The idea to give away the book came from my editor at Counterpoint. I think it was a great one. Though, some people have asked me how I stand to benefit from it. In a strictly commercial sense, I don't. But if I had approached the act of writing fiction from a strictly commercial point of view, I doubt I would have written a collection of short stories. I wrote TGF because I wanted to engage in a moral and aesthetic dialogue with readers. Likewise, if Counterpoint were only out to make money, then they would probably devote their resources to publishing celebrity cookbooks and coffee table books with pictures of kittens crawling into and out of large baskets.
Distributing creative work is extremely difficult under capitalism. Art is supposed to challenge the status quo, whereas the purpose of the free market is to serve the status quo. This tends to result in art that is either dishonest, shallow and wildly successful or art that is honest, urgent and obscure. This giveaway seemed like an opportunity to make a small gesture against that paradigm.
A quick aside: I don't feel 100% comfortable stumping for the Kindle, but I do have to give credit to Amazon for having come up with a means to distribute my book for free to anyone with the ability to run an App. That's laudable. Another quick aside: All this talk of Apps is making me hungry
Happy Holidays!
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