Scott Berkun is giving away his latest titleMindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds through November 3rd.
All he wants in return? Your email address. More specifically, Berkun asks that folks sign up for his monthly mailing list. And you can unsubscribe if you don’t like what he’s sending, so there’s little risk involved.
For those not familiar with Berkun, he’s a writer and speaker who worked for Microsoft from 1994 through 2003, mostly on Internet Explorer. But not, he wants you to know on IE6. He now works for Automattic on WordPress.com, and does a lot of writing and speaking. Berkun is probably best known for his Confessions of a Public Speaker, which is a must-read for anyone who gives, or wants to give, talks on a regular basis. (I would certainly like it to be required reading for anyone giving a talk that I will attend.) He’s also the author of Making Things Happen and The Myths of Innovation.
Mindfire is a collection of essays on creativity, management, and “a fun mix of everything else” that have been published before, so you can find most of the work on his site, but he notes that the essays have been “edited, washed, organized, re-organized, washed again, stared at crossly, then pruned, polished and curated for your pleasure.”
Having read some of the essays before, and just skimmed through the title after downloading it, I recommend downloading it right away. Whether you work as a CIO, CMO, IT manager, in marketing, PR, or spend your days hacking this book has a few good essays for you.
Watch and Learn
It might seem a little, well, insane for an author to give away their book. However, Berkun is not insane. (Well, as far as I know. Not because of this, anyway.)
The ebook is a collection of material that’s already free, it’s just polished for the ebook edition. He’s giving it away for a very limited time, and using the promotion to get more people signed up for his mailing lists.
It displays confidence in the material as well. Berkun is assuming, I think rightly, that people will download the book and then talk about it and recommend it to others. Of course, by then they’ll need to buy the book. Others should take note of the power of an ebook as a promotional tool.
According to the counter on Berkun’s site, you have a little more than a day to download it – so get going! Have thoughts on this or other Berkun books? Tell me what you think in the comments.
Update: If you’re curious how Berkun did with the promotion, I’d say pretty well. He sent out an update via the mailing list and said that the promotion had brought in more than 5,000 new subscribers. Will it generate sales? We’ll keep watching Amazon to see where it ranks. For companies looking to bring in more subscribers, producing a short, quality, eBook targeted at the audience you want might be a good hook. (Emphasis on quality.)
According to the counter on Berkun’s site, there’s just a little more than five hours left. (At 10:30 Eastern on November 3rd.) Get to it!
