#102 1999 · Paulo Coelho · Publishingwrong-door
Paulo Coelho pirated his own book in Russia instead of fighting the pirates, and sales went from 1,000 to millions
the problem
The Alchemist was selling only about 1,000 copies a year in Russia, where almost no one had heard of it
background
By the late 1990s The Alchemist had become an international bestseller almost everywhere except Russia, where Coelho's publisher had barely marketed it and annual sales sat around 1,000 copies — a rounding error next to the book's sales elsewhere. The standard response to a book failing in a market is more marketing spend or writing the territory off; the standard response to piracy, already spreading unauthorized translations online, is takedown notices and lawsuits.
Coelho did neither. In 1999 he posted a full digital Russian translation of The Alchemist on his own website himself, reasoning that readers who couldn't easily buy the book — or didn't know it existed — could at least discover it, and that some who read it free would still want the physical copy.
the move
Coelho made no changes to his contract, his publisher, or his marketing budget — he simply gave away, in the language readers actually used, the exact thing his publisher was failing to sell them, betting that exposure would beat scarcity in an unmarketed territory.
the payoff
Russian sales rose to roughly 10,000 copies within a year, around 100,000 the year after, and by 2002 Coelho's total sales across titles passed a million copies; his Russian sales alone have since passed 10 million.
what came after
Coelho turned the tactic into a standing practice, running a site called 'Pirate Coelho' since 2006 that actively links to unauthorized downloads of his own books in multiple languages, and has argued publicly ever since that free digital exposure, not piracy enforcement, built his international readership.
filed under
references
- [1]Paulo Coelho's Blog — Pirate Coelhopaulocoelhoblog.com, 2008paulocoelhoblog.com
- [2]Newsweek — Coelho Gives Away His BooksNewsweek, 2008newsweek.com