When Crown decided to give away PDFs of Infected, a new novel by Scott Sigler, a few days ahead of the official publication date, and take them off the grid when the book went on sale in stores, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing went off like a firecracker: “This is an act of massive goofiness,” Doctorow wrote. “Either Crown believes that free downloads sell books or they don’t. There’s no coherent explanation for a ticking-bomb download like this one; it’s like the hesitation marks on the wrists of a half-ass suicide.”
Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, who wrote the book on free, decided to see what Crown’s online marketing manager, Shawn Nicholls, had to say about that. Nicholls reports that the house conisders the campaign a success, as 45,000 downloads were matched by enough pre-orders to make Infected the #1 horror novel on Amazon.com. While Doctorow believes online consumers are too antsy from living in the “eternal now” to cope with pre-orders, Nicholls says “the online audience we were hoping to reach is more prone to buying from web retailers, so for them pre-ordering on Amazon four days before publication isn’t that frustrating. It shows up just a few days later than it would have if it were purchased after its on-sale date.”
Nicholls calls the cutoff a matter of “balancing the marketing buzz of a limited-time event against the virtues of longer availability,” and Anderson’s takeaway is that “the philosophical hurdle” of giving the content away “has now been crossed” for yet another major publisher. Doctorow’s not fully convinced, and turns up in the post’s comments to make his (more moderate) objections, at which point Sigler chimes in, trying to unite everybody so they can mount an even bigger promotional campaign for the sequel, Contagious.