You typed "booktrovert promo code" into a search bar. We know why. You wanted a discount on a free ebook, which is already free, which means you were chasing a number below zero, which is the most booktrovert thing a person can do, and we mean that as the highest compliment we offer.
You were probably looking for the new place, booktrovert.com, where they run Reader Deals and hand-picked favorites at special prices. Good site. Real coupons, presumably. This is not that site. This is the one from 1997, and we want to be honest with you up front: we have a promo code, but it is not going to do what you are hoping.
We have exactly one. We have never had more than one. It was issued by hand on a Tuesday in 1997 by our founder, Doug, who wrote it in ballpoint on the back of a deposit slip and declared it "good." Good for what, he did not specify. Doug rarely specified. That was both his great weakness and the reason any of us are still here.
The code is BOOKWORM. Yes, we know. We knew in 1997. Doug thought it was clever and nobody on staff had the heart to tell him that every business in America also thought it was clever. The code has never been successfully redeemed, in part because we have never built a field to type it into, and in part because when customers said it aloud at the front desk, Doug would simply nod, look moved, and offer them a chair.
People still ask what BOOKWORM unlocks. Here is the full and final accounting of its powers, as observed over twenty-nine years.
It does not lower a price. We have no prices. We have suggestions, and a coffee can. What BOOKWORM does, when spoken sincerely on the premises, is grant you a single uninterrupted hour in the back reading room, where the chair is good, the lamp is warm, and nobody is allowed to ask you what you are reading or whether you have finished it. Randy enforces this. We have never seen Randy. The hour is real anyway.
There was, briefly, a second code. In 2004 a temp named Cheryl printed up a thousand cards reading SAVE10 and put them in a fishbowl by the door. By Thursday the fishbowl was empty and we had not saved anyone anything, because there was nothing to save them on, so the cards just entered the world as small rectangles of pure suggestion. If you have ever found a card that says SAVE10 in a used paperback, that is ours. You may keep it. It is worth precisely what it says, which is the word "save" and the number ten, side by side, asking nothing of you.
The Ghost of Mark Twain disapproves of all of this. He considers a coupon to be "a small ghost that haunts your wallet," which is rich coming from him, and he has gone on record that the only genuine discount in publishing is owning fewer books you have not read. We told him that was bad for business. He pointed out that we have no business. We had no response to that, because he is, infuriatingly, correct.
So here is where we land. If you came in from a coupon site, hunting a Booktrovert discount code, we are sorry to have wasted the click, and also a little proud, because you found the funhouse mirror and not the storefront. The deals you were after are over at booktrovert.com, and they are genuinely free, which is a better number than ten percent off of free.
If you stay, the code is BOOKWORM, the chair is in the back, and the hour is yours. While you decide, you might enjoy our long comparison of the two Booktroverts, or our standing request that you please, when you can, buy a book from a living author. They do not run promotions. They run on encouragement and one good meal a week.
Please do not ask Doug to honor the code. He will. He will offer you the chair, and you will take it, and an hour later you will walk out having spent nothing and gained a paragraph you will think about for years. We cannot keep operating this way. We have no intention of stopping.
Discountedly,
Booktrovert #213