Since the last installment of the "Notes" I've kept up my rather fruitless efforts to score free publicity for NaNoWriMo Notes: An Exercise In Creative Insanity in its brand spanking new book form. Now I hadn't expected it to be easy to find free listings for the book, or places willing to post my press release out of the kindness of their hearts, but I had not expected the amount of duplicity I would run into.

How many ways did you think free could be modified? In my mind it's sort of like being pregnant; either you are or you're not. Well the same applies to the word free, either something is or it isn't. Imagine my surprise when I found out I'd been serving under a misapprehension for all these years.

It turns out there are various degrees of freeness applicable on the Internet. After doing my requisite Google search for sites offering free listings for press releases, I picked out five of the

most appropriate ones (based on quick visits to each of their home pages) and prepared myself for the tedium of registering at each of them.

It was the usual drill of filling in the information each site considered essential to its wellbeing to know about you. Once that was done, and the level of registration checked, you could kick back and wait for the email telling you that you had successfully filled in all the little boxes. At least that's the way I've been used to doing things like that.

The first email I received from one company was an apology telling me they no longer offered a free service and asking if I would like to upgrade to the next level? This was of course after they had hooked me in through Google claiming to be free, and saying all over their website reduced service was available for free: such lovely people.

It was actually quite special the number of sites that would somehow or other manage to get a listing in Google with the word FREE trumpeted in loud letters. It got to be less and less of a surprise when I would get to the site and discover the only thing free was going to their site. On others the free bit applied to the fact people were allowed to read through their database of press releases for free, or just be a member and not do anything.

I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised, seeing as how that's normal when you look for anything free on the Internet. There is not always a catch, like attaching adware to the free product that cripples your computer; it's just the sites that yell free the loudest usually charge the most for whatever service they are offering.

Then there are the sites that do have a genuinely free service, which they explain right up front does less than the service you would pay for, which is cool and makes sense. If you are willing to pay money you should be entitled to better service. What I started to get bored with really fast was their insistence on telling me how lousy their free service was.

As soon as I had finished filling in their registration form, they opened a new window telling me how little they were going to do for me. When they sent out the obligatory, "verify your account" email, they reiterated I might as well not even have bothered registering with them based on the fact their free service is useless.

Now I understand offering a free service as an enticement to upgrade to something that does more, I can even understand pushing the free service in your keywords to act as an inducement for people searching for your service. Those are both standard business practices and the former can be seen as a way to provide the client an opportunity to test what's on offer.

But if you use free as your hook and as your test package, what kind of impression are you going to make on potential clients if you keep degenerating the offer. Saying you could be doing more, in a faster manner, for ten dollars is a lot different from saying we're not going to do squat for you. What kind of confidence is the client going to develop if the company tells them the service is shit after inducing you to sign up because they offered it for free?

I do know if I decide to spend money on some online publicity it won't be through any of the services that acted like that. So far from what research I've conducted even if you have money to spend on publicity, you are more likely better off conducting the campaign yourself.

Create some banner ads you can place on web sites that utilize your cover art from the book and have some eye-catching text. Lather your own website with stuff, don't overdue it on each page, but make sure each page has at least some mention of the book and a link to where it can be purchased, even if it's only a button.

Create a special page for your book and put a fancy ad on it that ...