14 DAY TRIAL // Just around the time The Pirate Bay launched The Promo Bay, BitTorrent, the company behind the controversial technology, starts to highlight bigger and bigger success stories of people who used platforms like BitTorrent and free content to get a lot of attention, a lot of goodwill, a lot of fans and a lot of money.
"Last week, we released an exclusive first look at Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Chef to help the author fight the Barnes & Noble boycott. By the end of today, Tim’s BitTorrent Bundle will have been downloaded over 300,000 times," BitTorrent explained.
Tim Ferriss had signed a publishing deal with Amazon, which didn't sit well with everyone that isn't Amazon. Barnes & Noble and other bookstores were "boycotting" Ferriss because of this, so he looked at other ways of getting exposure.
He put a portion of his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, online for free and advertised it via uTorrent, the official BitTorrent client.
He also included exclusive content such as photos, interviews and so on. All of this was free and it landed in front of the millions of people using uTorrent.
Of the 300,000 that downloaded the bundle, 85,000 visited the Amazon page where the full book is sold. BitTorrent users got a 40 percent off deal on the price of the full book. Doubtless, quite a few of those bought the book as well, enough to get the book on a number of bestseller lists.
"Thanks in part to your support, The 4-Hour Chef will now be featured on all of the major bestseller lists: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly," BitTorrent added.
There's nothing surprising or even revolutionary here, make good content, get it in front of people and they will pay for it. At the very least, you'll benefit in other ways. More and more artists and creators are learning this. And more and more are finding they don't need the old gatekeepers to find success, be them Hollywood, record labels or big name book publishers.