So there I am googling ‘valor of the healer angela highland’, just to see if I find any interesting links that might be talking about forthcoming April releases in the SF/F or Carina realms and such–and I did in fact find one, a link with a roundup of titles due to be released in April. I’m on that list, which is of interest since this woman is a bookseller in Canada (in Toronto, even), but is also specifically calling out Carina SF/F titles!
But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about two other, less amusing links that came up in the same search results. They live at a couple of domains that look like they’re pointing at pretty much the exact same kind of page–and in both cases, they are pretending to offer a free download of Valor of the Healer.
“Well, shit,” I said. Had I really been pirated? Over a month before my release?
I dug into the suspicious pages a little further, though, by doing a View Source command on them in my browser. (View Source IS the friend of the QA web tester.) In both cases what I saw in the code were a bunch of links actually going off to amazon.com–but with a lot of extra parameters on the URLs that make me think that they’re trying to mooch off of the Amazon affiliate system.
I’m told that this kind of thing is actually quite common, affiliate sites pretending to be torrent sites. Which strikes me as simultaneously hilarious and kind of sad, really. And for all I know these two sites–or maybe one site, since both of the pages had pretty much the exact same layout and text to them, except for differing domains–may be legitimate Amazon affiliates.
But I kinda doubt it.
Long story short, when in doubt, check my Valor of the Healer page for the roundup of all the official places selling the book. It IS available for preorder on practically all the major ebook vendors’ sites now, though it has yet to show up on the Sony bookstore. And if you have any doubt whatsoever about where’s best to buy the book from, go straight to carinapress.com!
