According to newsweek.com, internationally famous Brazilian book author Paolo Coelho uses the Internet to promote his literary works to the public.
Coelho’s online activities also include a somewhat nefarious one: he likes to promote pirated copies of his own books. At the recent Digital, Life, Design Conference in Munich, Coelho told a gathering of tech company CEOs, artists and designers that since 2005 he’s been directing his readers to an online site where they can download his books, in languages from German to Japanese, for free. “I always thought that when, at the beginning of your career, you strive to be read, you can’t change your mind later and become greedy about it,” he said.
However, his publisher was uninformed of his activities.
With his announcement Coelho is turning up the heat on an issue that’s been simmering in the book publishing industry for years. In supplementing traditional promotional strategies, such as book signings and reviews, with free downloads, Coelho is championing a model that’s gaining momentum among his fellow, albeit lesser-known, authors. Writers of technical manuals, academic books and fiction authors, like science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, have been putting their entire books online for free, with the consent of their publishers. Some authors claim that online publishing increases book sales by stimulating word of mouth. Publishers, for the most part, have been reluctant to endorse the practice for fear that it will undermine their sales and contracts for foreign rights and distribution. The trouble is, nobody really knows what effect free online publishing has on book sales, because there’s almost no data to go on. “I think the Internet, for [publishers], is a very strange world, still,” says Coelho’s agent, Monica Antunes, from her office in Barcelona. “They can’t make up their minds whether it’s good or not good.”
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