Pirate Yourself, Become a Best-Seller 288
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."
On a related subject (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How long have we been saying it? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I for one (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm just really tired of the lumping together of all kinds of filesharing under the heading "piracy".
Mal Reynolds from Firefly said it best.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Brad
Re:Before claiming RIAA should learn (Score:4, Interesting)
Same for Education (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Won't work with games either... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been saying it for years. (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting fact with that article, shortly after writing it Moira Allen decided to post all of her hundreds of articles under the Creative Commons as well. The real revolutionary thing about the Creative Commons and piracy is the viral marketing side of it. Companies have known for a long time that giving away free samples is awesome marketing, they just tend to cost considerably but with digital media this can be negated to almost nothing.
Sure some people don't buy your stuff, but in a lot of cases they wouldn't buy it anyway. You can also make up for a lower quality product by pirating it. For one thing it's off limits, for another it's free, and lastly it's obviously liked by other people otherwise it wouldn't be pirated. All these factors combine to make piracy and Open Licenses very powerful marketing tools that most companies are just missing out on.
I've actually covered the benefits of Philanthropic Marketing [dynamicmar...utions.com] on my blog. This includes Open Source, Open Licensing, and just plain helping out in the community to foster a stronger community and help it thrive. A lot of the FOSS crowd seems to be a bit socialistic in their viewpoints and try to convert people that way. I prefer to cater to their greed and self-interest which we all have and which FOSS and sharing in general are compatible with.
If anyone's interested in learning more or getting help with a philanthropic marketing campaign drop me a line at the email address mentioned on my blog.
Over-hype (Score:3, Interesting)
But Wait, there's More!!!... (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, they publish, with some of their books, the Baen CD - a CD containing all of the Free Library, the book you just bought, and a whole bunch of others, typically by that individual author. And the license is great - you can do anything you want with the cd - copy, give away - EXCEPT sell it. http://oberon.zlynx.org/ [zlynx.org] has all of them, with links to other distribution sites, all PERFECTLY LEGAL.
Jim Baen passed away last year (God rest his soul), but the people who continue to run the shop show no signs of lessening their commitment to these distribution channels. Science Fiction and Fantasy may not be your cup of tea, but what they are doing is great.
Truer words were never spoken. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Quite frankly, the whole point of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."
-- Linus Torvalds
(source: http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95 [lkml.org])
Oddly enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How long have we been saying it? (Score:2, Interesting)
So I have this theory, that it was actually released by the software company itself, in a 'we didn't do that, honest' kind of way. Because it gets conslutants out there skilled, and able to 'test' and understand their product, without having to jump through the hoops of a corporate acquisition process.
They charged for support, and upgrades anyway, and we paid for support on our production servers, Couldn't justify the license cost on our 'test' server though.
The 'evaluation' code was fine for a business eval, but for someone who's doing it on their 'private time' it's not long enough. And I remain confident, they'd have never seen the rather large chunk of business we threw their way if we hadn't had people using it at home, and playing with it, and declaring it 'something we should check out'.
Re:Effective by design (Score:4, Interesting)
Intellectual property is exactly as imaginary as physical property. Both refer to "rights". Rights are inherently intangible. And contrary to their names, they both have physical ("real") referents.
Re:Won't work with games either... (Score:3, Interesting)
I had this experience in miniature ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had much the same experience with electronic distribution,
except in a much smaller scale. I was the co-author of the first
edition of O'Reilly's "Using Samba", which was published under a
free documntation license, and a copy was included in every
download of the Samba program.
Using Samba was O'Reilly's best seller of the period, and jumped
by all the other Samba books of the day.
It seems that people were printing small sections, making
notes in the margin, and then buying the professionally
printed book to have it in a portable format,
but not to have to carry around huge inconvenient lumps of paper.
--dave
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Interesting)
I bought the book. Granted, I picked the one of the several Baen books that looked most interesting, but I specifically picked a Baen book because of their policy. I don't regret it -- the book was excellent. Still, such marketing tactics DO work, and I'm grateful to Baen for taking the stance they do.