To make the transition from having an unpublished manuscript to having a book deal, writers are increasingly turning to the Internet to call attention to themselves. Some, like Steve Clackson, set up blogs from which they can address potential readers; others, like Val Landi, supplement the blogging with sites promoting their novel (in Landi's case, A Woman from Cairo).

And, as Tom Dunkel of the Baltimore Sun discovers, still other writers are willing to take things a little further than that. Dunkel stumbles onto what looks like a conspiracy theory website that turns out to be an elaborate backstory created by B. Brandon Barker to promote a book called Operation EMU which, Barker promises, "skewers pretentious sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and the cult of alien-life true believers." Wait, there are other "pretentious sci-fi films" like 2001? (Oh, okay, we'll concede the point for either version of Solaris.)

Anyway, it looks like the strategy worked, because Barker used his web stats to convince Byrd Leavell of Waxman Literary Agency to help him shop the manuscript. Leavell's no stranger to web-based writers, having made "very nice" and "good" deals, respectively, for David Dorey (TheHuddle.com) and Mark Frauenfelder (boingboing.net) earlier this year. (For those of you not familiar with Publishers Marketplace lingo, that's "more than $50K" and "more than $100K"—the latter of which probably seems like a high price for what Frauenfelder describes as a handbook for "powerful and little-known tips, tricks, and workarounds [on] the Internet." When you take boingboing's huge audience into consideration, though, the price tag becomes slightly more understandable...)