You need to get your name & content out there, so that your audience, both prospective & existing, know its there. Neil did a lecture once where he asked everyone in the audience about how they found their favourite authors – and almost everyone first found out about their fav author by being loaned/given a book by someone else. Online media sharing is the new “loaned to a friend”.

How many people have read a Doctrow book online and then purchased a copy?

Certain books I have 2 copies of so I can loan one to a friend without risking losing my own copy (Good Omens is one of these).

Of course we filesharers who share digital files freely for no cash, no profit and no gain have been telling everyone this very truth that we sample the goods and if we like it we go buy it. Now this has also been ‘discovered’ as true by Mr Gaiman I’d hope our message gets through to the politicians too, because we need them to change the copywrong laws that are stifling these authors and artists by ‘clamping down on piracy’ – the freakin’ dummies.

Write to your politicians with this article guys and put the pressure on for change. It’s people power.