eARC for Seanan McGuire’s Book Posted to Illegal Download Site

So, a friend of mine re-posted something that Neil Gaiman Tweeted earlier today, and it bothered me enough that I thought it was worth a post here. Neil Gaiman’s Tweet was a reference to a series of Tweets that Seanan McGuire made about an issue that arose with her most recent book: The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, the second book in the Sparrow Hill Road Ghost Stories series.

One of the services that we use to review books before they come out is called NetGalley. It gives publishers the ability to send out eARCs (electronic Advanced Reading Copies) to reviewers ahead of publication schedule, so that they can have time to read the book, post a review about it, and get some buzz going so that the first-week sales of the book are high. Historically, the first-weeks sales volume for a book is a really good guide for how much money the book is going to make in its lifetime. And thus it’s used as a metric by loads of people to gauge how much attention to give to particular authors and their future books.

NetGalley is awesome. We use it regularly. Loads of other people likely do as well.

But apparently someone took advantage of the situation and decided to put their eARC copy of Seanan’s novel, THE GIRL IN THE GREEN SILK GOWN, onto an illegal download site for anyone and everyone that frequents the site to download it, ahead of time, for free.

Not cool, dude.

Now, Seanan McGuire is a pretty well-known name in the speculative fiction community. You might also know her stuff by her pseudonym, Mira Grant. She writes quite a lot, actually, and to date I’ve never read a story of hers that I didn’t like. Granted, she also isn’t one of those authors for which I’m constantly foaming at the mouth while watching the release date countdown clock tick to zero. Still, she’s a speculative fiction author, and a right good one.

So, I figured that if someone that was parading around as one of ours (a reviewer) was going to haul off and pull something underhanded like this, then it was only fitting that we here at EBR do something to try and counteract his/her (although, if I’m being completely honest, likely his) utter stupidity. Thus, I immediately jumped on Amazon and pre-ordered the book. Release date is next week: 17 July 2018.

If you’re a fan of hers and are just now hearing about the book, or if you’d like to jump on the bandwagon and help her out a bit, or if there’s some other reason you might have to want to take this route as well, here’s a link to Amazon where you can pre-order the book: Amazon.

We’ll have a review up for it in the near future. After all, that’s what we do best here. 🙂

Later.