NEW YORK (Fortune) -- In 1999, best-selling author Paulo Coelho, who
wrote "The Alchemist," was failing in Russia. That year he sold only
about 1,000 books, and his Russian publisher dropped him. But after he
found another, Coelho took a radical step. On his own Web site,
launched in 1996, he posted a digital Russian copy of "The Alchemist."With
no additional promotion, print sales picked up immediately. Within a
year he sold 10,000 copies; the next year around 100,000. By 2002 he
was selling a total of a million copies of multiple titles. Today,
Coelho's sales in Russian are over 10 million and growing. "I'm
convinced it was putting it up for free on the Internet that made the
difference," he said in an interview at this year's World Economic
Forum in Davos.
Coelho, whose fiction explores universal themes of
spiritual aspiration and brotherhood in unpretentious language, has
been a star of the Forum for 11 years. (For an account of Davos 2008
see this column.) Before this year's Davos, both Coelho and I attended a wonderful conference in Munich called Digital, Life, Design.
Onstage there he told the surprising story of his embrace of free
Internet distribution. In Davos I sat down with him to learn more.
Coelho
explained why he thinks giving books away online leads to selling more
copies in print: "It's very difficult to read a book on your computer.
People start printing out their own copies. But if they like the book,
after reading 30-40 pages they just go out and buy it."
Intrigued by
his growing sales in Russia, Coelho used the Bittorrent site - a
favorite for illicit distribution of media - to seek out and download
online translations of his books as well as audio versions. By 2006 he
was hosting an entire sub-site he called The Pirate Coelho, with links
to books in many languages. While he did not play up his own role, he
did quietly include a link on his official site.
"So
you gather together all the stolen digital versions?" I asked him. "You
say steal?" he replied. "No. I think it's a way of sharing." His agent,
Monica Antunes, who joined in the interview, chimed in unashamedly, "We
don't own the translation rights to all those editions."
By last
year Coelho's total print sales worldwide surpassed 100 million books.
"Once we did the Pirate Coelho there was a significant boost," he says.
For
all this, he kept quiet with his many publishers in countries around
the world. "Sharing" is typically not the word they use to describe
such activities. Coelho says the publishers have periodically taken
action to remove books from the Pirate Coelho. "They think it is
against me. They don't know it is in my favor. They will know it after
your article," he says.
"Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age,"
Coelho continues. "Publishers see free downloads as threatening the
sales of the book. But this should make them rethink their entire
business model."
Now Coelho is a convert to the Internet way of
doing things. His online e-mail newsletter, published since 2000, has
200,000 subscribers. In 2006 he started blogging. Last year he joined
MySpace and Facebook to interact more actively with readers. "MySpace
is an addiction," he says ruefully. He also makes available an
extensive archive of rights-free photos on the Flickr photo-sharing site.
None
of Coelho's books has ever been made into a movie. But now he is using
the Internet to let his readers make one for him, based on his latest
book, The "Witch of Portobello." It tells the story of its protagonist
from the point of view of multiple people who knew her at various times
in her peripatetic life. Now Coelho and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500)
have created a competition, inviting anyone worldwide to submit a
segment as they envision it. Coelho plans to knit together 15 winners
and release the film.
He spends about three hours online every day,
interacting with readers who send him over 1,000 e-mails and messages
daily. A fulltime staff of six helps manage his manifold Net
activities, and the entire operation costs him $15,000 each month,
which he pays out of his own pocket.
"I don't understand why
publishers don't understand that this new medium is not killing books,"
Coelho says. "I'm doing it mostly because the joy of a writer is to be
read. But at the end of the day, you will sell more books." (c)

original link