My idea–I’m a genius at marketing my work, it should be obvious by now– was to send a free copy of Computational Photography each month, given postage-free^* to a reader drawn randomly from my subscriber list.

I mean, I would ask them first if they even wanted a copy of my book. I wouldn’t just dump it on them.

Nothing is simple, even drawing a random number, though there are apps for that. The problem was one out of what? All of my subscribers? Or just the new subscribers in the past month? Oh, the ambiguities of the English language! In my haste to write copy for my clever marketing scheme I hadn’t considered, well, I hadn’t really considered much. I just wrote the little blurb in the sidebar on impulse at three in the morning and posted it. .

So I drew two numbers, one from the whole group and one from the new group. Two winners! Twice the excitement!

It’s fun to send out free books, like Christmas all over again, and we need a lot more Christmases, that’s for sure. But as a motivational effort to increase the rate of subscribers subscribing it wasn’t very exciting at all. People subscribed at more or less the same rate in February when I had my marketing scheme in place, as in January, when the idea had never occurred to me.

Maybe it would have worked better if I had remembered to, oh, I don’t know, mention the free giveaway on the blog at some point? This marketing stuff is tricky, tricky, let me tell you. I suspect I may not be a natural at this Mad Men stuff.

So, yes, I’m giving away my book. Right now I’m giving away my book, gifts drawn from my subscriber list every month. I’m also giving it all away–if you want to see the book, to give it a trial run, the full e-book version (a nice pdf file) is free. Free as in free. Just download it. The hardback book is much better and does stuff the e-book doesn’t. But the e-book is free. Check it out.

If you want to subscribe but haven’t there should be a subscription thingy at the top, the side, the bottom, all over and they even pop up once in a while. It’s a little mysterious to me, too. If you are having trouble just e-mail me at darin@darinboville.com and I’ll add your name manually. Easy to do.

Congrats to this month’s winners and I’m looking forward to the end of the month when I can do it again. I love giving stuff away and I love sharing my work. If I could give it all away for free I would.

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*Postage-free in the USA, at cost elsewhere in the world!