Alchemist Author Pirates His Own Books
Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist”, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren’t too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.
Coelho’s view is that letting people swap digital copies of his books for free increases sales. In a keynote speech (embedded below) at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more. He said:
In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. [...]
I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. [...]
So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.
He’s convinced — and rightly so — that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales. For him the problem is getting around copyright laws that require him to get the permission of his translators if he wants to share copies of his books in other languages.
So is Coelho just seeding torrents of his books? That’s just the beginning. He took it one step further and, as quoted above, set up a Wordpress blog, Pirate Coelho, where he posts links to free copies of his books on filesharing networks, FTP sites, and so on. He says it had a direct impact on sales:
Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…
In his speech he talks about how the Internet is changing language and books, and how online “piracy” and BitTorrent have helped him not only be more widely read, but also sell more books! It’s a must watch.
Via P2P-Blog
Previously: Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling Acceptable? Not Quite!
Next: Virus Threatened to Kill File-Sharers, Creator Arrested for Copyright Infringement
110 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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Really great to hear :)
right way
Glad things are working out well for him. Content distribution does help sales, that’s a given.
Great book, by the way.
a smart man
Good to hear, we need more people like him to tell the big cheese’s to F off and get with the program!
Smart man, too bad it only works if the item in question is *good*. All those crappy authors/artists/movies will need to find something called talent (or a new job) because this won’t work for them and therefore, they have to go crying to mommy about the big bad pirate on the interweb.
[quote]Smart man, too bad it only works if the item in question is *good*. All those crappy authors/artists/movies will need to find something called talent (or a new job) because this won’t work for them and therefore, they have to go crying to mommy about the big bad pirate on the interweb.[/quote]
And why it should work for crappy authors? ;)
Author is one to be rewarded, not PR manager.
I just left a comment over at the Pirate Coelho blog. I hope it gets back to him.. =)
finally somebody is hoping on the money train, i fuckin cant believe there just starting to figure this out..
THERES MONEY TO BE MADE PEOPLE! Stop whining and hop on the money train like this guy, or die.. whatever, your choice, and you only have these 2.
Top effort to him!
Hell yes!
And for those authors who haven’t seen the light yet, help them out by scanning their books and putting them online:
http://www.rorta.net/textfiles/free.your.books.singleside.pdf
http://www.rorta.net/textfiles/liberez.vos.livres.singleside.pdf
And another smart person understands the internet and copyright problems ;)
Where are those guys to tell him hes stealing hes own book :)
Coelho is a very wise man. You know that already from reading his books.
Today he proves that he is wiser than the entire copyright-industry.
this is the best news so far.
Baen Bookss has been doing that for years. Apparently, it’s something like tripled their sales.
suck on that you corporate shit faces.
It’s always great to hear this. People like him deserve it, too!
Does everyone in here praising this guy is serious? He is a hack. The majority of people here in brazil with a little academic education hates this guy. He is a joke in a lot of circles. His writing is an pseudo-mystical ego trip… Please dudes… Maybe the translators are doing a better job than he is… But his success overseas seriously amazes me…
Protocol Bittorrent = new Protocol();
BigCompany.Profit.AddNewRevenueStream(Bittorrent);
MessageBox.Show(BigCompany.Profit.ToString());
^ For those who only speak C#.
Result:
Loads of money. Just like cd/tape.
The Alchemist is my favorite book, simply awesome… all his other books looked a little too inspirational for me, so I’ve never read them.
great speaker
good innititive
He is so right, i like this guy!! He understand the whole thing.
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