Everybody first search my books on B&N, and if you find Hephaestus Books with omnibuses of my work, go to customer service at B&N’s corporate site and write them explaining these are ripoffs and not real books. Be nice, but be firm that these are ripoff collections of Wiki articles purporting to be a book by me and that these have been tossed off Amazon and are now victimizing customers of B&N and cluttering up the search list under my name. This is the e-mail form: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/help/customer_service/morehelp.asp
Arrgh.
And the koi pond sprung a leak or something weird happened with its waterfall exit this morning. We’re down about 1500 gallons, it’s cold out there, and we don’t know why.
There ARE no calm days around here…
I’ve been talking to a couple of people. One has filed a complaint with SFWA. I’m not sure what everyone else is doing, but it looks like some action is being taken.
If anyone wants to copy by blog post, go ahead. I use the Creative Commons Attribution license, so as long as you attribute my work, you can mix and remix it however you want.
There is a follow up coming out tonight.
Wayne
It appears other SF and Fantasy authors are Filing Intent as well. John Scalzi mentioned the problem on his blog, as did Jerry Pournelle, and I believe the SFWA is getting involved. I would very much like to see a class action suit on behalf of authors everywhere for accurate advertising on the part of the Wikipedia scrapers. If you can’t be arsed to do your own Wikipedia research, this may be something you want, but for the vast majority of readers, it is an annoyance at best and outright scam at worst.
Especially when the text part of the display on various sales sites says this is a ‘complete collection of” my work for 12.00.
Thank you to everyone who said nice things about my work. I realize that I have been really whiney lately, and I’m going to try and curb that stuff. But thank you again. And now back to NaNoWriMo, which oddly puts me in a great mood.
Not sure if it’s also a problem, but I’ve noticed several of your books being offered by Amazon as e-books– like all the Fortress books, Alternative Realities, At the Edge of Space (Hanan rebellion) and seven of the Foreinger series PLUS some of Jane’s – when it used to only have a couple. Sure hope you were aware of this recent change and it was kosher.
It was kosher. I made a deal with DAW: they can have the few of the Foreigner books they didn’t have, and I get some books that they aren’t so interested in marketing as e-books, and we’re both happy.
I wrote a short follow up on Hephaestus. The annoying thing is that the online book stores appear to be ignoring the issue.
Wayne
The only way these online guys get excited is when their customer service people get hammered by irate customers. Writers, they don’t care about: they figure we’re disposable—look at all the guys online who send them stuff.
Ah, but John Scalzi is in on the game, and he has lawyers 🙂
Wayne