Paulo Coelho, author of books such as “The Alchemist” and “The Witch of Portobello”, sold over 100 million books last year. In part, he puts this success down to BitTorrent, as he saw a huge increase in sales when his books appeared on sites such as The Pirate Bay. We talked to Coelho to find out more about this remarkable story.
“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,” Coelho told TorrentFreak, explaining why he decided to share his books for free.
His urge to share received quite a lot of attention after Coelho started a weblog with the name Pirate Coelho a few months ago. His motivation? He wanted people to have the opportunity to ‘try’ his books for free, but he knew some of his publishers wouldn’t agree right away. So, he took matters into his own hands and put his own books onto BitTorrent, FTP sites and Rapidshare.
“There was a strong reaction when I mentioned the site at Digital Life Design, back in January 2008,” Coelho explains. “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.”
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