Jeff VanderMeer is already one of my favorite fantasy writers, so when I heard that Wired blog GeekDad would be providing free downloads of The Situation, his latest book, three weeks before its official release from PS Publishing, I was pretty psyched. (The download comes in conjunction with a Q&A feature with the author and his wife, Weird Tales editor Ann VanderMeer.) In the interview, Jeff talks about straddling the barrier between fantasy and literary fiction:

"In some countries they market me to general readers and in others to genre readers. There's both a risk and opportunity in that. The opportunity is that by jumping back and forth over a boundary I don't believe in anyway, I get to do all kinds of cool projects which sometimes annoy the gatekeepers, but generally satisfy readers."

The publisher describes VanderMeer's novelette as "a tale of corporate surrealism that ought to ring true for anyone who's ever found themselves trapped in cubicle hell and struggling to deal with the bewildering pace of technological change," which makes it sound as mainstream as Then We Came to the End, right?

Meanwhile, Night Shade Books has announced that it will make Richard Kadrey's novel Butcher Bird available for download on their website in multiple DRM-free formats. It's the second time this story has been offered to readers gratis: Two years ago, back when the novel was called Blind Shrike, it was distributed online by a SF magazine called The Infinite Matrix.

What's the benefit in giving entire novels away for free? John Scalzi, who recently allowed his publisher to enable free downloads of his novel Old Man's War as part of a promotional campaign, took a peek at the paperback's Nielsen Bookscan figures for the week of the giveaway and discovered sales were up 20 percent over the previous week—and sales of the sequel, The Ghost Brigades, shot up 33 percent. He admits the data is not definitive, but "I do suspect that the free eBook release did have an immediate impact on sales, and that the impact was positive."

And Edward J. Renehan, Jr. says he's had 2,000 people download his Mere Faith since putting it online last week. The 16,000-word essay is described as a "readable, ecumenical answer to the Richard Dawkins-Christopher Hitchens megaphone of recent pro-Atheism bestsellers." According to Renehan, many of the people looking into the ebook are discovering it through his Facebook profile.