Giving It Away, Faster Than Ever

About a year ago, there was an item on GalleyCat about authors turning old, unsold manuscripts into free ebooks, with Melanie Lynne Hauser‘s Jumble Pie cited as a prime example. Hauser emailed yesterday to say that the novel’s trackable readership had just passed the 1,300 mark—and, thanks to what she describes as a “lucky accident,” more than 60 percent of those readers came this summer. (Not known: How many of those 1,300 downloaders passed the file around to their friends?)

The original banner art Hauser used to promote the free ebook on her website was a simple picture of a pie. (“I’m a writer… what do I know about cover art?” Hauser quipped.) Then her husband asked if she wanted anything from the graphics website where he was about to use up some nearly-expired credits; pretty soon, they had a mock-up book cover that made Jumble Pie more recognizable as a “chick lit” novel, and “the number of readers’ requests jumped tenfold,” she reports. And a few PR companies have mentioned the possibility of lining up sponsorship for the book, in the form of a new page inserted into the PDF mentioning that the download is free thanks to the sponsorship of… well, whoever the sponsor might turn out to be. (Holy Chris Anderson!)

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