BitTorrent Proves To Be A Successful Promoter For Tim Ferriss’ Book

[Guest Ethan]

BitTorrent Proves To Be A Successful Promoter For Tim Ferriss’ Book

Despite his fame and success, Timothy Ferriss, the young American author who’s published several bestsellers along the years, took a huge risk when he refused to promote his latest work – The 4-Hour Chef – through the usual channels. Instead, he shook hands with BitTorrent and Amazon in an unlikely partnership that made the news worldwide.

Timothy’s decision to sign with Amazon and promote his book via BitTorrent was frowned upon by most of the major book retailers, including Barnes and Noble. Despite their boycotts, the result of this “unholy” partnership looks more than promising; “The 4-Hour Chef” was sold in more than 250.000 copies, while also ending on all the important bestseller lists.

Turning down big publishers is no small deal, so Ferriss had to compensate by shaking hands with others (not as big as Barnes and Noble, though), a sandwich shop chain known as the Panera Bread, and BitTorrent. For that last bid, Timothy created a 680 megabytes bundle (which included behind-the-scenes videos, several author notes, and a sample chapter from his book) to be published on BitTorrent’s networks.

The outcome of his bold move was not foreseen.

“To be honest, I was initially skeptical about how many sales would result from BitTorrent,” the author said.

“After all, that’s where people go to get stuff for free, right?”

“It turns out that I couldn’t have been more wrong,” he continued.

“The click-through rates from BitTorrent to Amazon were higher than anything I’ve ever seen through paid advertising. Orders of magnitude higher.”

In other words, approximately 300.000 people ended up watching the book’s video trailer on YouTube, and more than 370.000 visited the author’s official website, all thanks to BitTorrent. Amazon gathered more than 880.000 clicks.

While BitTorrent’s networks managed to promote the book (quite successfully, we may add), they can also be used to find illegal copies of his works. To that, Timothy said:

“If someone is willing to spend time finding a legit bootleg source and reading a DRM-broken hard-to-read copy of my book on a computer screen not intended for reading, just to avoid spending $12 or so, they weren’t ever my core audience to begin with.”

“If I get them, it’s nothing but bonus points,” he concluded.

It would be presumptuous to say that Amazon and/or BitTorrent will forever change the landscape of book publishing, but one thing is clear – the new ways are not as bad as others want us to believe.