Giving away ebooks has become a popular tactic for big-house marketers who operate on the theory that it somehow spurs sales. But indie publisher Doug Seibold, of Agate Publishing, is giving away one of his lead titles for another reason: because he’s afraid people won’t read it otherwise.

As he explains in a commentary on the Agate website, Rosalyn Story‘s second novel Wading Home seemed to him to be destined for good attention. After all, her first novel (More Than You Know) had gotten some rave reviews from major newspapers, and Wading Home, the follow-up — which centers around Hurricane Katrina — struck him as “even better, in many respects, than her first.”

But now, says Siebold,

… my first-order concern is the dismaying lack of exposure the book got upon release–even from places that had singled out Rosalyn’s earlier work for very high praise indeed. In fact, to its publisher’s embarrassment, Wading Home has gotten hardly any attention at all–despite the hundreds of advance reader’s copies we distributed months before it was published, despite the efforts of PGW’s excellent sales force, despite the author’s appearance at BEA, despite how the book’s publication coincided with the fifth anniversary of Katrina. And despite the fact that I’ve had a hard time finding any other such novels from trade presses–novels by black writers addressing this event, which had such a huge impact on how both black people and others think about the lives of black people in this country today.

Thus, he says, “I’m giving it away, in the hope that more people will read it, appreciate it, and tell others about it.”