I sold so many books because I made my work freely available online
Paulo Coelho
St Martin, France: 2009 has been a year of fear in the publishing world. The specter is digital media, in wide and varied forms.
Ten years ago, in 1999, my agent returned from Russia bearing bad news: The publisher of my novel The Alchemist had decided to discontinue publication because fewer than 3,000 copies had sold. After considerable effort, we found another Russian-language publisher. Unfortunately , he was based in Kiev, in Ukraine, and was having difficulty buying paper (which was not, at the time, generally available).
The odd thing is that, only weeks before, I had found a pirated edition of the Russian translation on the Internet , and my immediate reaction had been to attribute the low sales of my books in Russia to piracy.
Like any other author, I wanted my books to be read. Since a physical book wasnt available, and I had no idea when the new publisher would manage to buy the paper he needed to print the new edition, I thought: Why not make a virtual version available Acting on impulse, I posted the pirated translation on my Web site, where anyone could download it without paying.
At the end of 2000, my Ukrainian publisher was thrilled to report that we had sold 10,000 copies! A year later that had risen to 100,000. By 2002, 1 million Russian-language copies had been sold.
During that time, I received emails referring to the pirated edition I had placed on my Web site. Many of those messages said: Im so glad to have found your work. My conclusion: Russia was a vast country with enormous distribution problems, and the Internet was helping to bring the book to readers.
Excited by this discovery, I decided to do the same with my other books. But I ran into a legal problem : The Russian translation had been posted on the Internet by the translator, but what about translations to which I did not have the rights My solution was to gather all the links to file-sharing P2P (peer-to-peer ) sites and create my Pirate Coelho Web site.
This became a hit on social networking sites, which spread the news. By the time I spoke publicly of this at the 2007 Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich, a million unique visitors per month were visiting the site. There, they could find almost all my books in various languages - from German to Malayalam. Meanwhile, the printed versions were selling in ever greater numbers. Since none of my publishers had complained up until then, I assumed they must know about the Web site but had decided not to intervene.
The day after newspapers published my remarks in Munich, my telephone began ringing. Some of my publishers asked: Do you know the risk youre running Dont you realize that this is going to decrease your sales
Pirate Coelho had been online since 2005, I argued, and sales had continued to rise. That meant the traditional publishing model benefitted from file sharing. I must confess that, much as I respect my publishers , their view of reality bore little relation to what was happening in the bookstores.
By that time, I had sold more than 100 million books, and that gave me a few privileges. Among them was keeping Pirate Coelho online (where it is today) despite the bad example it set.
How can I explain what happened It isnt only the financial world that finds the word greedy problematic, but any industry that tries to claim a monopoly on anything , be it information or a specific product. In my case, people started reading my books on the screen, liked them and went on to buy a print copy handier and cheaper in the long term. And so it went for several years.
Somerset Maugham said: We do not write because we want to; we write because we must. And, I would add, because we want to be
In the 16th century, the Catholic Church created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books), and despite the fact that many of the authors of those books were burned at the stake, the list continued to grow during the four centuries it existed. More recently , dissident Soviet citizens produced mimeographed copies of their books in order to make their ideas available to whoever wanted to read them. Two of those writers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Boris Pasternak , went on to receive the Nobel Prize in literature.
The publishing industry cannot follow in the footsteps of the music industry, which managed to close down Napster only to witness an explosion of file-sharing sites. With new products like Kindle, Nook and Sonys Reader , and various applications for the iPhone and Blackberry, the author who once posted his books on blogs (for free) will now choose electronic formats and, from then on, the publishers like record companies will become expendable . Those countries in favor of banning file sharing France, for example, passed legislation this year will find their writers losing ground and importance in an ever more competitive world.
Banning things is just not the answer. The answer is to use the good things about technology to promote and disseminate the very best in literature.
Many people argue that I can allow myself the luxury of doing this because my books have sold in such large numbers. In fact, it was the other way round: I sold so many books because I took the trouble to make my work available. If someone today were to offer me the choice between getting paid $3 million to write a book for three readers and getting paid $3 to write a book for 3 million readers, I would definitely choose the latter. Im sure I wouldnt be alone in my choice. Most writers would do the same.
(Paulo Coelho is the author of 26 books, including The Alchemist, which has sold 65 million copies)
source:TOI
