Best-selling author Paulo Coelho blogs that he has managed to talk publisher HarperCollins into offering ten of his eleven novels for 99 cents each. (The single exception is his best-known work, The Alchemist.) The promotion is valid for the USA and Canada only (though he is in talks with his Spanish and Portugese publishers to offer a similar deal), and is in effect in the Kindle, Nook, and iBooks stores. Coelho writes:
This is a crucial decision for me. For years I have been advocating that free content is not a thread (sic) to the book business. In lowering the price of a book and equaling it to the price of a song in iTunes, the reader will be encouraged to pay for it, instead of downloading it for free.
The promotion is for a limited time only, though there is no word on when it expires.
As we’ve previously mentioned, Coelho is a big booster of offering e-books free, including via pirate sites, even going so far as to “pirate” himself. I’m glad to hear he was able to talk HC into offering this sort of promotion. Hopefully it will work out as well for him as he thinks it will!
