So, there's recently been some drama on facebook about certain people and a certain group. The group, Books Galore, which has since been made secret, was intended for someone who appeared to be a huge supported of us authors selling paperback ARCs that had been sent for free. Their logic being that Ebay hasn't pulled the books down and allows it, so it's totally fine.

I get being a voracious reader and running out of space on your shelves for paperbacks. I totally do. I was totally against kindles and e-readers, preferring holding a real book for years. After dragging yet another book case into the house and trying to find space for it, my husband ends up saving up and buying me a paperwhite kindle for Christmas about 6 years ago. He watches me open the box, sees the look on my face, and tells me it's a book intervention and to at least try it because we have too many cats in the house if I have to get another book case. I really enjoy my kindle now and that's pretty much all I use.

On the subject of SENDING paperback ARCs, it's not really something I personally do right now. I'm in the middle of remodeling my house and there's just too much stuff that needs to be installed lying around for me to keep paperbacks on hand to send them out. I only send out ebooks for ARCs.

HOWEVER, this entire situation reminds me of when I was a child. My grandmother did accounting work for a bookstore. This was before the internet, before ebay, before cat memes, before windows, hell, it may have been before MSDOS for a little while. This bookstore carried everything from classics to Stephen King. I don't know how they got their books then. They are still open and I don't know how they get them now or if this is still a thing.

When they wanted to pull a book from the shelf, either for an updated cover or to make room for a new release, they would let employees take bags of them home. My grandmother would call and tell me she had books if I wanted to pick some. BUT, even then, before the internet and internet marketplaces, they didn't want people reselling the books for money. SO the books I went through had various levels of defacement BY A BOOKSTORE. Sometimes, it was the front cover ripped clean off, a marker taken to the entire front chapter, sometimes it was also the back cover ripped off so I couldn't read a blurb when I was picking books.

I understood why this was done after my father and grandmother explained this to me WHEN I WAS 8. I still have some of these books with ripped off front covers on my book case. Bookstores and publishers didn't want you selling an author's work that you got for free in a early 80's and they were willing to deface books to make sure that you couldn't.

SO, unless people want to start getting defaced paperbacks since we can't watermark them like we do ebooks or you want an outright refusal for ARC's in that format, stop trying to turn a profit off someone who's barely making one as it is. I RARELY sell paperbacks. Most of my sales come from ebooks. If you get a paperback ARC for free, it's because the author BOUGHT AND PAID for the proof, used gas in their car to drive to the post office, and paid to ship to to you, all with the understanding that you would leave an honest review when you were done.