How Paulo Coelho Started Pirating His Own Books (And Where You Can Find them)

Get ready for it. This week, Knopf will release Paulo Coel­ho’s lat­est nov­el, Aleph. And we’re tak­ing bets on three ques­tions. How many copies will be legal­ly sold? (The Alchemist has sold more than 65 mil­lion copies.) How many copies will be pirat­ed and giv­en away? And to what extent will the cir­cu­la­tion of ille­gal copies actu­al­ly ben­e­fit legit sales?

In recent years, Coel­ho has become some­thing of a will­ing con­spir­a­tor in the pirat­ing of his own work. Some­times he links on his own blog to pirat­ed copies float­ing around the web. Oth­er times he makes the texts avail­able (in mul­ti­ple lan­guages) in a nice share­able wid­get.

Coel­ho explains how his adven­tures in self-pirat­ing got under­way in a Q&A appear­ing in yes­ter­day’s New York Times.

Q. You’ve also had suc­cess dis­trib­ut­ing your work free. You’re famous for post­ing pirat­ed ver­sion of your books online, a very unortho­dox move for an author.

A. I saw the first pirat­ed edi­tion of one of my books, so I said I’m going to post it online. There was a dif­fi­cult moment in Rus­sia; they didn’t have much paper. I put this first copy online and I sold, in the first year, 10,000 copies there. And in the sec­ond year it jumped to 100,000 copies. So I said, “It is work­ing.” Then I start­ed putting oth­er books online, know­ing that if peo­ple read a lit­tle bit and they like it, they are going to buy the book. My sales were grow­ing and grow­ing, and one day I was at a high-tech con­fer­ence, and I made it pub­lic.

Q. Weren’t you afraid of mak­ing your pub­lish­er angry?

A. I was afraid, of course. But it was too late. When I returned to my place, the first phone call was from my pub­lish­er in the U.S. She said, “We have a prob­lem.”

Q. You’re refer­ring to Jane Fried­man, who was then the very pow­er­ful chief exec­u­tive of Harper­Collins?

A. Yes, Jane. She’s tough. So I got this call from her, and I said, “Jane, what do you want me to do?” So she said, let’s do it offi­cial­ly, delib­er­ate­ly. Thanks to her my life in the U.S. changed.

The rest of the inter­view con­tin­ues here. And, in the mean­time, you can find sev­er­al Coel­ho books cat­a­logued in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paulo Coel­ho on The Fear of Fail­ure