If you went through last week’s Friday Free Fiction, you’d have noticed me mention Tor Books’ new email newsletter/giveaway program.
As good as that appeared in its own right, it seems much more is in the pipeline at Tor – Simon “Bloggasm” Owens has the scoop on this one, complete with anonymous tip-offs from within the organisation. The Tor site will have simple social networking features in addition to original content (fiction and non-fiction) from authors both on and off the Tor roster.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden confirms the rumours:
“The free digital books are exactly what we say they are: an inducement to get people to pre-register as users and allow us to send them emailed progress reports,” Nielsen Hayden said. “The book-length freebies are a temporary program slated to run from now until when we launch.
Although the site will be ‘giving away’ a lot of content – indeed, all of its content, as we don’t anticipate any part of it being DRMed or paywalled – the core of the site will not be built around a program of free novel giveaways. That said, we reserve the right to give away free digital books any time we think it’s a good idea to do so. (With the cooperation and consent of their authors, naturally.)”
Best go get signed up, if you haven’t already!
I tried to register last friday, still haven’t received an answer – is it not working yet or should I retry?
No idea, frog – I expect their system may have been inundated, so I’d give it a few days more and maybe send a polite email. I expect they’ll announce if there’s a big backlog.