Yesterday I received, in the mail, a copy of Ian Frazier’s new book, Gone To New York. The cool thing about it is, it was free.

A few weeks ago I got an email from a woman at Holtzbrinck Publishers saying she’d seen my mentions of Ian Frazier on my blog, presumably here and especially here, and would I like a free copy of his new book?

Yes I would, I responded. I would very much.

I figured there had to be a catch, or that it was some kind of hoax, but I got a free book yesterday in the mail, and haven’t had to give anyone my credit card number (yet), so it appears legit.

This strikes me as an ingenious marketing device. Part of me wants to wax cynical and fire up my Adbusters rhetoric machine about the ways in which “generating buzz” using “emergent media” like “blogs” is opportunistic and insidious, but I simply can’t; not this time, anyway. A person out there in the publishing world somehow stumbled across my blog where I was writing about an author I admire; that person, perhaps misguidedly, assumed my blog had a large readership and significant cultural cachet; I was rewarded for my indirect viral marketing efforts with a free book.

Pretty fucking cool, if you ask me. And I’d probably recommend Ian Frazier to everyone anyway, as I have twice already.

It also occurs to me that perhaps this system could be applied to other products and media. I will try it now. Boy, I sure do love the handsome new 60 GB iPod photo! Also, the new David Foster Wallace anthology Consider The Lobster from Little, Brown looks to be quite enjoyable! Apple juice!