This Ruined My Day

Why is it that I can't sell one book but publishers and agents fall all over themselves to sign up Bobby Henderson, creator of the web site for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a puerile parody of intelligent design?

I remember seeing a graphic for the FSM a few months ago on another blog. I thought it was a faintly amusing gag but nothing more. There is a precedent for non-books like this, the Darwin Awards. For the life of me, I can't understand who will shell out good money to buy these one-joke books. First, once you've seen the web site, you've seen it all. Second, you can flip through one of these books in a bookstore for five minutes and you've exhausted its potential. What motivates anyone to buy the book after that?

This is the kind of thing that I invariably discover online, just what I don't want to hear about.

Reading about deals like this must infuriate W.S. Cross. It certainly adds weight to his/her argument about how publishers employ inconsistent criteria to justify their acquisitions.