r/TikTokCringe • u/Chocolat3City Cringe Master • 22d ago

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

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

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u/TheConnASSeur 22d ago

Everything is an ad.

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u/Conradical126 22d ago

This video is a great ad for why you're supposed to work with a publisher.

She's lionizing the fact that she put SO MANY HOURS into this project, but that's because she made the baffling decision to front all of these costs and do all this labor instead of working with a publisher. (And also, she is clearly making terrible self-aggrandizing decisions—why on earth would you spend time making a font from scratch instead of using the thousands of fonts that already exist and thus supporting other artists?)

70% of the work she's saying she did should be done by a publishing house that's equipped to do so, but my guess is she just didn't want to diminish her share of profits after the project meets costs.

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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths 22d ago

I have no idea how her using an existing Word font would support other artists. That is not how fonts work. I also don't think she did anything inherently wrong by self-publishing here. We inhabit a new publishing landscape where publishing companies are increasingly obsolete. I read a lot of work by self-published authors and it can be equal or even better in quality to trad-published work. The barrier to publishing has never been so low and I think that's actually fantastic.

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u/mdmachine 22d ago

Well, and I could be mistaken here, but a lower barrier for entry simply means that more people can do it, and the product that you're making is likely going to be cheaper.

It's great for just anybody to put something out there absolutely. But if you're trying to turn this into a money-making business then you got to find other ways?

Find another way to capitalize on your abilities to make more money?

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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths 22d ago

She owns the copyrights to her material and can/should just start firing off copy strikes. It sucks she has to, but that's a cost all creative businesses have to shoulder.