February must be Give Away a Book Month. Why, here’s another one: Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children (Random House). But is free publicity worth a potential drop in sales? And did I really just display their whole ad in my blog post? Why, it must be worth it!
Giving something away for free in order to help you sell it surely seems counterintuitive to publishing’s old guard, but we’re living in Seth Godin’s age of souvenirs now:
As he pointed out, he’s not in the business of selling books; the books are the souvenirs for the ideas people pick up from his blogs and his speaking engagements. But not everyone was convinced: As the guys behind me in the lunch line commented later that morning, “he’s not in the business of selling books, but we are.”
