[Alexander Turcic]

Credits also to ricdiogo who reported the news first.

It's probably a safe bet to say that his publishers (one of them being HarperCollins) ain't going to be amused about this, but Paulo Coelho, author of the best-selling novel The Alchemist, decided to harness his talents as a pirate to spread his own books for free via BitTorrent. According to TorrentFreak, this "unusual" step helped him to radically increase hardcopy sales throughout the world:

In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]

I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]

So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.

Links:

• Video with Mr. Coelho on how the Net affects book business (highly recommended!)
• Official "Pirate Coelho" Blog (use Google to find the exact link as we don't want to encourage piracy here)

Thanks to "horseyride" for the tip!