The download madness continues.

Currently available over at  Monsters and Critics is a free download of SIX BAD THINGS.

Get some.

Also, I was asked by my publisher to provide some thoughts about free digital books in general.  They were looking for a line or two that might be included in a press release.   Silly rabbits, they should have known better than to ask for a sentence or two.

I like free stuff.  I particularly like free books.  I like the idea of free books that don’t requite trees being cut down.  Free things that I like make me feel good, and they make me think good thoughts about the people who give them to me.  I feel that way more ever more strongly the fewer strings are attached to a free thing.  Throw it out there will no limits on how much I can have or when I can get it and don’t ask me for my name or my email address or my profession and I will like you very much indeed.  It’s called good will.  useful free stuff creates good will.  As opposed to free crap, which just irritates people.  Or free stuff that is clearly offered only because you want to pry my mailing address out of my ass, which just pisses people off.  A free digital download of a book that asks no more of one than that they click a button is useful.  It is also vastly different than a physical book that one pays money for.  A book is a tactile experience.  It is a fetish object.  It is a gift.  It is a trophy one can place on a shelf that says, “I read that.”  Someday, not too long from now, most people will read text all but exclusively on screens.  But for the nonce, the exclusively digital book reader is a rare beast.  Which means that most serious readers still do it with a book.  They may dabble in digital, but between the covers is where they like it best.  For these people, a free ebook is a great opportunity to play with a new gadget and software, to get some slap and tickle.  But they’re unlikely to read more than a book or two on a glowing screen.  For them, a free ebook is a great way to sample a new writer, or to load up on an extra-portable edition of a favorite book.  For some readers, for the many to whom 20+ bucks is a lot of coin to drop anything they can’t eat, a free ebook is a way to keep reading until their purse strings loosen up.  Free ebooks spread the word.  They spread good feelings.  They get a writer’s foot in the ebook door in advance of a tidal change that will eventually sweep through our business as surely as it swept through the music business.  In the process, free ebooks, in my opinion, probably take little or nothing from the sales of solid books.  And, while it’s hard to argue that they will increase sales of the book being offered for free in digital format, they certainly help to spread the name of the writer and help funnel readers toward their new books.  Besides, it’s good to give things away.  They’re books.  We write them for people to read them.

-c