Today a New York Observer article printed an excerpt from Ryan Holiday‘s book proposal with the Twitter headline: “Did Ryan Holiday dupe Gawker and GalleyCat?”

The proposal excerpt in the Observer suggested that the marketing team should seed fake news about Holiday’s book advance to blogs: “That the information is all fake and part of a social experiment will be revealed later in the book itself—as evidence of the gullibility of the web and proof of concept.”

Oddly enough, nobody asked us where we got our information. This GalleyCat editor wrote about the deal yesterday because Will Weisser, the VP and associate publisher at Penguin’s Portfolio imprint, emailed us directly with all the details. We asked Weisser for a comment this afternoon.

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One week after his extramarital affair in Argentina surfaced, some wonder what will happen to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford‘s book deal. According to CNN, the rising Republican star secured (before the affair surfaced) a book deal with Penguin’s Sentinel imprint–scheduled for Spring 2010 publication.

The news agency caught up with the imprint’s associate publisher, Will Weisser, for an interview with a cryptic ending. This isn’t Sanford’s first book. In 2000, he published a book entitled, interestingly enough, “The Trust Committed To Me.”

Here’s more from the article: “Weisser would not elaborate on whether that meant Sanford would write a new book about the scandal, or if it simply meant the book deal has been scrapped altogether. ‘We’ll announce a decision about what’s going to happen about the book.’ he said.”