Dave Balter (check out Bzzagent to learn more) has published a new book recently – The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II, featuring a rather sad but thoughtful looking monkey on the cover. While I can’t speak to the quality of the book just yet (though I’m quite sure it will be good), the way he has brought it to “market” so far is fairly unique. Notably, you can purchase the book in all it’s bounded goodness from Amazon for $45, or alternatively you can download it for free – an offer exclusively available through about 20 members of Dave’s network that he considers to be the biggest, baddest thinkers out there (a social marketing /marketing 2.0 crowd mostly).

I like the strategy for a number or reasons – with being able to skim his book for free at the top of my list of course. I emphasize skim because it’s highly, highly unlikely I’ll read the entire book on my laptop – if I want to read the whole thing, I will probably buy the “real thing”.

From a promotion standpoint, each of the 20 people Dave allowed to exclusively offer the link naturally wrote a blog post the book, which is a great way to generate… wait for it… word of mouth marketing the The Word of Mouth Manual. Seth Godin’s (What Dave just did) was my favorite of all the related posts, but many of them are quite interesting… and the “side” benefit of good publicity for BzzAgent might be is most likely worth more than all of the potential book royalties anyway.

From a publishing standpoint, the fact that it’s exceedingly unlikely any real publisher would allow this approach to happen is but one of the reasons he opted not to have one – you can check out the others in his great June 13th post “The Book Distribution Experiment”. My favorite quote:

My first book, Grapevine, was published in 2005… by a major publisher and I saw the trouble with the publishing industry machinery first hand. For example, when my media company polled 15,000 BzzAgents about which cover we should choose, the publisher opted to go with the lowest ranked choice. Their reason? Because the people polled didn’t have “100 years of collective book experience.” Ignoring the opinions of real consumers so blatantly is one reason their marketplace is starting to crack.

We see that all the time around here – the mentality that it’s OK to ask customers what they want, and give it to them, as long as what they want is what you wanted to give them in the first place, otherwise screw them because they don’t know what they’re talking about. Seriously – is there a worse idea out there than engaging a community to get an opinion about a book called Grapevine and then doing the exact opposite of what they said?

So check out Dave’s book (the price is right!) - and if you really want to learn more about word of mouth marketing on the web, check out  each of the 20 blog posts and their associated comments…