone who tried to steal the book realized they had Stiefvater’s dummy — which just repeated the first four chapters, over and over again. The author believes this contributed to outstanding sales for the book, which ended up selling out in the first two days.