Whipped Cream Difficulties

Fan fiction isn’t my cup of tea. If you enjoy it, more power to you. And I don’t like making fun of other writers for being supposedly “bad”: it feels kind of like throwing rocks from inside my glass house.

But I ran across a discussion of this work of fan fiction while looking into something else (I’ll get into that “something else” later) and thought it was worth mentioning here. Especially for all you “The Eye of Aragon” fans.

“My Immortal” by “XXXbloodyrists666XXX” is a work of Harry Potter fan fiction. With vampires.

… the story centers on a 17-year-old female vampire, a non-canonical character, and her relationships with the characters of the Harry Potter series, most notably her romantic relationship with Draco Malfoy.

More:

The protagonist of the story is Ebony (occasionally Enoby, Evony, or Egogy) Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way, a seventeen-year-old vampire who attends Hogwarts (located in England instead of originally Scotland) as a member of Slytherin House. Hogwarts is depicted as being divided between two cliques, the goths and the preps. Ebony and all the sympathetic characters are part of the goth clique while the members of the prep clique are portrayed unsympathetically. Many of the main characters of Harry Potter are given “goffik” [sic] makeovers, moved to the Slytherin House, and renamed.

And it gets crazier from there. Draco Malfoy is bisexual, Harry Potter is a vampire, “there is also an unexplained cameo by a gothic Marty McFly, with the DeLorean time machine able to transform into an iPod.”

Also, the author can’t spell:

A third plot point sees Professor McGonagall (often referred to as “McGoogle” or “McGoggles”) and Severus Snape (often called “Snap”, or “Snope” at times) attempting to rape or harm the protagonists. Yet another plot point follow Remus Lupin and Snape being bisexuals who spy on Ebony, at one point resulting in a moment shortly after Draco’s “death” where they are sitting on their broomsticks with “Loopin masticating [sic]” to Ebony bathing.

This was originally published in 44 chapters to Fanfiction.net. The author claims that chapters 39 and 40 were actually written by someone who hacked into their account. And the author also apparently had a falling-out of sorts with “their editor” somewhere around chapter 12. (Personally, the most amazing part to me is that the author had an editor.)

“My Immortal” is no longer on Fanfiction.net, though copies are still circulating. I haven’t found one yet. If I do, I am tempted to give it a shot. The 44 chapters total to about 22,000 words, so it shouldn’t take too long to struggle through.

But what’s the rest of the story? How did this come to my attention, and why am I interested? Well, there are rumors floating around – based on supposed similarities in the writing – that “XXXbloodyrists666XXX” is actually Lani Sarem, author of the “New York Times bestseller” Handbook for Mortals.

This story broke late last last week. The NYT has a service that sends out advance copies of the weekly bestseller lists. Handbook was number 1 on the list for the week of September 3rd, and substantially outsold the book in the #2 position (The Hate U Give, which had been on the list for 25 weeks). (“…BookScan was showing sales of over 18,000 copies in a week. The next book down on the list only showed 6,000 copies.”) What was even stranger was that nobody had heard of the book or the author previously, and it was the first book from “GeekNation Press”, a spinoff of a website.

So people started asking questions. Among other things, it emerged that the book was out of stock at Amazon, and calls to Barnes and Noble bookstores revealed it was out of stock there too.

Then reports emerged from bookstore employees that people were calling, asking if they had Handbook for Mortals in stock, and if the answer was “No,” placing bulk back-orders for the book.

The Times apparently has a sort of weird way of building the list. They don’t just count point of sales data using BookScan (unlike the USAToday list). The Times has independent “reporting booksellers” that report sales data for the list. Exactly who the “reporting booksellers” are is theoretically secret, but in practice it’s an open secret. Many people know who those booksellers are, and know that the Times weights sales data from them more heavily than, say, B&N, in composing the list.

So if you want to get on the list, you can go around to the “reporting booksellers” placing bulk orders for your book. This happens a lot. So much so that the Times uses a special symbol on the list to designate books where bulk ordering is suspected.

Even better, according to some reports I’ve seen, because the stores didn’t have the books in stock and the purchasers were back-ordering them, the back-orders counted as “sales” for the purposes of reporting and list making. But: because they were “back-orders”, no money changed hands, and wouldn’t until the orders came in and somebody picked them up. (Assuming that ever happened. If it didn’t, I would assume, based on what I know of industry practice, that the stores could return the unsold books for credit.)

Very clever. Very clever indeed, Mr. Bond.

Somehow, this managed to escape the Times‘s notice until a couple of YA authors (Phil Stamper and Jeremy West) started looking into this and publicizing their findings. By Thursday, the Times issued a revised YA list with Handbook for Mortals nowhere on it.

EW coverage: this is the best summary I’ve found from a website I’m willing to link to.

Also from EW: an interview with Michael Bourret, a YA literary agent, that goes into more detail about the controversy and how the NYT list works.

THR interview with Lani Sarem. She denies that there was any attempt to manipulate the list. But at the same time, there’s an acknowledgement that Thomas Ian Nicholas “reached out to independent bookstores to buy bulk copies of the book in advance of local comic conventions over the fall, understanding that physical copies of the book wouldn’t be available until after Aug. 31.”

Sarem says she and actor/producer Thomas Ian Nicholas (American Pie), who is attached to produce and star in a potential movie version, have been promoting the book since the beginning of the year.

Which is interesting, since GeekNation Press has only existed since July.

Now that you’ve got a bad taste in your mouth, please allow me to offer you a couple of quick palate cleansers:

Sarah Lyall interviews John le Carré and Ben Macintyre.

Could someone steal F. Scott Fitzgerald’s manuscripts from the Princeton University library, using John Grisham’s Camino Island as a runbook? Almost certainly not. But I do kind of want to read Camino Island anyway.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 28th, 2017 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Books, Gatsby, Law, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.