This is such a big question that, unfortunately, affects a lot of people. Angela and I have run into this a ton, from people lifting content off our site to pirating our books. When you’re talking about content on your blog, you should absolutely go after anyone stealing your content. I would advise you to set up Google alerts for your name, your blog’s name, and any popularly pirated content that you have. You’ll get email notifications when those references show up somewhere on the Internet, and you can check them out to see if they’re legit. You can also run your own simple Google searches to see what pops up.

When you find someone using your content illegally, call those people to task. Create a form letter to send to these sites telling them to take the content down. The note I use is very simple: “I’m writing to inform you that the content entitled XX is copyrighted and needs to be taken down immediately. As the author and copyright holder, I would appreciate your cooperation in this matter.” At this point, they can either do it or not, but many times, it works. Sometimes it’s a matter of ignorance, where people don’t know they’re doing anything wrong and when they find out they’re guilty, they remove it. Other times, they know when they post the content that they’re in the wrong; in these cases, calling them out (and the implication of potential legal action) will prompt them to remove your material.

To bolster your claim, you also want to make sure you have a copyright notice on your site. We spoke to an IP lawyer, and he suggested the wording of the one we use. You can find it on the left-hand sidebar on our home page; feel free to adapt it for your own use.

This process takes some time. It’s frustrating, sincen you have so many other important things to do. But it’s important to safeguard what is rightfully yours. Having a form letter and a process for this can make it fairly easy and straightforward and will help reduce the frequency of this happening.

I hope this answers your question. Best of luck!

I’d genuinely ɑppreciate іt.

I’m happy to hear that we share that same annoyance about plot coming out of character. Bosh!

Thanks, Donna, for those kind words!

Yes, and I love going back and looking at those marked up books. Not just as a refresher, but as a fond memory of learning the craft and having little lightbulbs go off!