Author of the week: Paulo Coelho

last updated 8 January 2015

Leave it to 64-year-old Paulo Coelho to revolutionize the author-reader relationship, said Julie Bosman in The New York Times. The Brazilian writer, whose novels, including The Alchemist, have sold 140 million copies worldwide, came up with the unusual strategy of giving his work away for free online when he noticed others were already doing it for him. “I saw the first pirated edition of one of my books, so I said, ‘I’m going to post it,’” he says. “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.’” Giving away digital books consistently seems to boost his print sales. He plans to try the same trick with his new novel, Aleph.

One of the first writers to fully embrace social media, Coelho has some 6.5 million followers on Facebook. He makes a point of engaging his audience online, likening the practice to the way authors and readers interacted centuries ago. “People told each other stories, laughed and cried together with the author, until the 15th century, when the printing press was invented. Ideas began to travel much farther and at much greater speeds, and the author of those ideas became an abstract character,” he tells The Wall Street Journal. To everyone’s good fortune, says Coelho, the Internet has joined the two traditions. “Suddenly,” he says. “I could talk to people, who, by nature of having read my books, understood my soul.”