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Authors experiment with online

Mathew Ingram, February 11, 2008 at 12:58 PM EDT

Musicians are experimenting with downloadable tracks and “pay what you want” business models, so why not authors? At least one popular writer, Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, says that pirated versions of his books have caused sales of physical copies to soar, and several authors are experimenting with offering chapters or even entire books online.

The latest is author Neil Gaiman, whose books include Coraline and Sandman. According to Boing Boing co-founder Cory Doctorow, Gaiman's publisher has given him the green light to offer a freely downloadable version of one of his books, and now he’s trying to decide which one to offer. He’s asked readers and fans to vote for the book they want released on his blog.

Random House said on the weekend that it plans to sell individual chapters of a book online for $2.99 each, and Harper Collins says it will release digital versions of some books (including one by Coelho), although they will expire after a month and users won’t be allowed to copy them or move them to a portable device such as an iPod.

Coelho told a recent media conference that he now actively pirates his own books, through a website that he set up specifically to point people toward pirated versions of his novels. After a pirated Russian version of one book appeared, he says, sales of his books in Russia climbed to more than a million from less than 10,000 a year.

Other authors who have offered either entire books or chapters of their books online include Charles Sheehan-Miles, economist David Levine, and Toronto-born author Cory Doctorow. Suspense writer Stephen King experimented with downloadable chapters in 2000, but cancelled the experiment after the number of people paying for the content started to decline.

  1. Aidan Crawford from Toronto, writes: I've been using the same techniques to promote Jim Clemmer's new book.

    I built a website www.mooseonthetable.com and gave away one chapter at a time over 16 weeks. Each chapter also had a short promotional video.

    It certainly didn't hurt sales. In fact, at the same time we were giving chapters away, we were also selling the entire e-book.

    As a result we sold books (e-books and audio books) in places where we'd never sold anything before.

    Cheers,
    Aidan
  2. Jon Marvin from Toronto, Canada writes: Cory Doctorow, who is mentioned in your article, has made all of his books available as free downloads from his web site. Admittedly, Neil Gaiman will attract a LOT more attention (and web traffic) if, say, "American Gods" is available for free.
  3. Aart Hilal from Russian Federation writes: well – what people don't know is that Harper Collins only launched this free online reading site after the bestselling author Paulo Coelho revealed his pirate coelho blog to the world during the DLD conference in Munich last January.
    I read the interveiw he gave for Newsweek and can't help to join the dots:
    http://www.newsweek.com/id/108715
    I doubt Harper Collins would have made such a move without this author's pressure.
    Thumbs up for Pirate Coelho!

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