February 10, 2009

Download "The Heritage" for free!



So, the good burghers of Faber & Faber have decided against publishing a mass-market paperback edition of "The Heritage". I would've been pissed off, anyway, I guess, but I think would have understood this hard-headed business decision. After all, if you wanna kiss the ring of the Leather Pope then corporate capitalism's where it's at and fuck any of the considerations (art, literature, quality) you may pay lip service to. But I think my sense of fair play was piqued by being told less than two weeks before said paperback edition was supposed to be out. I mean, really, how shit is that? Sorry? Pardon? What was that I heard about putting authors first? Anyway, as the only way left to me to build any sort of a readership for what I think is a pretty good book (not a great book by any means, but not as bad as a lot of the shit out there), I'm posting it here for you to download. The file is only 853.5 KB and it downloads as a pdf direct from this link.

Take a copy, tell friends or associates who might be interested, or just email it on to them. The only thing I ask is that you forget the title 'printed' on it and think of it as "OLIVIA". This was what I'd originally named the book until I was told I needed to change it because the Faber sales and marketing people didn't feel it was "strong enough". I eventually settled on "The Heritage" almost by accident and was never happy with it as the title (I couldn't say it without adopting the tones of the guy who voices adverts for Hollywood movies). But everyone there "loved it" and, as we can all now see, it made a huge difference. What are you waiting for? DOWNLOAD DOWNLOAD DOWNLOAD before they make me take it down...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The formatting on this looks really bad, any way to fix that?

Will Ashon said...

It's a print-ready pdf, with identical formatting to the book itself but laid out on A4 sheets. It should be fine on a computer monitor (or printed out) but if you're trying to look at it on a reader of some sort, or any device with a small screen, it may be tricky. I don't know anything about those sort of things, but maybe there's some way you can tweak the settings..? I don't have it in any other format, I'm afraid...

Brian said...

I blogged about this over on booksurvival.blogspot.com, fyi.

Elsi said...

Will -- rather than the print-ready PDF, you might consider taking the source file (Word, maybe?) and creating an eBook suitable for viewing on the Kindle, Sony, Cybook, etc. readers. You'll need a couple of different formats, but the folks at MobileRead or Feedbooks would be willing to help you do the conversions. By the way, did you retain the electronic rights to your book? If so, you might consider selling electronic editions through Fictionwise or another distributor.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this, Will. Am really enjoying the book. The formatting's really only annoying for the first few pages -- might be worthwhile cutting them.

We shall fight them on the beaches...

Sean Murray