Best Selling Author Actively Pirating His Own Book -- Finds It Helps Sales Tremendously

from the the-benefits-of-free dept

We've been seeing more and more examples lately of content creators recognizing how they benefit from giving away their content for free. What's most amusing, however, is that every time we point out an example, people work extra hard explaining why that case is a special case. When we discussed less-well-known musicians giving away music, we were told that it would never work for megastars. When we discussed megastars giving away music, we were told it would never work for indie musicians. The same is true in other areas as well. When we recently wrote about an author giving his book away for free, someone angrily emailed to let us know that this only made sense because no one had ever heard of that author -- so it was purely a promotional effort by a new author.

Yet, apparently, it also works for well-known authors. TorrentFreak points us to the news that Paulo Coelho is such a fan of giving his book away for free that he's even set up his own blog called Pirate Coehlo where he points to where you can download various translations of his best selling book The Alchemist. Coelho explained all of this in a recent talk he gave:
Link: sevenload.com What Coelho quickly discovered was that the more his book was available for free, the more sales of the actual book increased. As an example, he cites the Russian translation of his book, where it went from only 1,000 sales to well over 100,000 in a period of two years, and has only continued to grow since then. It's yet another good example of someone embracing how giving away content for free can help them earn more money. And, it highlights (again) that, whether you're well known or a nobody, you can use these tactics to your advantage.

Filed Under: authors, books, downloads, free content, paulo coelho

Author Gives Away Book, Admits Obscurity A Much Bigger Problem Than Piracy

from the get-it-out-there dept

Doc was the first of a few of you to send in the news that author Charles Sheehan-Miles is the latest of a bunch of new authors who are happily giving away their new books for free. Sheehan-Miles is also making sure to give it away in as many formats as he can think of to make it as easy to read as possible, based on whatever your preference might be. He's definitely helping to highlight the maxim that obscurity is a much bigger threat to authors than piracy. He appears to recognize that there are plenty of business models if his work is well known -- but there are very few if no one knows who you are.

Speaking of free book experiments, a few others have also submitted the fact that Kevin Kelly's latest book on documentary films is available as a free pdf download -- but with contextual ads from Yahoo included. It's an interesting experiment as a model for free books, but it seems like one unlikely to go very far. It's difficult to see those ads being very effective in most books (there are a few exceptions). Either way, it's nice to see authors experimenting with new models, rather than simply whining about "piracy."

Filed Under: books, charles sheehan-miles, free

Harry Potter Will Conjure Up Big Sales, Despite Piracy

from the it's-a-magic-trick,-apparently dept

A few weeks back, Michael Moore's latest film, Sicko, was released and fared pretty decently at the box office, despite being available on P2P networks -- a situation one hyperbolic article described as "every film maker's worst marketing nightmare." That's a story that's played out time and time again, as the mere availability of pirated content hasn't held back the sales of legitimate content. Now, stories about the latest Harry Potter book being available on file-sharing networks are starting to come in, ahead of the book's release this weekend. This news isn't being met with the same level of media freakouts as when a reporter discovered Sicko online, with even the CEO of Barnes & Noble saying it "won't sell a single copy less" of the book despite it being available for free online. The biggest reason for this is the inconvenience of the pirated copies: they're huge PDFs, reportedly of low quality. To approximate the book-reading experience, users would have to print out all the pages, which could be time-consuming and expensive, while reading the book on a computer screen or monitor wouldn't be a lot of fun for many people. This draws parallels to other forms of piracy: for instance, while most new movies are available for free from file-sharing networks, plenty of people still want to pay to watch them in a theater, for a variety of reasons. Certainly there are people who will overlook any amount of drawbacks to get free content; chances are they wouldn't pay for legitimate content anyway. But there remains a large market of people who are perfectly willing to pay for content -- so long as content producers can provide them with sufficient value.

Filed Under: books, entertainment, piracy
Companies: barnes & noble