Get Infected for Free

As you might have guessed from the link in the sidebar, we're coming down to the last few days before Scott Sigler's Infected hits the shelves at a bookstore near you. This is incredibly exciting for anyone interested in the new publishing paradigms; it really shows that by giving your work away for free and building a huge fanbase, you have something of real value to bring to the table when you go to a mainstream publishing and want to be dealt in. This is a major coup for aspiring authors. Scott and his fellow podcasters and authors have also been working hard to get the mainstream publishing industry to understand how the very things which made him so popular can work to make money for them. Giving books away for free seems to be counterintuitive to a publishing company wanting to make money selling those very books, but it works. Several authors have proven that over time. Cory Doctorow didn't kill his sales figures by giving his fiction away for free, and recently Neil Gaiman joined the ranks when Harper Collins offered his book American Gods for free online for a time. Sales on that novel went up 300%. As Jessika pointed out, it's not just working for authors; Nine Inch Nails made a fair chunk of change by giving away the first part of their latest album. Scott has managed to convince Crown to put up the PDF of Infected for free download for a limited time. From March 27 to March 31, you can download it directly from Crown's website. So download your copy now, and email the link (and only the link) to all of your friends. To quote Scott's announcement

:

Please do not email the PDF, email the LINK. This is so I can prove to Crown the value in giving away content, and if your friends click on the link, that counts on their server stats - emailing the PDF doesn't count on the stats.

We definitely need to push this, and still buy our hardbacks on Tuesday so we can prove to Crown that this is definitely the way to go. They're still uncertain about the whole concept, it appears; Cory Doctorow addresses that issue over on Boing Boing while heaping praise on Scott and Infected. They're going to need to see it work for them before they're willing to go all out use free electronic copies to lure in new readers without the time limits. So download. Evangelize. Buy the book on Tuesday!  And find out more about Scott Sigler and Infected  in J.C. Hutchins's latest UltraCreatives Interview.

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