Shameless internet douchebaggery

Posted: Jul 07, 2012

by:

Cover of Scott Sigler's unathorized biography Junkie David Kirby sent me this interesting "unathorized birography" of me. Well! Aren't I horribly important and terribly busy! That's right, an FDØ expose. Perhaps by Kitty Kelly, author of biographies on Nancy Reagan, the Brittish royal family and Øprah? Nope, it's by some internet douchebag named Saul Eadweard Helias.

Now before you think I'm being mean, let me point out two things: first, Ol' Saul might not be real, and second: the $44, 88-page "biography" is content scraped from Wikipedia. Awwww, you mean I'm not horribly important and terribly busy? Sure, it's scraped from Wikipedia, but I'm still worthy of a biography, right?

Sadly, no. Ol' Saul is part of VDM Publishing, a company that rips Wikipedia articles and then offers the content as a print-on-demand (POD). So how special is my biography? As of November, 2010, the "leading content aggregator" had offered 150,000 titles for publication. Who knows how many are available now.

VDM's model is called an "author mill." Victoria Strauss goes into a bit of detail about the company and the biz model in her Writers Beware blog post from back in 2009.

In short, these Internet Douchebags scrape other people's work on Wikipedia, and also mass-solicit for old college papers, dissertations, etc., to feed their automated process that dumps title after title into eBookstores like Nook and Amazon.

I haven't looked that closely into VDM, because you can't cure douchebaggery, but if you are a writer and get anything from them or their many aliases (Alphascript, Betascript, Fastbook Publishing and Doyen Verlag) avoid them like the plague.

And people? Don't buy this thing. It doesn't even have any pictures of me in a gladiator costume back in 2002 waking up in a ruined Vegas hotel room next to a naked Pamela Anderson, and if you don't have that, it's not a real biogrpahy.

8 Comments

Kurt_eh

On Jul 07, 2012 @ 9:35AM Edited Jul 07, 2012 @ 9:35AM

I'll wait for the podiobook. But only if it's narrated by Hutch! ;)

OJ. No sig today. Sig tomorrow. Sig always tomorrow.

scottsigler

On Jul 07, 2012 @ 9:57AM

In reply to:

Kurt_eh

I'll wait for the podiobook. But only if it's narrated by Hutch! ;)

That is very clever, sir.

Dark Øverlord Media: We Default to the Nuclear Sølution

Surly Amy

On Jul 07, 2012 @ 10:45AM

Wow. That is total douchebaggery supreme. Any chance you can sue them for copyright violations?

Artificial_Selection

On Jul 07, 2012 @ 10:45AM

Such unmitigated, sacrilegious, and lazy abuse of Pope Siglericus' pontifical person should be punished.

scottsigler

On Jul 08, 2012 @ 9:14AM

In reply to:

Surly Amy

Wow. That is total douchebaggery supreme. Any chance you can sue them for copyright violations?

I don't think so. I didn't write the content on Wikipedia, so only Wikipedia has a case. It's an "unauthorized" biography, so they are not misrepresenting any interview they had with me. You can write books about people without that person's permission. I could sue them for libel if they made up a bunch 'o bunk.

Dark Øverlord Media: We Default to the Nuclear Sølution

exotiKali

On Jul 08, 2012 @ 12:51PM

My unathorized birography of you will have Manicorn pics and will be available for $43.99.

DeleriumTremens

On Jul 08, 2012 @ 2:07PM

I think we may have maligned VDM publishing unnecessarily. According to the picture it's there to support Books for Africa. Unfortunately due to economic hardship certain people in Africa may not have access to wikipedia. Without the services of the dead tree version of the FDO article, they will not be able to prepare to accept fealty to Sigler, or to prepare (in vain, obviously) to try and fight his inevitable takeover of their continent.