I've always been of the opinion that people who truly love what they piratesd will at some point want the author to carry on writing. Just like someone who just stumbled upon your work by accident. That's the beauty of humanity, people do remember, and they do care, and creative arts are a pursuit that connects author and reader.
I tried on Kindle, but the reality is that every day, a six-digit number of books are being released, which leads to insane odds.
I wrote cyberpunk/urban fantasy crossover books, but am now switching over to space opera. If you're still interested, I can give you the title of the "entry book" that starts the story.
I agree, and the optimist in me desperately wants to experience a post-scarcity society like the one we're seeing in the The Culture books, where AIs run the world, and we humans are free to chase whatever it is we're dreaming of.
Maybe that's a romantic notion, but I'm hesitant to give up on in. Dreams are what's kept us going for the past millennia.
We might end up like people who do graphics... replaced by AI tools. There aren't any that make it as easy yet (and maybe there won't), but who knows where tech will lead us.
If you do it as a hobby, you don't need to worry about it so much, but it does take something away for sure.
I'm an indie author, and all my novels ended up on PDFdrive.
Not that I'd be mad about it. If someone pirates my books and likes them, maybe they'll support me in the future.
Just saying, I'm not wearing suits. I'm working full-time and write when I have off and got the time and energy.
For us Indies, getting eyeballs on our books is next to impossible anyways, so I already gave up on the idea that writing will ever be more than an expensive hobby.
Mobile games don't qualify as games. They're riddled with micro transactions and ads, and I would know... I'm complicit in this, as I'm translating their games, of which the cash shops are a noticeable chunk.
May unity milk them till the udder produces nothing but pus.
Also storms, but that might depend on your location. We didn't have fires here, but some flooding. Not sure if a rising sea level will impact us here in Japan, but heat, storms and torrential rain is already bad enough. It's already bad enough, and we haven't really progressed that far yet.
And the worst part is, I'm not old enough to not see what's about to come in the 2030s.
No, I'm not writing Shadowrun, but the genre has some similarities.