Well, if you ever write Harry Potter fanfiction with different names, we won't buy THAT, we mean!

So, the dramas of the last several weeks demonstrated fairly conclusively to me that the people who fume "We'll never buy your work again!" don't mean it. (See icon.) What they mean, at best, is "I've never bought your work before and now I really won't do it!" One of the wonders of Bookscan is that you can monitor week-by-week sales of paper books. (One of the wonders of Kindle is that you can monitor sales on a daily basis.) So, all those "Haha, you're off our shopping list forever!" types? No effect at all.

Of course, I'd guessed all this ten years ago, but until now I never had the perfect moment of easy access to fine-grained sales information and a widespread Internet furor to confirm. I'm sure some of the group even actually buy books occasionally—I'm just as sure that there's enough Harry Potter fan fiction in the world that one can read it and nothing else until the sun goes nova and the Earth is a cinder—but to be perfectly blunt, anyone who is totally into Cindy Pon's stuff is not going to be enthusiastic about, say, Love is the Law in the first place. It's an accident of marketing and my own pedigree as a writer (no fancy school, no secured wealth that would allow me to send dozens of stories out to prestigious but non-paying literary journals until such time as the literary establishment deigns to notice me) that puts me on the same shelf as, say, the Anita Blake novels.

Honestly, it's sort of like GamerGate complaining that Depression Quest exists—that it does in no way hinders one's ability to enjoy Final Fantasy in all its many ridiculous iterations.

Anyway, speaking of buying books or not buying them, we have a couple of neat fan reviews of The Nickronomicon:

Jason Wayne Allen writes, in part, the author’s voice and ideas truly proves to be one of the most vital, and relevant in the Lovecraftian genre.

Scott Jones discerns a theme in the stories and then goes on to write If you enjoy Lovecraft even a little, enough to have grown tired of the rehashed Mythos slurry that passes for “weird fiction” these days, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of The Nickronomicon in your hands, and into the hands of your friends. Highly recommended.

The pre-sale ends on Friday. That is, it goes through Friday, as Halloween is a payday this year. Spend your pay check here. If you like ebooks, we have Amazon, Kobo, and NOOK.