LibraryThing abuse halted

As I grumbled about yesterday, this week a couple of idiotic authors decided that the LibraryThing friending system was the perfect opportunity to connect with interesting people, as one of them described his behaviour. Or spam themselves and their books to thousands of LibraryThing users, as some of us on the receiving end saw it.

Various people complained about it both by email and in a thread on a LibraryThing talk forum. The result is that Tim has put limits on comments-per-day that will discourage this sort of thing, and give the staff an early warning in any future incidents:
http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=24257

The moral of this story for other writers is that spamming is a bad idea. You could annoy more people into deciding that they'll never buy a book with your name on it than you gain extra sales. As ever when you're contemplating some course of action as a writer, put your reader hat on, and consider how you'd feel as a reader if a writer did this to you. And if you're trying to pimp your work -- how would you feel if all of the thousands of authors out there decided that you should be told about their work in the same way that you're proposing to tell other people about yours?

RIP Verity Lambert 1935-2007

Verity Lambert, the first producer of Doctor Who, the first female TV producer at the BBC, and one of the great producers of British television, has died at the age of 71. :-(

(Via altariel)

http://www.thestage.co.uk/news/newsstory.php/18940/ground-breaking-tv-producer-lambert-dies-at

Cover art and ISBN for Yule

Received the cover art for the new book last night. This is the one that I've been referring to as The Feast of Odin, but it's now reverted to what was originally the working title of Yule. It's a short story, part of a set that will be sold individually, but collectively will be known as The Festival of Lights. It's my first co-authored profic with someone other than predatrix, but lindsey_mullen is another writing friend I've known since way back from when I first got into fanfic. (And indeed could be said to be the person who got me into fanfic, so if you like my writing, you can thank her.) The page for the book went up on the Loose Id catalogue yesterday, but there's not much there but the ISBN at the moment, not even the cover art -- but you can see *that* below the cut here.

http://loose-id.com/detail.aspx?ID=623
ISBN: 978-1-59632-597-5

The art is by the wonderful April Martinez, who did the cover art for the whole set of Festival of Lights stories -- you can see some of her earlier work for Loose Id at her website.
( Yule cover art )