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| Alchemist Author Pirates His Own Books and makes mucho money! |
| 2008-01-25 |
| Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of âThe Alchemistâ, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers werenât too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so heâs taken matters into his own hands. Coelhoâs 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 âThe Alchemistâ 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. [âŠ] 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. [âŠ] So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions⊠And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho. Heâs convinced â and rightly so â 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? Thatâs 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 video of Coelho speaking about his technique and results at link |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #4 Seems like shareware stuff worked pretty good in the 90's, but somebody like sony or McMillan could never be satiated by anything less than pushing the price to the breaking point. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2008-01-25 17:57 |
| #3 This reminds me of a rapper who recently teamed up with Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) and put his latest album out for free or voluntary donation. So far < 10% of the downloads resulted in payments, but the total number paying was nearly the same number as his previous release, and - here's the kicker - he keeps every penny taken in and there's no record company taking most of the money. |
| Posted by: xbalanke 2008-01-25 16:53 |
| #2 Yo, ho! Yo, ho! An author's life for me! |
| Posted by: Mike 2008-01-25 11:32 |
| #1 Not surprising. If I find something I like, I buy it. I'm not the only one either. Most people are aware that if the people who make stuff you like don't get paid, then they won't do the stuff you like. BitTorrent let me find BSG, and I bought the DVDs lent them out and got others to buy it. It's no accident that Microsoft gives away and ignores piracy on a lot of it's software by developers. Eventually people pay for it, or write something that makes others buy it to run the devs apps. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles in Blairistan 2008-01-25 11:22 |