The Pirate Coelho

This is something I’d like to do, but I don’t know that we’d be able to get everyone to go along with it:

But if I had known about The Pirate Coelho, a blog, established by the million-selling author himself, I might not have wasted my money on the Alchemist after all. You see, Coelho has been happily “pirating” his own work for years, spreading electronic versions of his novels over the BitTorrent filesharing network for potential readers to download. The pirate blog encourages potential readers to seek out the electronic versions—in several language translations—by helpfully providing links to the files. He recently told a conference that rather than hurt his sales, this act of self-piracy has actually sent them through the roof.

Our problem isn’t that we’re going to sell a million books, and that these free electronic editions would be cutting into our sales. Our problem is getting attention for our authors and getting people to put the books in their hands. Giving readers a chance to test the waters in this way—free, online, accessible—could only help.