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Pirate Yourself, Become a Best-Seller

Posted by kdawson on from the old-time-religion dept.

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."

6 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. On a related subject by Robotech_Master · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm going to be interviewing Phil & Kaja Foglio live this weekend about this very issue: why they decided to stop selling individual print issues of their Girl Genius comic book and turn it into a free webcomic to sell more trade paperbacks and hardcover collections. Call in with questions of your own.

    --
    Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
  2. Re:I for one by stjobe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is it really "piracy" if the author is the one doing the distribution? Not that I know if he's the one holding the copyright, but even so?

    I'm just really tired of the lumping together of all kinds of filesharing under the heading "piracy".

    --
    "Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
  3. Mal Reynolds from Firefly said it best.... by JBHarris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    About fifty percent of the human race is middle men and they don't take kindly to being eliminated.
    --Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity
    This is the where the music labels and book & video game publishers fit. Think about it when you see the RIAA fighting to survive. That is their purpose. The tubes have made them non-important. If your only purpose for existing was being made irrelevant by some new technology, wouldn't you fight that with everything you had? I'm not saying I agree with it, but it certainly gives you insight into the reasons "WHY".

    Brad
  4. Same for Education by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is what I've been saying for a long time to the people I work with. I work for a medium-sized community college, and one of my jobs is creating media for our online classes, videos, podcasts, narrated powerpoints, etc. We have so many instructors that are worried about protecting their "intellectual property," as if it was academic gold. I tell them make you stuff open, share it with the public. Who cares if somebody at some other college uses our stuff? That only makes us look better. The one guy we have here that is actually doing what I'm saying has TONS of chemistry videos on Google Video, and as a result receives feedback from all over the world, and has been asked to speak at a few conferences because of it.

    --
    Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
  5. Re:Won't work with games either... by navygeek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    the same is true of games, but that wont stop the slashdot crowd from a) saying the games companies are stupid not to copy this model and b) somehow using this to justify pirating games. You're wrong. Take, for example, Stardock's "Galactic Civilization II". The game has NO copy protection and NO way to prevent you from installing and playing a pirated copy. Yes, they use serial numbers to activate accounts to download the patches, but you can download those from a number of places without activation - in practice, there is no real prevention method in place. Yet the company sold enough copies of the game to produce two expansions AND still profit.
  6. I've been saying it for years. by oncehour · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've known for quite a while that piracy would be a great marketing tool. I actually wrote about the Creative Commons being a marketing tool on the popular writing e-zine "Writing World": Increase Your Market with a Creative Commons License

    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 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.