By Paulo Coelho
A Warrior of Light always keeps his heart free of any feelings of hatred.
(Manual of the Warrior of Light)
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Daily Archive for January 29th, 2008
How many of your characters have you met in your real life?
A pilgrimage was my rite of passage. All of a sudden, walking during 56 days from France to Santiago de Compostela, in 1986, I realized that the connection with God was simpler than I thought, and that was better to, instead of trying to understand why am I here, start being here and accepting that God must have a reason for that. I my case, I always thought of being a writer, but I was 38 years then, and I thought it was too late. However, at the end of the pilgrimage, I said to myself: if you want to be here, you need to fight for your dreams. And I decided to write my first book. After a pilgrimage like this, everybody may be a character, or part of a character in my books.
We’ve been seeing more and more examples lately of content creators recognizing how they benefit from giving away their content for free. What’s most amusing, however, is that every time we point out an example, people work extra hard explaining why that case is a special case. When we discussed less-well-known musicians giving away music, we were told that it would never work for megastars. When we discussed megastars giving away music, we were told it would never work for indie musicians. The same is true in other areas as well. When we recently wrote about an author giving his book away for free, someone angrily emailed to let us know that this only made sense because no one had ever heard of that author — so it was purely a promotional effort by a new author.
Yet, apparently, it also works for well-known authors. TorrentFreak points us to the news that Paulo Coelho is such a fan of giving his book away for free that he’s even set up his own blog called Pirate Coehlo where he points to where you can download various translations of his best selling book The Alchemist. Coelho explained all of this in a recent talk he gave:
Link: sevenload.com
What Coelho quickly discovered was that the more his book was available for free, the more sales of the actual book increased. As an example, he cites the Russian translation of his book, where it went from only 1,000 sales to well over 100,000 in a period of two years, and has only continued to grow since then. It’s yet another good example of someone embracing how giving away content for free can help them earn more money. And, it highlights (again) that, whether you’re well known or a nobody, you can use these tactics to your advantage.
Digg this : Alchemist Author Pirates His Own Books
