annleckie:

ballroomnotoriety:

cielrouge:

cielrouge:

 rnoachi
replied to your link “Handbook for Mortals’ Pulled From ‘New York Times’ YA Best-seller…”

What’s going on omfg

LMAOOO. All right Ima try and explain this succinctly as possible. Basically this random-ass ‘young adult’ book, ‘Handbook for Mortals,’ hit the NYT Bestseller List on the #1 Spot for the Hardcover Young Adult Category this morning. Only problem is that literally NO ONE had ever heard of this book before, like nada marketing, publicity, etc. Zilch. It was supposedly published by a company, GeekNation who only announced their publishing arm back in July. 

To hit the Bestseller list, the book would have had to sold at least 5,000~ copies within the first week, but a few people were quick to point out a major discrepancy where the book was literally out of stock everywhere in all major retailers, like legit you couldn’t find it on B&N, Amazon, and so on.  

YA Twitter basically crowd-sourced an investigation where a few anonymous booksellers revealed that they had gotten calls first asking if they were NYT-reporting bookstores, and then received bulk orders of the book but not caring when the books arrived. Soooo essentially what happened was that this book scammed it’s way on to the top of the NYT Bestseller List by figuring out which bookstores reported sales to the NYT (to determine what hits the bestsellers list, the NYT’s methodology takes a sample from various bookstores, and this supposedly changes every week). They then ordered thousands of copies of the book from those stores and only those stores – and by doing so, this was all a scheme in the hopes of driving the book to the top of the bestseller list. 

The main impetus for hitting the bestseller list was for getting a better chance to have a movie adaptation of the book made with a label like ‘#1 NYT Bestselling Book!’ which would have made it more appealing to potential investors. Butttt all of this was discovered and the NYT sent out a revision where they removed the book on the list a few hours ago. 

Someone also compared an excerpt of the book to an excerpt from ‘My Immortal,’ so now there’s a conspiracy theory that the author, Lani Sarem, is actually the author behind that fanfic. She’s also a former music manager who worked with bands like Blues Traveler, and the official Blues Traveler account weighed in and claimed that she was fired for ‘pulling these kind of stunts.’ 

And IN ADDITION to all this craziness, you had the bizarre emergence of random early-2000s celebrities linked to all of this – Lani is apparently JC Chasez’s (from N Sync) cousin who promoted the book on his twitter, and the co-founder of GeekNation (the publishing company behind this book) is Clare Kramer, who portrayed Glory on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and actor Thomas Ian Nicholas (American Pie, Rookie of the Year) was allegedly involved and planning to star in an eventual movie adaptation.

So, yeah that’s what happened in the last 12 hours of YA Twitter lol. 

Important addendum: the illustrator behind the book cover might have plagiarized it: https://twitter.com/rcrejino/status/901133779166777344

And in case y’all missed it the first time, here’s the side-by-side comparison of the book excerpt with a ‘My Immortal’ excerpt: https://twitter.com/runwithskizzers/status/900810659654283265

from the illustrator:

i’m screaming this shit just keeps getting wilder

I…the illustrator’s tweet is difficult to parse. Ok, it sounds like the illustrator was hired to do “an homage” of the linked original, and the original artist was to receive a credit because of this, and the illustrator is just now learning no such credit was added? Except…that’s not how it works in that particular field, if I understand correctly?

I think the person who called this “clownshoes grade” was on the nose. As it were.

Oh, and I’ve only ever read what I assume is the opening paragraph of My Immortal, but when I read that brief excerpt from HfM on twitter my first reaction was “This…really reminds me of My Immortal.”