Pirate Yourself, Become a Best-Seller

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "It sounds like a dotcom-era business plan: 1) give it away, 2) ???, 3) make pots of money. Author Paulo 'Pirate' Coelho leapt out of obscurity and onto the best-seller list by giving away his books on the Net. The best-selling author of 'The Alchemist' will even help you pirate his books via his blog. His publishers were not pleased, but then his books went from selling 1,000 copies to 100,000 and then over a million. He gives special credit to pirate translators who are making his work accessible to a wider audience and convincing more people to read his book."

He's not the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

These guys [s2games.com] recently released their newest game as a free download, with a $30 charge to register an account to play it online. Both this and TFA are exactly what us slashdotters have been telling people to do for a long while now, and it appears to be working (S2 claims they are "very impressed" with initial sales figures).

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with S2, nor am I a fan of their game, just their business model.

Paulo Coelho ...

[Qetu]

Paulo Coelho leapt out of obscurity? WTF?

from wikipedia:

Coelho has sold over 100 million books in over 150 countries worldwide and his works have been translated into 66 languages (Goodyear, Dana (2007-05-07), "The Magus", The New Yorker: 38-45, ). He has received numerous literary awards from a variety of countries, including La Legion d'Honneur (France), Grinzane Cavour (Italy). In addition, he has written Maktub[5], which is a collection of his best columns published in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo, The Manual of a Warrior of Light, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept[6], The Fifth Mountain, Veronika Decides to Die, The Devil and Miss Prym, Eleven Minutes, Like The Flowing River and The Valkyries[7].

Re:Effective by design

[FredFredrickson]

Although it doesn't have to do with books or piracy, Ian Rogers has an interesting speech [fistfulayen.com] about "effective by design." His mantra is similar- those who embrace the scalability of the web instead of try to create scarcity will be the ones that profit.

I feel it isn't ground breaking, but his little thing on physics really put into words what I've been feeling for a long time. Worth a read.

Re:Online "library"

[ericspinder]

Why not just have an online library that allows people to download whatever book they wanted ... There is a "limited" number of books released to this online library and ... If you want a book ... an option to purchase the physical representation

Do you mean like Oreilly's Safari service [oreilly.com]?

Re:HTTP lives on port 80

[bhtooefr]

Because that's not the actual URL for his blog? That's a Coral Cache link, which is quite useful to prevent Slashdotting.

Remove the .nyud.net:8090 to get the real URL.

Re:Prove it

[stjobe]

Can you cite a source for this claim and not just 1 anecdote?

Here you go [baen.com]. You could probably get a lot more from reading the other "Prime Palavers" and the slashdot [slashdot.org] articles [slashdot.org] discussing those, but my hunch is that you won't bother.
If you'd like to prove my hunch wrong, there's also a few [mises.org] more [openbusiness.cc] people [simplenomics.com] out there with the same experience as Baen.

Re:He's not the only one...

[penguin_dance]

Back in the day, Apogee games [3drealms.com] came up with a similar model. They put out the first in the series (usually 3 games) for free--I remember getting Commander Keen on a floppy disk with my joystick purchase. If you liked the first one, you could order the rest of the series for a nominal fee. It seemed to be a fairly successful business model.

Re:How long have we been saying it?

[Angst Badger]

But I don't think the artists are losing much from those people anyway.

Indeed. The 16-year-old with a pirated copy of 3D Studio Max couldn't afford a legitimate copy if he or she wanted one. This is the problem with the absurd estimates of piracy losses groups like the BSA come up with. How many of those millions of copies of software would actually have been sold if they couldn't be pirated? Probably relatively few. The same applies to other media.

Books probably do represent a special case to some extent, though. Not very many people want to read an entire book on a monitor, and book lovers really do love physical books. So if they get a digital copy, read a couple of chapters, and enjoy it, they'll probably want the real thing. Baen Books has been making money hand over fist on that theory. This is probably a bit less true of music and software, where a copy is just as good as the original.

Obscurity? Paulo Coelho?

[BlackCreek]

Paulo Coelho obscure?

Yet another proof that slashdot editors really don't control anything that gets posted here

Paulo Coelho has sold around 100 million books on 150 countries and has been translated to more than 66 languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Coelho [wikipedia.org]. Somehow the bozo submiting stories will credit all of that to torrent publicity? Check out (in the portuguese wikipedia) http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Coelho [wikipedia.org] the number of international prises he got way before torrents were in any way popular. Please just read the list of prises he got BEFORE 2000.

Yeah, obscure all the way. Indeed.

BTW, what's the name of that obscure comedy writer that released a book on the internet, and after he got famous, decided not to do that again? Oh, yeah that would be (otherwise unknown) Scott Adams http://www.themillionsblog.com/2007/11/giving-it-away-for-free.html [themillionsblog.com] ... Another usurper of the torrent comunity no doubt!

Re:I for one

[VJ42]

I don't know offhand if libraries have to purchase books or if publishers give them to libraries for free

Having worked in both public and academic libaries (in the UK) I can confirm we have to pay for them just like anyone else; we even have to pay a fee to the British Library for an interlibrary loan if a customer wants a book that we don't have and consequently have to request a copy from them (unless we decide to buy it ourselves of course).

This is not Coelho's Blog.

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is wrong with slashdot folks? This is obviously not Coelho's blog. Besides, as it was pointed out above, this guy was famous around the world much, much before this phony blog was created, in June 2007.
Can't you guys see the difference between a world wide famous writer, and some kid blogging from his parents yard?

Re:Paulo Coelho ...

[Carlos Laviola]

[quote]ure, I thought the same thing when I read the summary....but it turns out in 2001 he had only sold 10000 copies.[/quote]

Says who? That's blatantly untrue. He was already a huge best seller in Brazil [b]before[/b] becoming one worldwide.

Coelho pirated not only his own work

[leomaro]

This Autor is very well known here in Argentina for his "self-help books". He writes tons of books,and he doesn't even write them. Why?, well, because he is known to copy from other books and use that in his own work. Some years ago a female spanish autor realized that Coelho was copying from her work (whole chapters) and started legal measures against Paulo.
By the way To pirate is to assault ships in the sea, not copying something.

Re:I for one

[Stripe7]

This is not something new, Baen books discovered this a while back. They started the Baen free library http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm/ [baen.com]. What they discovered was that readership in the authors books skyrocketed. What they found strange was the books posted in the Free library were the ones that started selling!

Re:Prove it - Long sense proven

[jrboatright]

Try Eric Flint's series of analytical articles on the relationship between copyright, DRM and the book market in his column in Jim Baen's Universe magazine on line ( http://www.baens-universe.com/ [baens-universe.com] ) while the general magazine requires a subscription to read more than half the story, Eric's columns are free-and-open.

You might start here: http://baens-universe.com/authors/Eric_Flint [baens-universe.com] -- start at the bottom and work up. By the time you're done you'll have a pretty complete education on the relationship of copyright, DRM and the book marketplace WITH NUMBERS.

Have a good time. Come back when you're done.

Baen Free Library

[1c3mAn]

He definitely isn't the first to do this. The Publisher Baen has been doing it for years.

http://www.baen.com/library/ [baen.com]

Just read the comments by Eric Flint and see that the authors who have books in the Library have seen a significant increase in sales. Sure, most of the books are older, and just the first one or two books in the series, but if other readers are anything like I am, then if you read the first book in a series and like it. You will definitely consider buying the second on wards.

Now the fact that he used in mainly to get notices is new, but free books really aren't