You typed "booktrovert free ebooks" into a box, pressed enter, and a search engine, using judgment I would not trust with a houseplant, delivered you to us. Welcome. Sit down. We need to talk about this before you get your hopes up any higher, because they are already too high, and I can see them from here.
Over at booktrovert.com, the free ebooks are real. You click a cover, the book is yours, it arrives on your device faster than you can feel good about it, and nobody in a basement is watching you do it. That is a genuine service. They are proud of it. They should be. It works.
We are not that. We have never given away a free ebook. Not one. Not in 1997, when we could not have delivered a file anywhere even if we wanted to, and not now, when we technically could and still will not.
Not here. I want to be clear because people arrive on this page, read three paragraphs, and then email us to ask where the button is. There is no button. There has never been a button. In 2004 Doug installed a button on the homepage and it turned out to be a photograph of a button, and it stayed up for eleven years because nobody wanted to be the one to tell him. If you clicked it, a small sound played. That was the whole feature. That was the closest this website has ever come to giving something away.
The actual free ebooks, the ones you were hunting, live at booktrovert.com/promotions-giveaways. Go there. Claim four books. Feel the warm rush of getting something for nothing. We will wait. We are very good at waiting. It is most of what we do.
This is the part where I stop doing the bit and mean it for a minute. A book is the result of a person sitting alone for a very long time, making something out of nothing, and then handing it to strangers with their whole chest exposed. Authors are fragile organisms. They survive on sunlight, encouragement, and the occasional royalty statement that does not make them lie down on the floor. When you buy their book, you are keeping one of them alive to write the next one. When you demand it for free from a haunted parody website, you are, and I say this with love, part of the problem.
We ran the numbers once. Marigold added them up on an index card. If Booktrovert.org gave away even one free ebook per visitor, our annual revenue would drop from its current figure, which is already negative, to a figure so negative that Randy said it made a sound when he read it aloud. We cannot afford free. We can barely afford the light bulb over the stairs, and that bulb has been out since March.
So instead, here is our counteroffer. Buy a book. Any book. From anyone. From the little store with the creaking floor, from the big site with the fast shipping, from the author's own trunk at a folding table in a community center. We do not get a cent of it, which is exactly how we like it, because it means we are giving you advice instead of a sales pitch, and advice is the only thing this website has ever had in stock.
If you are still deciding which Booktrovert you meant to visit, we laid the two of us side by side in a chart that took a real emotional toll. And if the phrase "please buy books" struck a nerve, we have a whole page about keeping authors alive that says it louder and with more feeling.
The free ebooks are one tab away, at the other Booktrovert. Go get them with our blessing. Just leave a little room in the budget, next time, for a book somebody has to eat because of.
Unfreely,
Booktrovert #503