Why I Trust BookDefender to Protect My Books (And Why You Should Too)
I’m going to tell you something most people in this industry don’t know. The man who built BookDefender built it because of me.
In 2004, I discovered that my books were being pirated across the internet. Entire novels uploaded to download sites, handed out for free to thousands of readers who never paid a cent. I was furious. I went to my publishing houses at the time expecting them to do something about it.
They didn’t.
They knew about piracy. They just didn’t consider it their problem to solve. My books were being stolen, my income was being eroded, and the people who were supposed to have my back shrugged it off as a cost of doing business.
My husband Shane didn’t shrug.
He’s an engineer by trade—he spent his career in automotive quality assurance, where precision matters and “good enough” doesn’t exist. When he saw what was happening to my books and watched the industry do nothing about it, he started doing the work himself. He learned how piracy networks operated. He tracked down every stolen copy he could find. He filed DMCA takedown notices and followed up when platforms dragged their feet. He did it again the next day when new links appeared.
He did this for years. Not as a business. As my husband, protecting my work because nobody else would.
It Didn’t Stop with My Books
Word gets around in author circles. My friends—fellow authors, many of them six- and seven-figure earners—were dealing with the same problem. The same piracy. The same silence from publishers. The same helpless frustration of watching their hard work get stolen.
One of those friends was NYT bestselling author Jana DeLeon. Over the years, Jana kept telling me the same thing, “Shane should start a business doing this. I’d hire him.”
Six years ago, he finally did. He took everything he’d learned—twenty-plus years of fighting piracy, combined with his engineering and coding skills—and built BookDefender into a professional DMCA takedown service from the ground up.
And Jana beat me to the signup. She became his very first client. NYT bestselling author Michelle M. Pillow, who’d been agreeing with Jana every single time she told Shane to make it a business, became his second. (I’m still a little salty about being third in line for my own husband’s company, honestly LOL.) The list of my close author friends who hired him out of the gate grew. Over the years, they have been wonderful about spreading the word about him and his business, pointing out what he’s done for them in their fight against digital piracy.
Now, BookDefender helps over one-hundred of today’s top authors fight back against digital piracy. All of that from word of mouth.
What BookDefender Is
For anyone who doesn’t know, BookDefender is a professional anti-piracy DMCA takedown service built specifically for authors and publishers. Shane and his team find pirated copies of your ebooks and audiobooks across the internet—piracy sites, file-sharing platforms, Telegram groups, torrent networks, all of it—and file DMCA takedown notices to get your stolen work removed.
The thing that makes BookDefender different from every other service out there is that every single link is verified by a human being before a notice is filed. Shane built it that way because he’s an engineer and he doesn’t cut corners. Automated services blast out notices by the thousands without checking whether the links are actually piracy. They flag legitimate Amazon listings, library copies, and book reviews as infringement. Every false positive damages your credibility with platforms like Google—and once that trust is gone, it’s incredibly hard to rebuild.
BookDefender doesn’t have that problem. Human eyes on every link. Every time. No exceptions.
The results reflect that approach. Over 5.5 million takedown requests processed with a 95.7% success rate. BookDefender is also a member of Google’s Trusted Copyright Removal Program, which provides expedited access to Google’s copyright removal tools—a membership earned through years of accurate, legitimate filings.
Why I’m Writing This
I’m not writing this because Shane asked me to. I’m writing this because I’ve spent over twenty years watching authors struggle with piracy and not know where to turn. I’ve watched friends lose significant income to stolen books. I’ve seen authors get blindsided by KDP account issues triggered by pirated copies they didn’t even know existed.
And I’ve watched too many authors hand their money to takedown services that promise everything and deliver nothing—services that launched last year, rely entirely on bots, and can’t produce a single satisfied client whose name you’d recognize.
I know what good piracy protection looks like because I’ve had it for over twenty years. I’ve watched Shane do this work day in and day out since 2004. I’ve seen the results firsthand—not just for my own catalog, but for my friends’ catalogs and for the hundreds of authors BookDefender now protects.
Some of the biggest names in indie publishing trust BookDefender with their careers. NYT bestselling author Jana DeLeon has said publicly that BookDefender is the first DMCA service she’s used that actually gets results. That kind of endorsement doesn’t come from marketing. It comes from the work.
What I Want You to Know
If you’re an indie author and you’re not actively protecting your books from piracy, you’re losing money. Maybe a little. Maybe a lot. But you’re losing it.
If you’re in Kindle Unlimited, pirated copies of your exclusive titles can trigger account reviews and worse. That’s not a scare tactic. It’s happened to authors I know personally.
If you’re using a takedown service that relies entirely on automation, ask yourself: has anyone actually looked at the links before filing notices in your name? Because if the answer is no, that service might be doing more harm than good.
And if you’re looking for a service that does this work the right way—with the experience, the accuracy, and the genuine care for authors that this work demands—I can tell you from twenty years of personal experience that BookDefender is it.
Yes, the founder is my husband. Yes, I’m biased. But I’m biased because I’ve watched him do this work with the same relentless precision for two decades. I’m biased because I’ve seen what happens when authors don’t have this protection, and I’ve seen what happens when they do. The difference is real, measurable, and career-changing.
Your books are your business. They deserve someone who treats protecting them like it matters.
Shane does. He always has.