Paulo Coelho's self-piracy

In The Guardian, Jeff Jarvis reports on best-selling novelist Paulo Coelho's surprising strategy for boosting foreign sales.

Coelho discovered the power of free when a fan posted a Russian translation of one of his novels online and book sales there climbed from 3,000 to 100,000 to 1m in three years. "This happened in English, in Norwegian, in Japanese and Serbian," he said. "Now when the book is released in hard copy, the sales are spectacular." So Coelho started linking to pirated versions of his books from his own website.