February E-book Giveaway (Update)

As I mentioned here a couple days ago, if my February reading list poll hit 500 votes by midnight on January 31st, I would do a giveaway for a few eBooks. Since the polling hit that level a few short hours ago, the giveaway is live.

But first…

At the time I posted the “stretch” goals, the voting had held at 393 for close to 8-9 hours, and there was no sign of any budging. Yesterday, there was a brief spurt of voting that took me to 425, and before I went to bed last night, the polling had hit 451 votes. That meant that today I had to share that exciting bit of news I mentioned in the post above, and start planning (to a degree), the reading poll for March.

Today, I woke up to 470 votes, which meant I was closing to the third “stretch” goal. I called in a few favours from some friends to get more social media exposure for the poll, and voila! When I left the screen a couple hours later, the polling was at 499, and I came back to 508. Right now it’s at 511.

And that means the giveaway is now on for sure.

First things first however.

If you look at this post over at The Founding Fields, I briefly talked about a new genre e-magazine, IndianSF, that has just launched in Mumbai, India thanks to the enterprising SFF geek Geetanjali Dighe. A few days after that post went live, Geetanjali contacted me via email and expressed an interest in publishing some of my reviews in the magazine. Specifically, she wants to publish my review of self-published author Selso Xisto’s 2012 debut SF novel Particle Horizon for the March/April issue of the magazine.

Very exciting stuff as you can see! I chatted with David Ploss, who runs The Founding Fields and owns all published material on it, about this opportunity and we were both of one mind: that this was awesome! After a brief talk with Ploss, I contacted Geetanjali and told her that yes, we were perfectly fine with her republishing my reviews from The Founding Fields for IndianSF as long as due credit goes to the site and to me. So come March, expect to see The Founding Fields get some great exposure in the Indian SFF community.

IndianSF represents a fantastic opportunity for everybody involved, and it goes without saying that I’m really looking forward to it all.

Now, as I mentioned up top, the next poll will be going live towards the end of the month, and I’m thinking of a ten-day window for which the voting will be open. Same guidelines as the current poll apply of course. The first was a great success, and I’d like for the second one to be even better. We can definitely make that happen! I’ve certainly seen, in my own small way, how powerful social media is when spreading the word about such things. Not that I needed any proof of it really!

(Update: I’ve been contacted by one of the publishers below about possible copyright infringement in this giveaway, as the eBook license for their books is null/void should there be any sharing of files without prior permission, even for a public giveaway such as this. They’ve stopped just short of sending me a C&D. As such, I’m temporarily suspending the giveaway so that I can contact the other publishers and figure out if the rest of the books are in the clear as well or not. I have to say though, that I am not confident of the giveaway going ahead after this, having talked to a couple of friends about it. I regret the entire affair and offer my deepest apologies to all the people who were looking forward to winning some cool books.)

On to the main agenda then.

The giveaway goes live right now, since the prerequisites have already been met. Here are the details and the rules.

• The giveaway is open till midnight (11:59:59 pm) 7th February. That’s midnight on the 7th Dubai time (UK: 8pm and New York: 3pm)
• These are the books available in this (quite massive!) giveaway:
  • Black Library – Short story pack that includes Josh Reynolds’ Gotrek & Felix: Berthold’s Beard, Anthony Reynolds’ Horus Heresy: Dark Heart, Mike Lee’s Nagash: Picking The Bones, and Gav Thorpe’s Dark Angels: Battle Brothers.
  • Black Library – one pick from Josh Reynolds’ Gotrek & Felix: Road of Skulls and Gav Thorpe’s Dark Angels: Ravenwing.
  • Tor Books – One pick from Kendare Blake’s Anna Dressed in Blood and David Brin’s Existence.
  • Solaris Books – One pick from James Lovegrove’s Age of Ra and Jonathan Strahan’s anthology Engineering Infinity.
  • Del Rey Books – Rob Reid’s Year Zero.
• To enter the giveaway, leave a comment below that answers the following question: “Which book are you most looking forward to reading in 2013, and why?” Also, do mention which books you are interested in, so it is easier for me to sort everything out by the time the giveaway ends.
• At the end of the time period, I will pick five winners at random, and I will contact you via email. You will have 72 hours/3 days to respond. After that, if you don’t respond, then I’ll pick another winner, again, at random.

That’s all of that I think. If you have any questions, then do let me know! And keep voting for the poll! I want to see how far we can get!

And once again, a huge thanks to everybody who has participated thus far, either by voting, or spreading the word. Your support has been invaluable.