Guerrilla or Garddener?

An addendum to the entry about "guerrilla book promotion", pursuant to the counter-intuitive nature of giving books away in order to sell more.

I am a great one for metaphors, at least in terms of using them to see an action in more than one light. The first thought with sticking a book where someone will find and take it is that I am just giving books away. Not throwing them away, since at least someone will read it. But it is a gamble that someone picking up a book will talk about it to others or even buy the book for others.

Then I thought about gardening. I am a vegetable gardener, not so much a flower gardener. My husband and I each have community garden plots. It occured to me that one could look at buying a packet of seeds and planting them as simply throwing the seed away. What is more "throwing away" than burying something? But of course, no one would see it that way. The seed is expected to germinate, grow andproduce food. My husband put seed potatoes in the ground and now we have many times their number to eat.

One does not abandon seeds. One has promise of manifold return. Why not see the books the same way, not abandoned but rather planted?

Of course, metaphor is all very well. Horticulturalists know the likely percentage of seeds that will germinate and grow, but I doubt anyone has figured out the likelihood that a book found is such and such number of books sold...

But a book given away is also not likely a book not bought.. so what the heck. I'll give it a try.