Del Ray have announced that book one of the Star Wars: Legacy of the Force series is going to be made digitally available to fans for free as a promotional offer. The offer be will like the earlier successful one we reported on by Oprah in her promotion of Suze Orman's 'Women and Money'. This will also be time limited, in this case to two weeks but will be able to be printed, shared and emailed.
Legacy of the Force follows on from Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi and book nine, which will be the final book in the series, Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Invincible, will go on sale on May 13.
Interestingly Del Rey has partnered with a list of booksellers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Powells to make the file available to their customers. Del Rey will be supporting the free download with a major online marketing campaign.
It sounds a must for all trekies and interesting model for others where the old title is effectively given away to promote the new one. It leans heavily of the experiments of the likes of Prince and Radiohead within the music industry and could be an interesting one to watch. We presume the rights given away are more than offset by the potential increase in revenues and royalties generated by the promotion.
