I got me a free book…
Friday, March 28th, 2008Interesting bit of marketing from horror author Scott Sigler for his book Infected, due out on April 1 (though whether that is solely in the US or in Europe too is anybody’s guess). Following a link off a New York Times book email I ended up with a time-limited opportunity to download a free and DRM-unfettered PDF of the entire work that I could read on my PC screen or print if I felt so inclined.
So I did.
Admittedly when I came to read it, I only got three chapters or so in. Now, there are various reasons for this. While I love crime and thrillers, horror does not tend to be so high up on my personal reading list. Then I was due to go on holiday and had a lot to get done, and I had a backlog of books that I had been waiting for months to read waiting for me. At the time they simply seemed more important.
I gave it a try, found that some shaky writing and the narrative’s habit of jumping between locations was a little more than I was prepared to cope with at that point, and put it aside. Probably not the ideal result, but I’m definitely prepared to come back and have another crack when I feel less under-pressure. And here’s three things I did do that will no doubt make author and publisher happy with their experiment.
One, I tried something new - something that I might not have tried if a cash transaction had been involved. Two, I did not delete it, but hung onto it to read in future. Now Scott Sigler has name and genre recognition with me that he certainly did not have before and that might mean I’ll part with money in the future. Three, I emailed the PDF off to a friend who I knew would enjoy it. So much for time-limited downloads. So sue me, already, while I perform invaluable viral marketing for you.
Although quite how the publishers will quantify intangibles like these while deciding whether their bottom line adds up is an interesting question.
Here’s a story from BoingBoing.net’s Cory Doctorow on the subject, who found the whole promotion a mixed blessing:
Scott Sigler’s INFECTED — free download, inexplicably limited
Scott Sigler’s new book INFECTED is in stores on April 1 and for the next four days, it will also be available as a free PDF download from Random House’s website. Scott made his name by writing and podcasting high-quality science fiction novels under Creative Commons, and eventually, Random House’s Crown imprint came knocking.
But publishers are schizophrenic and often end up acting really dumb in the service of trying to do something smart. Crown is putting Scott’s book online for free as a PDF, but they’re taking it down after only four days — presumably just in time to kill whatever momentum the downloads are generating. If you happen upon this blog-post next week when it shows up on Digg, you’re out of luck — no download to use to figure out if you want to buy the book.
Worse still: Crown is only making the download available before the book goes on sale! This is an act of massive goofiness. Here’s what this means: the book’s promotional download period ends before you can buy the book. If you download this book and love it, you can’t walk down to the bookstore and pick up a copy. Sure, you can pre-order it on Amazon, but I know from watching my affiliate link payments here on Boing Boing that ten times as many of you buy books that are on sale when I blog them than buy books that have to be pre-ordered. Read full post here…
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