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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."
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with S2, nor am I a fan of their game, just their business model.
from wikipedia:
Although it doesn't have to do with books or piracy, Ian Rogers has an interesting speech 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.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Do you mean like Oreilly's Safari service?
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Because that's not the actual URL for his blog? That's a Coral Cache link, which is quite useful to prevent Slashdotting.
.nyud.net:8090 to get the real URL.
Remove the
If you'd like to prove my hunch wrong, there's also a few more people out there with the same experience as Baen.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
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.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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. 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 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 ... Another usurper of the torrent comunity no doubt!
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
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?
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.
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/. 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!
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/ ) 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 -- 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.
He definitely isn't the first to do this. The Publisher Baen has been doing it for years.
http://www.baen.com/library/
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