E-mail this morning (actually late last night, whilst I was asleep) wondering why, regarding Agent to the Stars, I hadn’t credited William Tenn’s short story “Betelgeuse Bridge” as an inspiration. Agent to the Stars, as most of you know, is about a movie agent who gets the job of trying to introduce a slimy but friendly race of aliens to the human race; “Betelgeuse Bridge” is about a PR exec who has more or less the same gig, with aliens who are also slimy (they’re snails).

The answer as to why I didn’t credit Tenn’s story is simple enough: I hadn’t read it and I had no idea it existed — indeed, I had no idea it existed until this morning, when the e-mail in question had me trundling off to Google Books to see if there was an excerpt of the story there that I could look at (there was, but not enough that I could read to the end — now I need to get an anthology it’s in, of which there are several). From the portion I read, there are definitely similarities, although, if I may say so, from what I can see, my aliens seem like nicer people.

Be that as it may, the seeming coincidence here is just that: Coincidence. Agent came out of my own experience working as a film critic and journalist in the early 90s and was written in 1997, and I’m vaguely ashamed to admit my first awareness of Tenn came in 2004, when he was a Guest of Honor at Noreascon4, that year’s Worldcon. It’s possible I read some Tenn before then, but if I did, I don’t remember, and from what (admittedly little) Tenn I have read since 2004, I can say I think I would remember, because he really is my kind of writer. As it is, it appears he and I ended up having more or less the same story idea, 46 years apart.

Things like this will happen from time to time. Indeed, it’s happened to me before — many critics and readers assumed that Old Man’s War was either partly inspired by or a reaction to The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and I received incredulous stares and sometimes outright disbelief when I noted that I hadn’t read Joe’s book before I wrote mine. And, well, what can I say. There are gaps in my reading (in the case of Joe, I’ve since made up for lost time and in fact wrote an introduction to the latest edition of The Forever War).

I’m not entirely surprised that a story with a set-up similar to Agent exists; science fiction has been around for a long time and the idea that aliens might need a marketing strategy is a pretty attractive one. It’s more surprising there aren’t more stories with the same general topic, actually. I’m looking forward to reading all of “Betelgeuse Bridge” and seeing how it ends up. I can’t say it was an inspiration for Agent, but I can say that what I’ve read of the story is likely to inspire me to read more William Tenn.

Over at her own site, Mary Robinette Kowal notes that at the moment there are some published novelists who are bagging on National Novel Writing Month and calling it waste of time and a bad idea for aspiring writers. She counters this by noting that her novel Shades of Milk and Honey (which is fabulous, by the way) was a NaNoWriMo novel — that is to say she wrote it first as part of the that experience, then finished it and sent it off. So the suggestion that NaNoWriMo is a waste of time and/or effort is pretty definitively rebutted in her own experience.

My own comments to folks, professional novelists or otherwise, who want to hate on NaNoWriMo is as follows:

1. Dude, a program that encourages thousands of people annually to celebrate the act of creating words — of creating their own words — and you want to piss all over that? If you look to the right, I have some kittens you can set on fire while you’re at it.

2. Even if you think it’s a waste of time, it’s not a waste of of your time, so why do you care?

3. Alternately, even if something like NaNoWriMo doesn’t match your own writing process, there are a lot of writing processes out there. So if this one works for some aspiring writers, don’t crap on them for it.

The third point here is especially salient. One of the kvetches I’ve seen from the pro set about NaNoWriMo is that writing a novel only in one month, once a year, is not the way pros do it, and it sets a bad example for up and coming writers. And my own response to that is, well, maybe that’s not how you do it. But you know what, in 2009 I wrote one novel, and I wrote in about five weeks very much on a NaNoWriMo plan of writing a certain volume of words per day, and then for the rest of the year I did and wrote other things. I have to say it worked out pretty well for me. And I’m fairly sure I qualify as a pro. I mean, I’ll have to check. But for now let’s assume I am.

As Mary notes over on her site, one of the hardest things newer writers face when tackling a novel is conceptualizing the idea that they are going to scale a mountain of words in one extended go. Writing a novel’s worth of words is hard, and it’s even harder when you’ve not done it before and you’re psyching yourself out about it. NaNoWriMo offers a way for these writers to take a swing at that process in a systematized fashion, and in a crowd, and both of these things can offer a fair amount of psychological comfort to a person embarking on what is in fact a lonely and arduous process of sitting in front of a keyboard with a goal of about two thousand words a day.

Is it going to work for everyone? No. Is it going to be useful for everyone? No. But it’s going to be useful for some, and that’s fine – the ones it’s not useful for will find some other way to climb that mountain. Meanwhile the skills that those it works for learn — write every day, keep writing, get that story done – are skills that are transferable outside of the NaNoWriMo context and will be a benefit when that new writer, having completed the task of writing 50,000 words in one month, decides to try to write 100,000. In April. Or whenever. Yes, there may be some people who fetishize NaNoWriMo or take less than useful lessons from it (“Novels must be 50,000 words! They must only be written in November!”), but let’s entertain the notion that this will be more about those particular people than it is about NaNoWriMo.

So if you’re a pro novelist or whomever wringing your hands over NaNoWriMo, remember that hands are for typing, not for wringing, and get back to your own work and let the kids have their fun. If you’re a NaNoWriMo participant and you’ve heard the grousing of the pros, ignore it and enjoy your experience of banging out words. In the end, no one cares how or why or under what circumstances a novel has been created, they care about the words on the page. Readers don’t read process. They read novels.

We’re closing in on the one-month mark of our ownership of Daisy, so I thought I’d catch you all up on her status. Basically, it’s gone very well, and she’s become pretty fully integrated into the Scalzi clan. In particular, the cat/dog issue seems to have been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction: The cats seem to understand Daisy is here for the long haul, and Daisy gets that the cats are family, and everyone gets along. They don’t cuddle up like the cats (well, Zeus and Ghlaghghee) did with Kodi, but it’s still early days.

Daisy definitely has her own personality. For one thing, she’s an attention hog: if one the cats is being petted she will headbutt her way into the pet session, because apparently no reason she shouldn’t get pets if someone else is. For another thing, she knows what’s allowed and what’s not but subscribes to the “if you didn’t see it, it didn’t happen” theory of morality, which allows her to get premium nap time on beds, which she knows she’s not allowed on but will get up on anyway. When I get up from my desk the first sound I usually hear is a soft thump as the dog quietly jumps down from whatever piece of furniture she knows she’s not supposed to be on, followed by the dog head popping out into the hallway to find out where I am. She’s a sneaky one.

Also, she’s a very excitable dog. Having an older dog for the last few years dimmed the memory that a favorite mode for dogs is run! everywhere! really fast! Well, I’ve gotten well-acquainted with that dog mode once again, and I have cause to observe that it’s actually a good thing I have 5 acres of lawn, because Daisy has made herself informed about every single square inch of it. This is not a bad thing for me, since what she enjoys most of the world is running around the yard with someone running after her, arms flailing, howling like the Cookie Monster set on fire, and guess who, as the work-at-home person, gets to do that. As a result, I’m getting a whole lot of exercise and looking entirely foolish as I do so.

And there we are. This is the end of “what’s up with our new dog” posts, I think; from here on out, when I post about Daisy, she’ll just be referred to as “the dog.” She’s one of us now, and she seems to be as happy about it as we are. And that’s a good thing for everyone.

Thanks, folks. I appreciate the service.

Picture taken from this story about a veteran’s rifle brigade.

Over at Filmcritic.com, I’m going over the holiday season’s science fiction and fantasy film loadout, and guessing how each of those films will go in the box office battle. Here’s a hint: That tiny little film featuring a cult character named Harry Potter? Might do okay! Come look at the rest of my thoughts on the season, and of course add your own thoughts in the comment thread.

A real one, it seems (real meaning “from Judith Griggs”). It’s up at the Cooks Source site.

The good news is that there’s an apology to Monica Gaudio, along with the assertion that indeed a donation has been made to the Columbia School of Journalism, as Ms. Gaudio requested. So that’s good.

The rather less good news is that the apology seems generally to be avoiding the fact that Ms. Griggs’ letter to Ms. Gaudio plus the extensive examples of articles wholly taken from other sources without clearance or payment make it clear that the issue with the Cooks Source was not “an oversight of a small, overworked staff.” It also attempts to imply that the problem with Cooks Source was not Ms. Griggs’ “The Internet is a buffet of rights-free material” philosophy but that contributors playing fast and loose with other people’s material were somehow to blame.

The final little annoying touch is the attempt to suggest that the real victims here are the people that Cooks Source “assists,” i.e., its readers, etc. Well, no. In fact the real victims — the ones who have suffered verifiable material loss — are the writers and rights-holders whose work was appropriated without compensation. It’s nice that Cooks Source has caved and given Ms. Gaudio what she asked for; I wonder how it and Ms. Griggs plans to compensate everyone else it took work from without compensation.

In all, I give this apology a D+, and that passing grade is entirely for compensating Ms. Gaudio as Ms. Gaudio requested. Otherwise, let’s not pretend that if the Internet hadn’t fallen on Ms. Griggs’ head, that even this grudging effort at an apology would exist. This is the apology of someone who is sorry she got caught, not the apology of someone who feels she has done wrong. And, well. She did do wrong, and she should have done better.

Two things:

* First, I was asked whether Fuzzy Nation will be out in the UK at the same time as the US. My answer: Dunno. At the moment we’re shopping FN to UK publishers, so it’s really a matter of who wants it and then I suppose whether they want to time its release for the US release. Which is to say it’s not up to me. Of course, if you’re a UK science fiction publisher and you’d like a crack at FN, go ahead and contact my agent, he’ll be happy to talk with you.

* Second, over at Tor.com, Brit Mandelo has started a series of post on writers who have written books on writing, and has started that series with me, and my 2007 book You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop. Fortunately for me, her review is generally favorable. You can read the whole thing here.

There is a small irony in that in discussing the book, she points readers to the SubPress catalogue page for the book, which tells folks it’s entirely sold out. And it is sold out — in print. However, over at Webscriptions, there is an electronic version available for the entirely reasonable price of $6. Go, electronic media!

Last week Subterranean Press and I did an experiment, by taking “An Election,” a short story SubPress bought from me, posting it here and running ads in it for SubPress product. When one publicly announces one is running an experiment, it’s fair to then also publicly present the results of the experiment for people to analyze and discuss. So here are some stats, etc to chew on.

First, numbers-wise, the story was seen and at least partially read no fewer than 25,828 times as of this morning, going by the number generated by WordPress’ stats package. Per my earlier discussion of how WordPress generates stats information, I consider the WordPress stats in this case to be a lower bound rather than the true number of readers, which I suspect based on experience is somewhat higher; if I had to guess, I’d go with something in the 35k – 45k range. But in terms of visits I know the story got, 25.8k is confirmable, so let’s use that.

How does 25.8k views in eight days compare to how the story might have fared elsewhere? It’s hard to make exact comparisons, but here’s some data on two points:

* In 2008, when I published “After the Coup” at Tor.com, that story was visited 49.5k times in two weeks. That was part of the debut of the entire Tor.com site, which didn’t hurt in terms of exposure. I also think at this point, most people acknowledge Tor.com as the most-visited sf/f-related online site which regularly publishes short fiction.

* The current circulation numbers for the largest SF print markets in the US are 15,491 for Fantasy & Science Fiction, 16,696 for Asimov’s and 25,418 for Analog. One wants to be careful comparing direct views on a Web site to general circulation numbers for various reasons — for example, not every one who reads a magazine reads every story, which means you may have fewer actual readers than the circulation… but more than one person will read each copy, which means you may have more readers than the circulation number, too — but circulation numbers are a reasonable baseline for estimation.

So, 25.8k views in eight days compares reasonably well with both top print and top online sites, in terms of getting the story read to a large audience. So in that respect I think we can declare the experiment a success.

I asked Bill Schafer, publisher of Subterranean Press, for his thoughts on its success in terms of advertising, etc. He said:

I’m plenty happy with it. We saw a small but noticeable spike in Kindle sales of the advertised titles. And really, I did it mostly because it was a new way to get the SubPress name out to readers. Business overall is good, which is the best way to quantify the stuff we’re trying.

So it’s a success on that end as well. And of course I’m happy with it, not in the least because selling the story enabled me to get a new computer monitor. So overall, I think we can say our little “Election” experiment worked pretty well.

BUT: is this sort of thing replicable? It’s one thing to something like this one time and get attention for it, on the grounds that it’s something new — as far as I know no other science fiction author has been paid pro rates by a publisher to publish his fiction on his own Web site — but it’s another thing to do it again and get the same sort of numbers.

The short answer to this is “we’ll have to try it again and see how it goes,” but the slightly longer answer is that there is another similar data point that suggests it might be doable. About a month prior to “An Election,” I posted a short short entitled “When the Yogurt Took Over.” I posted it for my own amusement rather than trying to sell it (I mean, it was really short, and also about yogurt taking over the world), but over the course of eight days, it racked up 26.4k views, i.e., numbers very similar to those garnered by “An Election.” While not definitive, it does suggest that fiction presented here will perform within a certain bound, as long as, you know, it’s entertaining. And that’s good to know going forward.

The next question, as you might expect, is whether I plan to make a regular habit out of this sort of thing. And the answer there is: Who knows? One, I don’t write all that much short fiction — usually a story or two a year. Two, it’s almost always on commission, so it typically already has a home. Three, most publishers, I expect, want to bring work they purchase into their own magazines or sites; SubPress in this sense was throwing an idea against a wall to see if it would stick. It worked for SubPress but then SubPress had books it wanted to advertise. Most short fiction venues don’t have the same dynamic going on, as far as I can tell.

I’m certainly not opposed to doing this again — just ask me! — but I suspect this will be a rare treat rather than a regular sort of thing. On the other hand, regardless of whether someone is paying me or not I like trying out things here, and it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that I’ll put something up here just because I feel like it. So again, we’re at: Who knows? Just keep dropping by and we’ll see what pops up for you.

It’s kind of awesome:

Context (for those three of you who still need it).

The song is by this guy. Well done, Arlojeremy.

Hat tip.

It’s my Fuzzy Nation ARCs! And I may — may – have one to offer up to one of you folks. I just have to think of a suitably sadistic fun contest for it. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, let me just say: Soooooo pretty.

Also, the “Marketing Plans” on the back cover tell me that, indeed, Tor is planning a tour for the book, as well as various other promotional thingies which will require me showing up to do my professional book flogging thing. I do not yet know the extent of these plans, so if you ask me in the comments “where are you going to go on the tour?” I’ll just say “I don’t know — ask me in a few months.” Actually I’ll say, “Did you not read the actual entry?” and then cry small, gulping sobs. And no, that’s not a reason to ask me about it, you bad person.

And now I’m off to pet my new ARC. Pet, pet, pet.

Update: For those of you actual legitimate reviewers and booksellers wondering how to get your mitts on one, my publicist at Tor has just tweeted about it here. Note her caveats, however. I don’t want to see any of you whining.

AS IF YOU CARE.

1. Back home again after a weekend away. Where did I go? What did I do? Sorry, that’s classified. But I will say that when that race of superintelligent badgers emerges from its sett outside of Omaha, Nebraska and claims dominion over the whole of the Midwest, you should not be entirely surprised. And I had nothing to do with it. Nothing.

2. That said, it was a lovely weekend with friends, not nearly all of whom were hypercognitive mustelids.

3. All right, fine. You want a hint where I was? Here’s a hint: While I was there, I ate beignets. Which badgers do not like unless dipped in an earthworm reduction.

4. I am told I am not allowed to speak of the badgers anymore.

Anyway. How was your weekend?

Wait, that’s not right. Well, never mind that now.

What I really want to tell you is that I’m taking the weekend off, starting this very second. I may check in with Twitter, but most of the time I won’t be online. Because I’ll be having grand adventures. Or sleeping. Mostly sleeping. But you never know. If you see me out there in the world with a cutlass in my teeth, swinging from a rope, don’t be surprised. That’s all I’m saying.

Have a good weekend and I’ll see you all on Monday.

A couple of quick notes on things relating to ME ME ME ME ME:

* I kvetched a couple of days ago about Barnesandnoble.com’s search listings on “Scalzi” calling up a bunch of craptacular insta-books with content sucked in from Wikipeidia, rather than, you know, my own books (or the books of the other occasional author named “Scalzi”). Well, I went back today to see what would happen, and lo and behold, when you type in “Scalzi,” you get Scalzi-written books. The first several listings are NookBooks, but hey, I have a Nook, so I’m fine with that.

I don’t imagine my kvetching was the predicate cause for this fix, but however the fix came about, thank you, Barnesandnoble.com, for making it easier for my readers to find my books on your Web site. I will be purchasing a book for my Nook today, in your honor. Also I want you to know I would be a really excellent beta tester of your color Nook. Your shiny, pretty color Nook. Which no doubt smells of violets and love. I’m just saying.

* Speaking (vaguely) of electronic editions, I have an e-mail today from someone wondering whether I make as much from my ebook versions of my books as I do from other versions, ad if there’s a version of whatever book they should buy to be sure that the maximum amount of revenue goes to me.

My official response to that: If you want to be sure I get paid, get whatever legitimate, new version of the book you want. Don’t worry about which format pays me the most — if you’re buying it legitimately, and unused, then I will get paid enough in any format you might choose. So, really, get it in the version that works best for you, and thanks for actually wanting to make sure I get paid. I, my family, our pets and our various creditors thank you.

* Folks have asked if, now that there’s an official release date for Fuzzy Nation (May! 10! 2011!) if that means they can pre-order the book. The short answer is, yes you can — but I think you might want to hold off, because one of the things I’m currently doing is trying to arrange something with my local bookseller where you can order FN from them, and then I will come in and sign it for you. I figure if you’re the sort who want to go pre-order the book the instant it’s available for such, you might also be the sort who might, you know, want an autographed first edition. So hold on, kids, and let me get that worked out for you.

* This also reminds me that I need to go into the local bookstore and once again set up our holiday book signing thing, in which if you buy some of my books as holiday gifts from my local store, I’ll come in and sign and personalize them for you to your intended recipient (or you, if that’s how you want it). I’ll make an official announcement of that soon, probably in the next week.

Some post-mortem thoughts on two big things in this last week:

* I suspect everyone involved was mildly surprised at how quickly and expansively the Cooks Source thing blew up; aside from the Internets explodinating about it, the thing got picked up by the Washington Post, the LA Times, Gizmodo, Forbes, MSNBC.com and so on. Which asks the question of why this particular story got blew up while other tales of intellectual property theft, equally egregious, don’t get a peep.

The theory I’m going with is the theory lots of folks have already offered in yesterday’s comment thread: What blew up this story to monumental proportions was not the actual act of appropriation, it was Cooks Source editor Judith Griggs’ attitude about it. The fact Griggs would tell a writer that she should be happy that the magazine didn’t put someone else’s name on the article it stole from her — as just one example — is so genuinely morally appalling that in a twisted sort of way you almost have to admire the brazenness of it.

What it meant was here was a narrative that had a clear-cut, unambiguous villain — and also a clear-cut, unambiguous victim, since not only was writer Monica Gaudio clearly wronged, she had also acted virtuously when asking for the wrong to be corrected, asking only for a printed apology and a donation rather than payment for herself. And even that request was waved aside.

So: Clear wrong, clear bad actor, clear virtuous victim. Add to that the editor-writer power dynamic, a stereotypical print media cluelessness of online media and mores, and the fact that this wasn’t just some schmoe cutting and pasting onto a Web page but an actual business making money off the uncompensated work of others, and it’s off to the races we go. There was nothing about this story that wasn’t seemingly designed to make the Internets go boom, and to make the story easily transferable to more traditional media outlets.

Will this have any effect outside of amusing us for a day and making Ms. Griggs learn that yes, indeed, the entire Internet can be dropped on one’s head? In this particular case, the answer does seem to be yes, since folks online have compiled a list of Cooks Source articles which are also wholly or partially taken from other sources, from sources like NPR and Disney and other corporate sorts.

Unlike Ms. Gaudio, these folks have entire legal departments to follow up on stuff like this, so if Cooks Source didn’t actually license reprints rights for those stories — and if Ms. Griggs genuinely believed that what was on the Web was free for the taking, then why would it — then I suspect the magazine is pretty much done. This is especially the case as folks online went out of their way to inform Cooks Source advertisers about the incident(s), and at least some of them have already pulled their advertising. Potential serious legal issues plus radical change of business plan (now they’ll have to pay for things!) plus angry advertisers plus what appears to be a one-woman magazine shop equals so long, Cooks Source.

Mind you, that is if Ms. Griggs has any sense at all, and at this point there’s not a huge amount of evidence of that. Her most obvious actions to date are not answering her phone and changing the actual Cooks Source Web site to no longer feature the magazine’s contact information, unaware, apparently, that such information is already all over the Internet. Chalk that up to one more thing she doesn’t know about the online world, I suppose. I wonder if she knows what happens when one searches for her name on Google.

* On a rather lighter note, it’s been a week since I attended my very first World Fantasy Convention. Folks had told me before I should go, but I demurred, saying that I wanted to write some fantasy before I went to a fantasy convention. Their response was to look at me as if I was nuts, but hey, I never said I made sense all the time. This year, not only had I written fantasy, but also SFWA had decided to have its annual business meeting at WFC and so I as president needed to be there for that. And, it was in Columbus, so I could drive there! Off I went.

And had a wonderful time, honestly. The convention is attended by quite a lot of writers, editors and agents, so I saw a bunch of friends in those fields, and as I didn’t participate in programming outside of SFWA events, I spent a lot of time hanging out in the convention bar and catching up with folks. While I was doing that I was also haranguing the SFWA members among them to attend the business meeting, so there was a practical aspect to being in the bar, harumph, harumph. But seriously, who am I kidding, I was there to hang about.

As for the SFWA stuff, quite obviously I won’t go into specifics of private meetings, but in a general sense I’m very happy to say that the business meeting was both well attended and over with in an hour, and everyone seemed to walk away from it both happy and informed about what the organization and its board were doing. I as president am blessed with a SFWA board of directors that is impressively smart, engaged and on top of the organization’s business, so I was glad our members got to see them in action, doing their thing.

So, in all, I now understand why people kept telling me I had to go World Fantasy. It was a blast, and I do intend to go there again. Next year it’s in San Diego, which certainly helps with the decision-making.

I have been alerted as to the release date of Fuzzy Nation:

May 10, 2011.

Which is my birthday.

WHICH IS AWESOME.

That is all.

I have three things for you to think about giving some money to.

One, Strange Horizons, the fabulous online science fiction magazine that published my very first science fiction story oh-so-many years ago, is in the midst of its annual fund drive.

You’ll remember last year that Whatever folks took them over the top with their fund raising, so if you still value the work they do — and the work they publish — consider sending a few more dollars their way this year as well. Remember also that Strange Horizons is a non-profit organization, and your donations are tax deductible (and if you work for a cool job, may also qualify for matching gifts from your employer). This is, I think, the last week of their fund drive, so get in there.

Two, today I got this note from Epic SF author Peter F. Hamilton:

I agreed to auction off a character name in the next book for Autistica, a UK charity working for autistic kids.

http://members.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?viewUserPage&userid=autistica_charity

I know you get some UK traffic through your site, so I wondered if you’d consider giving it a mention.

Consider it mentioned! I’ll note that other UK authors are also auctioning off character names, but you know what? A Tuckerization in a Hamilton novel would be especially sweet.

Three, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog author Chad Orzel is doing his annual charity drive for education charity Donors Choose, and this year he’s also planning on selling off naming rights for one of his upcoming books. The twist? Chad explains:

I will name two animals in the book-in-progress after the pets of people who donate to the Challege: one for the largest individual donation, and one to a donor chosen at random.

My new dog Daisy is already so very excited about this. Here are all the details. Chad’s charity drives runs through next Tuesday, so hurry if you want to make your pet famous.

It is, in a response to a writer complaining that the editor’s magazine stole something she wrote on the Internet and used it without compensation:

But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it!

Get the whole story, from the writer of the piece, here.

And then get Nick Mamatas’ take on it, here.

And then go look at the Facebook page of the magazine and see how people are gently correcting the editor in question, here. That is, while you can, as I have no doubt either the page or the comments will be taken down soon, although, of course, screen caps, text cut-and-paste, and good ol’ Google cache will keep the spirit of dissent alive forever!

And kids, remember: Writing on Teh IntarWeebs can has copyright! Even the newbiest of newbie editors should know that.

Oh, and to add to the Google Search weight this incident will have, the magazine in question is Cooks Source. That’s “Cooks Source,” with a “c.” Once again, Cooks Source.

There, my work is done.

Received an alarmed e-mail today from a reader, who was concerned that when you type the word “Scalzi” into the search function at Barnesandnoble.com, the first several listings are for shabby-looking books that appear to be illegal compilations of my work (here’s one of them).

In fact they’re not, but what they are isn’t substantially better: Some geniuses have hit upon a scheme of cutting and pasting Wikipedia articles into what appears to be publish-on-demand books and then charging people ridiculous sums for the collation. The link above is to 32 pages of Wikipedia articles on my books, and the charge for this service is $12.72. That’s a pretty obnoxious amount to charge for something someone can read for free online, or could print out themselves for pennies. I won’t speculate whether grepping content from Wikipedia and then trying to sell it to people represents a violation of Wikipedia’s Creative Content license, but I will note that on its FAQ page, the publisher here claims that they charge for everything but the content, which is the sort of delightful hair-splitting that would probably get destroyed by any competent lawyer.

I don’t particularly care if these folks sell Wikipedia articles about me as books — it’s a stupid business and you’d have to be stupid to buy the books, but apparently there are enough stupid people out there to make it work — but what I am annoyed at, as an author, is that when people go to the Web site of a major retailer and search on my name, the first several references they get — the “Top Matches” — are to crappy insta-books I didn’t write. Call me crazy, I think the “Top Matches” for my name should be my own work, not the work of Wikipedia-snurching bottom-feeders. Likewise, it would be substantially less than awesome if someone desiring to purchase my work clicked on the book bearing the name of four of my works, paid for it, and then got a tiny, slim volume of Wikipedia articles. Because that reader may end up pissed off. And that’s not good for me.

Dear Barnes & Noble: You know, when I type in “Scalzi” at Amazon, the first nineteen references are books I wrote. At Powell’s it’s the first twelve. At IndieBound it’s at least the first fiften. So, do you think it’s possible that the Web site of the nation’s largest brick and mortar bookseller might actually put one of my books in the top five references when you type in my last name? Or at the very least, some author named Scalzi? It’s not too much to ask. Thankfully, searching “John Scalzi” turns up my work, but I think the “Scalzi” thing is sufficiently problematic to give you a head’s up about it. If you could fix that, it would be lovely.

For everyone else, well, if you see a really crappy looking book with my name on it (or the name of any other writer, for that matter) in the Barnes & Noble search function, see if the publisher is “Books LLC,” and if it is, run away from it. I didn’t write it, and you can get what’s in it for free online. And besides, all the books by me from real publishers don’t look like crap. They look awesome.

As threatened, I changed the theme I’m using for Whatever (this one is called “Fusion“) and then fiddled with it to get it to my liking. It is largely there at the moment — I like what I’m seeing in any event — and so while I may fiddle just a tiny bit more with it, I think by and large this is it, theme-wise, for a while. That said, a couple of quick notes:

1. I’ve checked the site with on Windows with Firefox/Chrome/Safari/IE 8, and it seems to render just fine with each of them, so I don’t anticipate any problems there. That said, when I checked it on my wife’s iPad I noticed that the text runs right up on the left margin. I don’t know why it renders that way or what I can do about it, but I will look into it. In the meantime, if the margin thing becomes annoying to you on the iPad, I’d suggest in the short term looking at the site through an RSS reader. That might help.

Update, 11:48am: regarding the left margin thing, I just switched the theme to “flexible” setting, which means it expands/contracts the layout to fill the space provided. This means you on Mac Safari/iPad/tiny laptops should now see a left margin. I’ll see how I like the flexible setting over the next day, and if it doesn’t drive me nuts, I’ll keep it.

2. The theme allows the owner the option of showing icons called “Gravatars” alongside the comments, and at the moment I’m allowing them and am inclined to keep them. When someone doesn’t already have a Gravatar set up, it procedurally generates one based on one’s e-mail (I think), so that explains the fractal-ly images. However, if you would like to customize your Gravatar as it appears here, you can go to the Gravatar site and make your own.

Gravatar is owned by Automattic, which also owns WordPress.com, so it’s not a completely unknown company, and it means that the Gravatar should work consistently across a whole bunch of sites with WordPress installed. Just make sure the e-mail you use to comment here is the same one you use for your Gravatar (you can create more than one, depending on how many e-mail accounts you use to make comments).

3. If you have additional feedback about the look/feel of the site I’m happy to hear it but be aware I’m constrained in what changes I can make by a) the restrictions WordPress has on those using their system (for reasons of load-balancing and/or not having the whole system brought down by viruses and bad coding) and b) my own questionable competence. At the moment, the only major (i.e., non-cosmetic) change I’m looking at is finding a way to bring back a “comment preview” button; if I can manage that I will let you know. Otherwise, as noted, we’re pretty much where we’re at for a while. I hope you like it.