Author Paulo Coelho Pirates His Own Books (and increases sales)

The famous Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, author of novels such as “The Alchemist”, “Veronika Decides to Die”, “The Devil and Miss Prym” who had already accustomed us with having enormous success, enjoyed a fabulous book-selling also in 2007 (100 million books). He thinks that partly accountable for this success was BitTorrent, because he says he noticed a massive sales boost after his books were made available on sites like The Pirate Bay. TorrentFreak interviewed Coelho to learn the truth behind this story.

Coelho dwelt on the idea of sharing and motivated his decision to put his books online - “Since the dawn of time, human beings have felt the need to share - from food to art. Sharing is part of the human condition. A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone.”

Since he feared his publishers wouldn’t agree to the idea of starting a blog on which to pirate his own novels, he’s done it himself – he uploaded his material onto BitTorrent, FTP sites and Rapidshare.

Further on, he describes how he went through with the whole thing:

There was a strong reaction when I mentioned the site at Digital Life Design, back in January 2008, […] The blog was out there for a while, but it seems that nobody from the publishing world was paying attention to it. When I spoke about it, all eyes were aimed at the site. From that moment on, based on actual numbers, the publishers not only accepted it, but helped me.

“Harper Collins, for example, decided to offer a new book of mine every month, for free reading.” This, together with the pirated copies worked out really well, and the book sales went up. “If you go to the New York Times Bestseller list, you’ll see that the Alchemist jumped to the #6, and the Witch of Portobello is in the extended list.”

Not only doesn’t Coelho regret diving into this idea but he encourages other writers to do the same -“The ultimate goal of a writer is to be read. Money comes later.” Since he started to share his books the author’s popularity has increased and along with it the sales. However, Coelho is an author who nevertheless affords this “experiment”.

When asked about how does book piracy stand compared to the unauthorized copying of music and movies, the novelist made a well-placed remark saying that it’s easier to consume movies and music digitally and that pirated ebooks are more often used to preview.

The digital saga of one of the most read (and accessible) authors of our times continues on his weblog, Myspace, FaceBook, Flickr and even Twitter where he interacts with his readers. “I want to share everything I write, from my books to my blogs.”

It even seems that he engaged also into a new experiment, enouraging his readers to make a film inspired by one of his books. At the release of“The Witch of Portobello” Hollywood was thrilled anticipating another movie deal, but Coelho had already thought of something else.