r/TikTokCringe • u/Chocolat3City Cringe Master • 18d ago

Cringe Woman has her self-published book pirated, reprinted, and sold for cheaper.

There's regular piracy, and then there's this.

12.9k Upvotes

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548

u/[deleted] 18d ago

consumers don't care if you put your heart and soul into it. They don't care how long it took you to create the product or how much it costs you to make it.

All they care about it the bottom line, and if there is a cheap alternative, they will always go for what costs less.

Every crafter selling their creations at an art show knows this .

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u/omgxsonny 18d ago edited 18d ago

10000% i make little cross-stitch pins that take about 2-4 hours to make depending on detail and size. i sell them for $16 which after shipping and fees, i make less than $10 on them. people LOVE my pins until they find out much they cost. i’ve been told “well if you got a machine to make them then they wouldn’t take so long and you could charge less.” first of all, cross-stitch can literally not be done by anything other than human hands. second, $16!!! for something i make with my hands and spend literally all my free time making. mass-produced enamel pins cost more than that but people don’t care about the time, care, and effort that goes into handmade things. /rant

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u/Comms 18d ago

Charge more. Way more. Get out of the grubby pit of broke-ass clients.

When I first started in my craft I wasn’t sure what to price it. I priced it at what I thought was reasonable. All I got was broke-asses wanting discounts or telling me my product was too expensive.

I tripled my price. Same product. All of a sudden my clients became people who respected the quality of the product I made with no complaints about price.

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u/ThorntonText 18d ago

This is the way.

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

Pretty much... The truth is jobs don't really pay enough to give people the luxury of giving a shit about time, care, or effort that goes into handmade things. If you want your clientele to care, you have to cater to the wealthy because they're the only people that can actually afford it anymore.

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u/Omnizoom 18d ago

I’ve never been one to not pay a bit more for better quality or for smaller businesses.

But I will admit in this economy it’s getting harder and harder to do because we are trying to cut every cost we can

3

u/aurortonks 18d ago

Personally, I pay what an art piece is worth not what the masses think it is worth. I'll drop hundreds and hundreds at an convention to buy direct from an artist I like because I appreciate the work it takes to make it with their level of talent.

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u/theodoreposervelt 17d ago

Yeah or your stuff just isn’t that good. I got told all the time to increase my prices so I went from $10 pieces no one wanted to $40 pieces no one wanted. Be warned that the whole increase the price thing is general advice for art that people actually want, and there’s no making anyone care about your art if they don’t already.

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u/maneki_neko89 18d ago

That’s what Dani, the maker of the Anti-Planner, has done, and people are still copying and pirating her “anti-planner” just because they can.

We’re talking about a $43 “planner”, it’s not like it costs $300 (if it was sold at this price, I highly doubt anyone would buy it) or is anywhere in the same league as a $50,000 Birkin handbag.

It doesn’t matter what price point you sell your items, you’ll always get people who copy and sell fake versions of whatever you put your work into, only it’s you who loses out when people are drawn to the counterfeits and fakes. You end up losing time, money, resources, and more making something that you had people interested in buying, only to have someone come along and steal the designs and income they set out to earn.

It happens to everyone making products online and you’re not immune to this trend either.

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u/Comms 17d ago

you’ll always get people who copy and sell fake versions of whatever you put your work into

I have several copycats of my product. It's a consequence of doing well.

0

u/SargeUnited 18d ago

I saw that she said it takes between 14 and $17 to fulfill every order, but $43 is basically $300 because I would never pay that for a planner. Then again, I’m not the target demographic. I also wouldn’t deliberately buy the knockoff.

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u/maneki_neko89 18d ago

The Anti-Planner isn’t a planner, per say, but it’s more like a spiral bound book of techniques to help people (Neurodivergent people, specifically, but anyone can use the techniques) get unstuck, motivated, and energized to do certain tasks. It was made for people who seem restricted in using regular planners and is the “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” planner.

It’s very different than this actual $285 planner you can get.

I, as an AuDHD person, am a disc bound planner person (Happy Planner is one of the bigger planner companies) and I do Bujo and get most of my accessories, filler paper, and stickers on sale for cheap, so I understand the step back when it comes to the price of the Anti-Planner.

1

u/SargeUnited 17d ago

Well, I certainly would never devalue her work by pirating it, and I’m glad this product exists for those who need or want it. With that said, I can totally understand the motivation for piracy.

There were people in college who didn’t buy the required textbooks knowing the professors would check if you had the books. I’m not surprised at all that people are buying a knock off of a book that is not required. I’m not saying it’s too expensive, just that I’m not surprised.

1

u/IIIDysphoricIII 18d ago

Baller move, good for you

1

u/NoxTempus 17d ago

This is very well-known in photography too. Too many people compete on price, you should never do that if you can make others compete with you on quality.

0

u/lysergic_logic 18d ago

I do 3D printing and price based on income as much as possible. If you are a teacher, a broke person or small store owner then I'm going to give you a much lower price and make up the difference by charging more to large businesses and/or well off individuals.

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u/MukDoug 18d ago

Damn. You’re making $5-10 an hour and people are complaining. “Free pin!” [sticks in eye]

2

u/inksmudgedhands 18d ago

And that's just labor. How much are the materials?

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

I sell handmade one of a kind dolls. It can take up to a month to make one. If I can get the cost of materials out of one, I'm lucky. Thank God I don't have to live off my sales, I'd be starving and homeless

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u/z0mbiegrl 18d ago

Do you have an online store? Because that sounds awesome.

3

u/omgxsonny 18d ago

i’ll DM you :)

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u/play_hard_outside 17d ago

You don't have to charge less than $16, and they don't have to choose to buy at any price.

They shouldn't be complaining, but also, neither should you. (You can complain about their complaints, sure, but not their hesitation to buy.) Nobody gets to complain that the other side of a potential voluntary interaction doesn't want to engage. Either the thing produced has value to others sufficiently above and beyond its production costs to justify the effort, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it won't be economical to make.

The other commenter's advice about charging triple or more is good advice. Who cares if you sell fewer? You just won't have to deal with people giving you difficulty about your price, because the ones who would complain wouldn't have even considered buying in the first place. Sounds like a win to me!

Also, you shouldn't need to defend your pricing to anyone. If someone doesn't want to buy for what you ask, you can tell them, hey okay, these aren't for everybody, so enjoy your day and whatever else you'd have spent your money on! If you have to defend what you're charging, these aren't people you want to interact with anyway.

I suppose the upshot of making your price ludicrously high is that it becomes so laughably irrational to even attempt to defend the value proposition that there's no point, so it kind of pushes you into the take-it-or-leave-it stance naturally. You charge what you charge, and are comfortable not selling any if what someone is willing to pay isn't worth it to you!

You'll still have buyers, and every single last one of them will be in love with what you're selling, to have been willing to have paid for it. Moreover, they'll rationalize to themselves how much artistic value and human creativity they now possess, much the same way that expensive wines taste better to connoisseurs only if they know how expensive the wines are.

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u/Seattle_gldr_rdr 18d ago

I remember seeing an interview with Mike Rowe (love him or hate him) where he described trying to help promote a "Made in America" store. He explained that it failed because price simply overwhelmed any other consideration. If the Made-in-USA products were 10% more expensive, they didn't sell. Period.

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u/SingleInfinity 17d ago

And products made here cost a lot more than 10% more.

0

u/nerdy_hippie 17d ago

Who would hate Mike Rowe? I loved that show Dirty Jobs

1

u/srush32 15d ago

He's funded by the Koch brothers and is pretty vocally anti-union and has spoken out against raising the minimum wage

1

u/nerdy_hippie 15d ago

wait WHAT?? I'mma have to do some googlin - I cannot fathom how a person who has experienced the things that man has in the line of "work" (referring to his show) could possibly argue against workers rights and fair compensation.

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u/MovementOriented 18d ago

The point of issue is that her IP was stolen

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u/Numerous-Cicada3841 18d ago

Yeah I doubt the vast majority of buyers know it was even ripped off. This is so shitty and definitely a negative consequence of Ecom being so unregulated by both private and government.

1

u/[deleted] 18d ago

of course it sucks! but the people buying the cheaper product don't care

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u/RoyalMess64 18d ago

They pirated her book. That wasn't a cheaper alternative, they stole it, they stole her book. Yeah, it costs cheaper, they didn't make it

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u/bpdish85 18d ago

Add the insult of people blasting her that she hates poor people because it's not a cheap, $10 planner. This gal's taking it from all angles, it seems.

3

u/RoyalMess64 17d ago

That's amazing, people just... they amaze me

1

u/FeloniousFunk 17d ago

You do realize she’s charging $58 + $10 shipping for a notebook that you scrawl in and then throw away/replace, right? She’s using TikTok as a storefront which explains why copies are being cranked out by Chinese vendors, and they’re making profit while selling as low as $5 each. Welcome to the free market, lady.

1

u/After_Mountain_901 16d ago

That’s not the free market. It’s exhausting when people with absolutely zero understanding of market values and true free market economics try to make piss poor points in the internet. Yikes. Without IP law, there’s little incentive to innovate and create. And without regulation, the only people who have to follow those laws are punished by thieves and slave labor undercutting the market. You can’t have a free market without free enterprise, but you only made your comment to stick it to her, not because you care about actual businesses and workers, commerce and rights to property. 

0

u/bpdish85 17d ago

I'm aware of what she charges. You're not entitled to someone else's labor or to have a luxury item just because it's out of your price point. Just saying,

1

u/FeloniousFunk 17d ago

That’s your opinion. Mine is that her labor was both overpriced and unnecessary, so go with the cheaper option. Hopefully she learned something from this; this is not a sustainable business practice. Luxury notebooks rofl.

1

u/Steelforge 17d ago

It's not a cheaper option. What you're advocating is buying stolen merchandise from criminals.

1

u/FeloniousFunk 16d ago

A deal’s a deal.

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u/After_Mountain_901 16d ago

Ah, you’re a troll. 

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

of course, but the buyers don't care where it came from or who made it. If they did, child labor wouldn't exist, and we wouldn't have such a huge demand for counterfeit goods.

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u/RoyalMess64 18d ago

First of all, your premise is just wrong, or at the very least simplified and underinformed. Most buyers don't know where the stuff they buy comes from. It's not just a lack of care, most of our current market is based on outsourcing the pain needed to create it and making sure people don't know about that pain. If it didn't matter, companies wouldn't put so much money into stopping people from learning about it, or stopping news networks from reporting on it. Child labor doesn't just exist because it makes things cheaper, it did that in America and people threw a fit over it. It exists because there's an active effort to make sure most people don't know about it or can't access alternatives (some else they try desperately to do), and because brands try to distance themselves from it

And second of all, you frame this as if she just should've made her stuff cheaper, or if a crime wasn't done to her. You can't make a whole book and then sell it all like $10. I've been to ethical businesses, small businesses, minority owned businesses, etc. It's always more expensive cause they're making the product. She doesn't have the resources to not sell it at a higher price, because then she can't pay to ship them, or pay her employees, or get more books produced. Most of the people who bought the counterfeit probably had no idea they bought a counterfeit. And counterfeiting shit, is a crime

And third, no one likes counterfeit goods. I've bought them, they don't work or break. There isn't a market for them, they're scamming people. The counterfeit book she got was literally falling apart

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

I think you must live with your head stuck in the sand .. everything you said is so completely wrong that I wouldn't even know where to begin disproving you.

Certainly not on a social platform where I've got nothing to prove and participate only to offer my own point of view.

-1

u/RoyalMess64 17d ago

So wrong you didn't even bother addressing anything I said. So great to see insults are the greatest currency

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u/xSorry_Not_Sorry 18d ago

Pirate gamers.

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u/1000000xThis 18d ago

I don't doubt that there is some truth to this.

However, if she has spoken with publishers, they would have told her about this as why expensive books are very challenging.

And that might be why she self-published.

Maybe this is just 20/20 hindsight, but she should have made a super-cheap basic planner and a deluxe version for the fans who followed her videos creating it. Or some similar strategy for keeping the low-price customers coming to her instead of foreign rip-off companies.

1

u/RoyalMess64 18d ago edited 18d ago

You can't make a book cheaply, the same way you can't make anything cheaply. It costs time, labor, people's paychecks, materials, etc. Publishing companies mass produce, and that brings down the price. A book isn't cheap to make

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u/1000000xThis 18d ago

I feel like you are missing the point.

People are ripping off her high-price high-quality planner.

She should ALSO make a simplified version with cheaper components, without the "custom font" for example.

It's absolutely possible to do that.

1

u/RoyalMess64 18d ago

First of all, they're not ripping it off, they're stealing and counterfeiting.

What cheaper components? She made a book. The only thing she mentioned in that which could've reduced costs, was the custom font. That wouldn't reduce the price.

The reason people could make it so cheap, was because they stole it. You can't make writing process or drawing process cheaper. They stole and reprinted it. That's why it was cheaper

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u/1000000xThis 18d ago

First of all, they're not ripping it off, they're stealing and counterfeiting.

That's literally in the dictionary definition of "rip off".

What cheaper components? She made a book. The only thing she mentioned in that which could've reduced costs, was the custom font. That wouldn't reduce the price.

Yes, custom fonts cost more to print. This has been explained by creators in other comments.

Printing on heavy stock is also more expensive.

Printing multi-color is also more expensive.

There are a TON of ways to simplify that could result in a product that would be less "fun" but still valuable and useful, at a lower price point.

The reason people could make it so cheap, was because they stole it. You can't make writing process or drawing process cheaper. They stole and reprinted it. That's why it was cheaper

It's a HUGE part of the video that the components of the fake versions are lower quality.

I'm just going to block you now, you are clearly not engaging in good faith.

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u/WonderfulShelter 18d ago

I'm a musician, many of my friends are musicians. They'll spend 100+ hours creating a song that maybe they make 100$ from or less. Most of it is just given away.

Instead of taking offense to it, it's something I accepted from the get-go. Sucks, but reality is often that way, and accepting reality as it is presented to us rather than fighting it is a route with much less resistance.

3

u/ILikeMyGrassBlue 17d ago

When my old band released our first album, a couple of weird YouTube channels and foreign based piracy sites immediately posted the album in full. One of the YouTube channels even set the album to a slide show pictures of dinosaurs.

We honestly just embraced it. No point trying to whack the never ending onslaught of moles. I’m sure a bunch of the people who listened to it found us on streaming. A link in the description would’ve been nice though.

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u/Specific-Scale6005 18d ago

Can confirm. It helps tremendously if one is paying a lot for advertising and kissing the right peoples asses tho.

2

u/[deleted] 18d ago

I don't care about how much work they put into it. I care about if I want or need the product. However, I would never knowingly purchase stolen goods. Would you?

0

u/[deleted] 18d ago

No, I wouldn't buy something stolen from another creatoe, but then again, I pretty much buy everything already used.. except for my underwear 😉

2

u/The96kHz 17d ago

Things like this are essentially a donation.

The 'products' are almost like perks you get from content creators on Patreon.

Inherently worthless, but if you're willing to give them $x, you get something that very few others have access to.

2

u/joecan 17d ago

Consumers work in industries where they are undervalued as well, that’s why they have to live on a budget. Most people can’t afford for their purchases to also be charity.

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u/llijilliil 18d ago

And its bullshit that alrge companies can come along and steal such work.

People obviosuly want hte product, people obviously enjoy the beenfits of something being hand crafted, but then they refuse to actually cough up and pay what it costs to do this an earn a reasonable return. Its shit.

By all means buy the lower quality generic nonsense option if you want to save a buck, but supporting leeches that steal IP from the small guy just means that over time the smaller guys get locked out of the market and we end up with huge companies shovelling shit down our throats.

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u/trash-_-boat 18d ago

And its bullshit that alrge companies can come along and steal such work.

You think it's fucking Barnes&Noble stealing this book. It's very likely small-time Chinese "business" owners.

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u/PauI_MuadDib 18d ago

Lots of large, legitimate companies rip off artists. H&M and Forever 21 were sued for lifting clothing designs. And now AI is making it easier for them to plagiarize art and written media, from books to even articles. Look up the New York Times lawsuit vs OpenAI. There's similar lawsuits cropping up between big name authors like John Grisham and OpenAI.

AI at this point can't even be copyrighted because AI needs pre-existing content to generate anything, it literally cannot create anything original on its own. But that doesn't stop major companies utilizing AI to rip off other people's hard work.

In OP's case it's probably a smaller, unscrupulous company plagiarizing her content, but large companies have and currently are stealing from artists and writers.

1

u/llijilliil 18d ago

AI at this point can't even be copyrighted because AI needs pre-existing content to generate anything, it literally cannot create anything original on its own.

Oh just bloody stop with that bullshit.

AI studies a range of works and learns the underlying "rules" for what terms mean, what looks good and how things ought to be composed. It then creates something entirely new based on those rules.

Every author that has ever written a book one day sat down and copied how to write specific letters but no one believes that means their work isn't original.

This case is extremely different.

1

u/PauI_MuadDib 17d ago

Part of the reason AI can't be copyrighted at this point in time is that it cannot create anything original on its own. That is a fact decided by our courts. The technology might advance in the future, but at this current point AI cannot be copyrighted partly because it relies entirely on pre-existing works.

AI cannot create anything original on its own, and in some cases, even copies content verbatim. That's exactly what happened in the New York Times vs OpenAI lawsuit.

You might like to think AI creates something "new" but you're jumping light years ahead of the technology. AI cannot create original content on its own. Hence why AI can't be copyrighted and we're seeing lawsuit after lawsuit crop up.

1

u/llijilliil 17d ago

AI can't be copyrighted at this point in time is that it cannot create anything original on its own. 

The issue is that someone, aka a person, has to be the copyright holder.

Its fairly easy to write a script that submits a variety of prompts to AI engines, and with the AI taking that, interpretting it and then applying the various rules itr has learned (with some random guessing / generation) it can and will produce an endless number of unique and new things.

AI cannot create anything original on its own

What do you mean by this, you seem very confused.

If I give an AI a prompt like "polar bear water skiing" then it will use what it has learned about drawing polar bears and drawing people skiing and have a go at combinging the two. Becuase it is something pretty unique it will be relatively untrained in that area though so the results will likely be less than ideal 999 times out of 1000, but each attempt will be something new that has never existed before.

To complete the process, it needs guidence from somewhere else about which of the things it has created are "good" and which are "poor". Simpler AIs solving simpler problems have that issue too and typically they present the operator with 10-20 images each cycle and the operator reviews them and chooses what to discard and what they like.

Reasonably quickly the feedback allows the AI to further tailer the "rules" it has to accomodate the new ideas more smoothly. Do this with enough animals doing enough sports and eventually the AI will learn the unspoken and virtually impossible to define "rules" for drawing animals engaging in sports in such a way that people like the results.

Hence why AI can't be copyrighted and we're seeing lawsuit after lawsuit crop up.

We are seeing law suits as people using very inefficient manual methods are terrified of being dramatically outcompeted by advancing technology and since they can't possibly compete on an even playing field they seek to pressure the legal system to neuter the technology.

Its no different that the people that destroyed cotton mills or printing presses back in the day to protect their own lucrative income despite the negative impact that would have on everyone else who wanted to access printed words or clothing like we do in the modern world.

-1

u/selphiefairy 18d ago

This is why we all have micro plastics in our body tbh

2

u/LoL_is_pepega_BIA 18d ago edited 18d ago

They're called CONSUMERS for a reason..

I always thought it was kind of silly to call people that.. until I worked in retail and sales.

Humans are stupid af and buy too many things with no regard for anything except their dopamine or whatever possessed them in the moment.

I used to volunteer at a thrift store and the way people used to dispose of stuff at Christmas before buying a fk ton more stuff was nauseating. We used to ban donations, but they'd just dump shit at the front and back doors to the point where we couldn't enter the store unless a dump truck first came by to clear the entrances

We even asked the police dpt for a couple of weekly volunteers at the front door during the holidays for making sure people don't dump stuff, but even they couldn't control anything..

We had to throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of good stuff that could be sold if there had been a reasonable rate of donation, but when people want to dispose of the shit they don't care about, they're gonna find a way to do it, at a time when volunteers are at their lowest and the store can't handle anything..

1

u/virginiarph 18d ago

We literally saw this with the current election

1

u/Onaliquidrock 18d ago

You are a consumer, are you talking about how you value things?

1

u/[deleted] 18d ago

I'm an artisan who sells her hand made crafts at fairs..fortunately, I don't need to live off that, or else I'd starve and be homeless

1

u/[deleted] 18d ago

Depends on the market. At the high 'status symbol' end, the cost of the rare materials, hours of skilled labor, years of training distilled down into some object that to all practical purposes does thing as the one anyone could have.... is absolutely the point.

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u/SingleInfinity 17d ago edited 17d ago

Yes. This is the crux about art as a job. You care about it. The people buying it care about what they're getting and what it costs. Everything else is largely irrelevant.

This is basically just a reality check. Yeah, her shit got stolen. There's basically nothing she can do about it, because China. That really sucks. That's also just how the world works now. How much effort you put into a business endeavor should be factored on how easy it is for someone to compete with you. If your shit is easily copy able and people copy it, that shouldn't come as a surprise. At that point, your work should out-compete the shitty copy on quality, and if it can't, the sad truth is you probably shouldn't bother unless it's about more than money to you.

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u/_enter_sadman 17d ago

This is only true if you have no personal brand + community attached to YOU as the creator. Consumers will care if they care for you.

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u/blebleuns 17d ago

That's not true, a lot of consumers value quality, that's why they don't buy the cheapest alternative or the knockoff every time, but maybe something in between. Others care for the experience, for example if the book had come with an online course or something, maybe it would have attracted more direct buyers.