‘Holding us hostage’: WA authors’ horror as Meta uses their pirated work

When Perth author Holden Sheppard abandoned his X account, part of the mass exodus following the Elon Musk takeover, he forfeited an audience of 17,000 built over eight years’ work.

Now, he’s contemplating the costs of keeping the platforms he has remaining.

Sheppard, one of Western Australia’s more commercially successful novelists thanks to the awards won by his debut novel Invisible Boys, now a major series streaming on Stan, relies on an online following of around 11,000 followers across Instagram and Facebook to communicate his news and events – and with his third novel King of Dirt being released in June, the pressure to stay visible is relentless.

Women’s fiction author Rachael Johns is another West Australian writer commanding a significant following on Meta’s platforms, with around 26,000 followers, around 6500 of whom tune in to her Facebook-hosted online book club monthly.

For years, they have allocated time they could be writing their books into building these followings with thoughtful posts, knowing that Meta was gaining advertising dollars thanks to them, but also feeling there was reciprocal benefit.

Now, they’re not so sure.

“It’s like they’re holding us hostage,” Johns says, speaking on the phone at her Swan Valley home, where she can write as a day job thanks to her commercial success, placing her in the vanishingly small group of full-time Australian authors.

Johns and Sheppard both say some authors gained public visibility the old-fashioned way, before social media, but with publisher publicity budgets dropping and traditional media shrinking, authors are increasingly expected to bridge the gaps themselves using social media.

Having done so in good faith, they are furious at news Meta has trained its AI on their allegedly pirated books, along with thousands of other authors who have made the discovery over the past week.

“I’m getting close to the point where leaving is worth the risk,” says Rachael Johns.

Meta is being sued for copyright infringement by United States authors alleging chief executive Mark Zuckerberg approved use of the LibGen online books dataset to train the company’s AI models – despite warnings from his executives it was pirated – on the basis it was faster and less expensive than licensing books and articles.

Meta intends to rely on a “fair use” defence, telling Australian media it “has developed transformational GenAI open source LLMs that are powering incredible innovation, productivity, and creativity for individuals and companies” and that “fair use of copyrighted materials is vital to this”.

The LibGen database itself acts outside the law, so publishers’ notices requesting the removal of copyrighted material are ineffective.

The Atlantic has published a database where authors can search their name to see if their work is on LibGen; the Australian Publishers Association estimates well over 7000 Australian books are in it, from authors including multiple former prime ministers, Stella Prize winner and Booker shortlister Charlotte Wood, Helen Garner, Hannah Kent and Sarah Wilson.

From a West Australian perspective, industry heavy-hitters including Tim Winton, Natasha Lester and Sara Foster are on the list alongside award-winning early career writers such as Rebecca Higgie, Molly Schmidt, Katherine Allum and Michael Burrows.

“I’m livid,” Sheppard says. “All my hard work has been stolen without consent and used to train something I’m completely opposed to ethically.”

Broome-based Indigenous publishing house Magabala Books has released a statement demanding First Nations storytellers be paid for their work and their rights upheld, saying Meta’s actions are theft of First Nations peoples’ intellectual property and undermine the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Fremantle Press chief executive Alex Allan told WAtoday Meta’s actions were especially egregious because they were “theft by the powerful and rich, from authors who we know are some of the lowest paid [professionals].”

Fremantle Press on Monday released a further statement denouncing Meta’s actions, saying this theft undermined the value of original work and should be challenged.

“Now is the time for creators, politicians, journalists and industry members, to do what we do best,” it said.

“Use our voices, and our power as expert storytellers, to help people understand why this news is so devastating and what it is costing us all.”

Writing WA chief executive Will Yeoman said writers invested countless hours and immense creativity into their work, and it was unacceptable for tech giants to exploit this without permission or compensation.

He said writing WA stood in solidarity with the Australian Society of Authors and other industry bodies in calling for immediate action from the Australian government to protect authors’ rights with robust AI-specific legislation.

“While we recognise the potential benefits and importance of AI tools in enhancing productivity and creativity in the writing process, we emphasise that these advancements should not come at the expense of authors’ livelihoods,” he said.

“It is crucial that we strike a balance between technological progress and the protection of our vibrant literary culture.”

Meta also uses public Instagram posts to train its AI model, without opt-out available in Australia.

“I feel kind of trapped … like we need to use the very tool that is exploiting us,” writes Perth’s Molly Schmidt, author of award-winning debut novel Salt River Road.

Rachael Johns says including translations and anthologies, 38 of her titles are in the dataset.

She and her peers fear that to leave represents career suicide, with Johns’ publisher Ali Watts, of Penguin Random House, telling her leaving would be detrimental for her because of how active her Facebook community is, and because it’s a demographic that finds new books by scrolling socials.

Watts emphasises, however, that this is not general advice for all authors.

Perth-based, New York Times bestselling author Natasha Lester has 10,000 Instagram followers, but she’d love to leave Meta entirely, and it’s why she has taken breaks of up to eight months and started a Substack account. But with her new book out (inset) Meta is one of the only ways she feels she can advertise her impending book tour.Credit: Stef King

Johns is not convinced authors need Meta as much as it needs them, citing a social media expert telling a United States author conference only 7 per cent of their followers would actually buy a book.

She suspects authors with 50,000-plus followers may enjoy associated higher sales, but that the smaller the audience, the more marginal the benefits.

Johns says most people who achieve runaway sales do so because they are featured by a high-profile TikTokker, blogger, book club or other prominent list, not because of their own social media efforts.

She has invested enormous effort into growing a large following, but while her sales have been “reasonably good for quite a long time”, they are not growing proportionately to her social media presence.

She also points out the apps’ drawbacks, from the pressure to respond to all comments and messages, to their power to distract from creative work, and their mental health impacts.

Johns is thinking through the logistics of transitioning away, particularly shepherding her 6500-strong book club audience to a new platform.

“You don’t begrudge others’ successes – their 10,000 words written or their movie deal – but still, it’s a lot of head-noise,” she says.

“If we all said, en masse, to readers, ‘We will not be here soon, but you can follow our newsletter’; if we educated readers as we left; maybe they would understand.”

“My presence on social media was directly contributing to feelings of isolation, frustration, and an unnecessarily apprehensive view of the people around me.”

Perth author Laurie Steed

Johns, Sheppard and other bestselling historical fiction and thriller authors Natasha Lester and Sara Foster are among Perth authors future-proofing by growing audiences on email newsletter platform Substack.

Sheppard has also built 1500 followers on microblogging site BlueSky, considered an ethical alternative to X, but says it will remain a creatives’ niche until there is a shift of general users deciding Meta is too unethical or problematic to use.

“The next 12-24 months will be very interesting,” he says.

“This is a tough career and authors are not in it for the money, so many will choose to take the hit as they’re not making much anyway.”

Perth’s Laurie Steed, author of Greater City Shadows, You Belong Here and Love, Dad, two of which are on LibGen, deleted his accounts recently and says there is life after Meta.

“My presence on social media was directly contributing to feelings of isolation, frustration, and an unnecessarily apprehensive view of the people around me,” he says.

“I left social media knowing it could well impact my career, and I considered such concerns alongside my own needs.

“It is a struggle to withdraw from spaces that seem to acknowledge our identity as authors and part of the greater literary community … we rarely make much money as authors; in this instance, our ability to receive credit, acknowledgement and potential income has been stolen by a multi-billion dollar company which can and should do better.”

The Australian Society of Authors is running a LibGen register and calling for federal AI legislation, as is the Australian Publishers Association. The Australian Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is gathering signatures to an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, which reads:

“Australia’s creative and media workers are not going to sit idle while you devalue our work and degrade our society. Our work is not a free input to be fed into your machines.”

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