According to Publishers Marketplace daily email newsletter Publishers Lunch (no link), personal finance guru Suze Orman will be giving away her new book’s e-book away for free.  For one week.

When Suze Orman promoted what became over a million free downloads in less than two days of her book WOMEN & MONEY on the Oprah Winfrey Show last February, the book had already been on the market for almost a year. Now Orman and publisher Spiegel & Grau are building on that experiment by launching her newly-announced SUZE ORMAN’S 2009 ACTION PLAN with an appearance on Oprah’s show and a free ebook download for a full week, ending with a live webcast on January 15. As with the previous download program, they are providing both English and Spanish versions.

The release promises “honest, straightforward guidance that will help you adapt to the new economic reality of today and place you on the path to financial security in the years ahead.” Orman “discusses what safeguards should be put in place, appropriate actions to take, costly mistakes to avoid, and even opportunities to be had, so that you are protected during the downturns and prepared to prosper when things take a turn for the better.”

In another free promotion of a financial book, Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad book is the cover advertisement on this week’s PW, which coincidentally has “exclusive” news of “a daring venture”: his new book CONSPIRACY OF THE RICH: The New Rules of Money, will be published online for free, a chapter at a time, “sometime this winter,” before Business Plus publishes it in print next year.

This sounds like a smart move for someone in her position.  Anything that enhances her one-woman brand will help her in the end.  It would be interesting to see what portion of her empire’s revenue comes from books sales as opposed to her TV program, speaking fees and whatever else.

Perhaps Spiegel & Grau is taking a bit of a risk, but the publicity this generates will almost certainly help with those who either want the print book or just don’t hear about it during the brief week the free version will be available.

Nightmare scenario:  a world where all the A-list authors give their content away for free, knowing they’ll do just fine off of the secondary income sources.  The 98% of authors who are not A-list are in the position of either trying to compete with free content with their full price books or else giving theirs away for free, too, and not seeing much or any financial compensation for their efforts.

It’s difficult to envision how A-list fiction authors would make enough from secondary revenue sources to satisfy them, though, so maybe this potential nightmare would be limited to those with multimedia aspirations.  Or will fiction authors start going multimedia as well (their own online-only television series, video games, movie deals)?  I’m going to stop thinking about this now.