Piracy is Good??

Paolo Coelho: not someone who really needs an introduction. The multi-million selling author and writer of such classics as The Witch of Portobello, Eleven Minutes, and The Alchemist. Now that's an author huh?? And definitely someone who's a staunch opponent of Piracy right?? Well....wrong!!

Paolo Coelho has actually claimed that online book piracy has actually increased sales of his books in hard copy instead of decreasing it. Amazing huh??

One of Coelho's fans supposedly posted a Russian translation of one of his famed novels on a file-sharing site and since then, sales of his books increased in Russia from 3,000 to 100,000 to a staggering 1 M in the timespan of three years.

"This happened in English, in Norwegian, in Japanese and Serbian," said Coelho. "Now when the book is released in hard copy, the sales are spectacular."

However, HarperCollins, Coelho's US publisher pulled him up on a supposedly unauthorised version of one of his books that the author had linked to from his own website. Supposedly the unauthorised version was found to contain Coelho's own author's notes!!

Coelho has long been known as one of the most tech-savvy authors. He Twitters, he blogs, he encourages his readers to submit their thoughts on developing stories (or their pictures to Flickr). However, in his own words, "he still believes in print."

It gives me a lot of joy, because writing is something you do alone. -- Paolo Coelho on why he writes