Would you accept this e-book discount for your contact details?

Entrepreneur and author, Patrick Evans is launching his new e-book ‘Transire‘ with an interesting trick up his sleeve for discounted prices and marketing. This is his first work of fiction after publishing his first book ‘SalesBURST!!’.

The action works like this: Buy the book from Amazon.com for $2.99 as an e-book or $15.99 for the paperback. The book is shipped to you or uploaded as you might expect and a confirmation email will arrive. You’ll be familiar with this process if you have purchased anything from the online retail giant.

Following this, if you then forward that shipping confirmation email to the Transire email address, it will send $1 per Kindle e-book or $3 per paperback into your PayPal account. (Trusting that you have one.)

Transire is published through BIG 6 Publishers. This in turn is a division of evanSales, founded by Patrick Evans who is of course the author too.

Big Six in publishing usually refers to the world’s largest publishing houses, Hachette, Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group/Macmillan, Penguin Group, HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster. A quick search will show you that these companies dominate the publishing arena, so Evan’s choice for a name to publish his own book under is an interesting one.

According to Evans, the deal is beneficial to everyone involved. “The author receives the all-important email address of each book buyer so an author and book buyer can now communicate and the author sells more books.”

And there you can see where the window of opportunity lies. If you forward your confirmation email to the author, they can start to collect a database of readers and push future updates, emails or even spam your way. Data for cashback in a very simple move.

What price a discount?

We all like a discount of course,  and you’ll recognise that many online services like Twitter, Facebook and Google already sell data at a premium while we all use their sites without a charge. So this is not an unprecidented idea, but it is an interesting move for vanity publishers.

The idea could also be used more creatively. Those who work in the transmedia publishing community use social media platforms to interact with their audience regularly. In this case, giving up your email address to an author could mean that you get a more in-depth and engaging experience of a story and the possibility of accessing audio or visual supplementary material.

The case is an interesting one that we have not seen before and may prove to be a success for Evans. Scaled up to the levels of James Patterson, Stephen King or Jackie Collins though, the likelihood of getting a personal response via email is slim. After all, these authors have one of the real ‘Big Six’ publishing houses to represent them.