Comment by vidarh

The vast majority of writers do not recoup their investment, not due to piracy but due to a massive glut of works available.

I've published a couple of novels. They've sold far better than average, and yet not sold enough to be remotely worth it if I did it for the money. Piracy might have made a tiny dent, but the many millions of competing novels matters far more.

Anyone who has self published will have experienced that it is hard to even get people to read (as opposed to just download to hoard) your work even for free.

It's more comfortable to blame piracy, though.