how to get rich as an author: pirate yourself

February 10th, 2008

So says Paulo Coehlo, who when his publisher was none too keen about distributing digital versions of his work, set up a blog, Pirate Coelho, to help fans find P2P downloads. What was the effect? Sales. In a speech 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. Here’s a link to a blog post with video of the speech on torrentfreak.com.

Why does it work? From the Guardian book blog:

… giving away free digital copies of books makes a lot more sense that giving away free digital copies of music. Downloading a couple of chapters allows you to see how much you might like an author unknown to you. The point being that most of us who like what we read are then likely to go on and purchase the physical copy of the book, because so few of us have the stamina to read an entire book from a screen.

Coelho is one of the biggest names I’ve heard of adopting the strategy espoused by Cory Doctorow, et al. My guess is that we’ll see free sample chapters as a mainstream marketing strategy in a year or two, if not complete works. Good news for writers just starting out: setting up a torrent of your novel could emerge as a viable (and cheap) way of bootstrapping yourself into a publishing contract.

Entry Filed under: ebooks, get published