There are many zany tactics adopted by publishers and authors to get their books noticed, but how about giving them away for free? John Warner, chief creative tsar of struggling independent publisher TOW Books, is so sick of sending his books out to newspapers and magazines and television shows for review, and hearing nothing back, that he's decided to give up on the media and send books directly to his readers.

(Behind the decision there is also perhaps a measure of ennui for booksellers, too, after a passing gag he made about a ridiculous preposterous novelty book was taken at face value and generated significant interest from retailers.)

"Really, if you think about it in this day and age of Amazon and blogs and Facebook and MySpace, and LibraryThing, and Shelfari, everyone has a public forum where they can express their opinions," he writes. The only thing he is asking in return "is that you say something somewhere about them, even if it's along the lines of 'U think ur funny, but u suck'."

Paulo Coelho has been linking to pirated digital versions of his books for some time - he says it actually boosts sales of the physical editions - but TOW is offering (limited) physical copies as well as unlimited electronic copies; it'll be interesting to see if its attempt to tap into the online books community and start that elusive word of mouth works. It's certainly been paying dividends for some publishers. Now I just wish TOW would go ahead and publish Kevin Federline's Guide to Sudoku, which mysteriously never appeared.