Since the last installment of the "Notes" I've kept up my rather fruitless efforts to score free publicity for NaNoWriMo Notes: An Exercise In Creative Insanity in its brand spanking new book form. Now I hadn't expected it to be easy to find free listings for the book, or places willing to post my press release out of the kindness of their hearts, but I had not expected the amount of duplicity I would run into.
How many ways did you think free could be modified? In my mind it's sort of like being pregnant; either you are or you're not. Well the same applies to the word free, either something is or it isn't. Imagine my surprise when I found out I'd been serving under a misapprehension for all these years.
It turns out there are various degrees of freeness applicable on the Internet. After doing my requisite Google search for sites offering free listings for press releases, I picked out five of the most appropriate ones (based on quick visits to each of their home pages) and prepared myself for the tedium of registering at each of them.
It was the usual drill of filling in the information each site considered essential to its wellbeing to know about you. Once that was done, and the level of registration checked, you could kick back and wait for the email telling you that you had successfully filled in all the little boxes. At least that's the way I've been used to doing things like that.
The first email I received from one company was an apology telling me they no longer offered a free service and asking if I would like to upgrade to the next level? This was of course after they had hooked me in through Google claiming to be free, and saying all over their website reduced service was available for free: such lovely people.
It was actually quite special the number of sites that would somehow or other manage to get a listing in Google with the word FREE trumpeted in loud letters. It got to be less and less of a surprise when I would get to the site and discover the only thing free was going to their site. On others the free bit applied to the fact people were allowed to read through their database of press releases for free, or just be a member and not do anything.
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