"The Gawker Guide To Conquering All Media" has, according to Portfolio, sold all of dozens of copies. (Current Amazon rank: 107,116!) Back in 2004, we regularly trashed mini-agent Kate Lee for her all-blogger lineup of book proposals, and wrote: "Enjoy the hype, little bloggers. Take your advances and buy stock in Halliburton while you can." So now we get to tell ourselves—or at least, whatever arm of this company saw a piece of that advance money—that we told you so!

Some publishing peon took Mediabistro's Galleycat blog to task this morning for painting a too-rosy picture of the industry, provoking a mix of responses from that blog's readership. "There are many people who slave away every day who would like for you to reflect their opinions as well," he or she wrote. Seriously, that's your beef with Galleycat? The response post was headlined "An editor's angstful cry draws mixed reactions." Angstful.

What's this? The New York Times bestseller list "is not a completely accurate barometer of what the reading public is buying," public editor Clark Hoyt informed us last week. This, even in spite of recent adjustments to the top-secret formula, devised in order to prevent publishers from "gaming the system" that determines the list's rankings: Appalling! Well, not really. As people who work in publishing like to tell their disappointed authors, the mysteriously-weighted list has always been essentially meaningless. Unless those authors have bestseller bonuses in their contracts, in which case: The list is extremely meaningful! And so while the list does not mean everything, it must mean something. For example, the #1 spot on this week's Hardcover Fiction list is occupied by a John Grisham book called "Playing For Pizza." What's that about?

Ads for the paperback of "The Discomfort Zone," Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays, include the really mean ones. "Odious!" says Michiko Kakutani. [Papercuts]

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's memoir has sold to Knopf, surprising many, including Knopf editor Ash Green: "I thought Rupert Murdoch would get it," he said. "Because Murdoch for ten years supported Blair through his newspapers, and he has the Sunday Times first serialization, and he has HarperCollins, that seemed to be a natural fit. Our English cousins have strong connections to Blair, but I didn't think they quite equaled... I think there was some wonder here whether the agent was using us as a stalking horse to get Murdoch's price up." [NYO]

From Publishers Marketplace: "Mother of pop-star Britney Spears and television actress Jamie-Lynn Spears's personal story of raising high-profile children while coming from a low-profile Louisiana community, to David Dunham and Joel Miller at Thomas Nelson, for publication in Spring 2008, by Chip MacGregor at MacGregor Literary." Thomas Nelson is a publisher of Bibles, inspirational (Christian) books, and occasionally books by pontificating celebrities like Bill Cosby, so Lynne Spears is a natural fit for their list.

The "scandal" that erupted over striking similarities between Jessica "Jerry's wife" Seinfeld's new Oprah-endorsed bestselling cookbook and Missy Chase Lapine's more modestly published take on the same topic—sneaking pureed veggies into kid-friendly foods—is grinding to an anticlimactic close, but Galleycat's Ron Hogan won't let it go. Today, he tries to find out whether the fact that Missy's book was submitted twice to Jessica's publisher might have resulted in plagiarism and learns that: guess what? Editors don't hang onto proposals they've rejected! They send them back to agents or throw them away, they don't keep them all in some giant walk-in storage facility. DUH. Here's the real shocker: that Spiegel & Grau's Julie Grau didn't have anything better to do than respond to Ron's email within "minutes." [Mediabistro]

Lazy-student-targeting fast food delivery site Campusfood.com is offering a huge $1 dollar-off promotion for the latest probably readable-but-kinda-crappy film adaptation-ready Nick Hornby novel. It's called SLAM and it's about teenage parenthood and, uh, Tony Hawk. If you and like 40 friends order soon you'll save enough to get yourselves some Plan B!

Slam [Campusfood.com]

Finally found the November Porfolio last night! (It's slowly trickling downtown where the poors live.) You know what was striking? There are seven book reviews in it—6 of them between 100 and 200 words, each of those with a byline. But occupying one-third of page 150 is an unbylined review of "Crawfish Mountain," a new book by Portfolio's own senior editor Ken Wells! It's an extraordinarily detailed plot summary, and is headlined "From Our Staff." Whoever wrote it sure does know the book inside and out—at the very least, we can sure confirm that it's a terrible editorial call to have run this without a byline.

Finally someone takes on the great evil of our time: SHELFARI, the stupid book-centered stupidly-named social networking site that auto-sends an invite to everyone in your address book when you're dingbat enough to sign up. I hate them so much and I scream a little inside every time one of these damned "DO WE LIKE THE SAME BOOKS?" emails arrives. They are basically social networking rapists. [NYO]

The Penthouse Club is west of the Shamrock Horse Stables, redolent of horse manure and oats, beyond the ramshackle tire shops and automotive garages. It rises up on Eleventh Avenue like some set from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure"—a steely Babel of boobs. Last night it was where Imogen Lloyd Webber decided to throw another book party for her debut effort, The Single Survival Girl's Guide. There were a lot of guys in suits there, a couple ladies in business attire and then a brigade of women in negligible negligees that, as the night wore on, wore off.

9/11 wasn't so bad, according to newly Nobel-anointed novelist Doris Lessing. "Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be," she told Spanish daily El Pais. Also: "I always hated Tony Blair," and "I hate Iran, I hate the Iranian government, it's a cruel and evil government. Look what happened to its president in New York, they called him evil and cruel in Columbia University. Marvelous! They should have said more to him! Nobody criticizes him, because of oil." We want to be like this as an old lady: just walking around talking shit and whapping people with our cane. But between this and the Jessica Seinfeld plagiarism scandal, the HarperCollins publicity department is having kind of a bad week.

The gossip from Frankfurt, where international rights to books are bought and sold during a traditionally ribald and booze-sodden week every October, is beginning to trickle in as the fair draws to a close. It is all lame. There's no "big book" this year, only a "big story" about the dissolution of British agency PFD, whose 85 employees simultaneously quit, leaving clients like Ruth Rendell unmoored. FSG editor Lorin Stein, who, according to our inbox, is a "notoriously arch shithead" and a "boat-shoe wearing schmuck," let Times book lady Motoko Rich follow him around as he played hooky from the fair to pick apples in the Rhine Valley and attended dinners that found him "carving slabs of pork ribs and sampling the local apple wine. ('It's wretched,' he declared after the first sip.)" Something interesting must have happened, though, at the notorious Canongate party?

You heard the Facebook, ladies: Dana Vachon is up for grabs! Get out there and snag yourself a Lit Boy. 34Bs and over, please.

Single Girls and their Wingmen and BFs and Girl Playmates and Squeakies hopped in their Cabbage last night to confront the Clit Teasers, Social Hand Grenades, and All Text No Trousers types who awaited them in the City. Some of them wound up at Bloomingdale's SoHo at the book party for Imogen Lloyd Webber's advice manual The Single Girl's Survival Guide, which is the source of the wholly original euphemisms above and many more. "[Pink superscript 'I']t is a truth which should be universally acknowledged that a single girl can be in possession of the most wonderful life," the book begins. With the help of photographer Nikola Tamindzic and maybe one too many passionfruit mojitos, tee hee, I set out to discover whether this could be true.

In response to our take on the tug of war over the publication of early drafts of Raymond Carver's best-known stories came a small excellent email: "As a grad student, I sat for a week in the Lilly Library at Indiana University poring over Gordon Lish's papers, after exactly what Tess Gallagher is/was/will be forever after—to expose Lish as the man behind the curtain and Caver as an unsullied genius. I read hardly anything in grad school but Carver and Faulkner (I know) and read anything I could get my hands on looking for the holy grail that is Authorial Intent. As I went through the Lish papers, reading manuscript copies of "The Bath"/"A Small, Good Thing" (where in the first Lish-edited version you don't know if Scotty dies and where in the second Carver reinstated the ending) I found lots of black ink, and a good 2000+ plus words of scenes and dialogue that didn't make it into any published draft I saw, but that significantly changed the story."

You know how all Raymond Carver's short stories are like, "We sat in the kitchen. It was raining. I poured another scotch. I drank it. She sat on the chair, drinking. We drank together a while"? Apparently they weren't always so minimalist. In fact, according to Raymond's widow Tess Gallagher, they were downright "expansive" before his editor Gordon Lish got hold of them, radically cutting them and in some instances changing their titles and endings. And in a recently-unearthed letter, Raymond seems to plead for Gordon to stop publication of the altered book. So Tess wants to bring out an alternate edition of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" that contains the unedited stories. Is this a terrible, terrible idea?

This afternoon I had the pleasure of going on former HarperCollins imprint-haver and If I Did It-making-happener Judith Regan's Sirius radio show. She's fun! By which I mean, she didn't hit me! And she confirmed that she couldn't stand the HarperCollins HR department. And also? She looks like a million bucks. She really does. (She is 54.) I didn't have time to ask her for beauty tips (we were too busy talking about how poorly I was dressed and why I want to defame people all the time and of course our book) but the internet provides some answers. I had thought perhaps it was a deal with Satan! But instead: It's coffee enemas with Howard Stern co-host Robin Quivers!

So the womyn of Jezebel and our new cougar pal Erica Jong were very thrilled that feminist author Doris Lessing got the Nobel Prize for literature, but we were sort of less than thrilled and felt like the choice reeked of affirmative action girl style now. (We think Doris felt much the same!) Seriously, ladies (and mens!): have you read 'The Golden Notebook'? Really? While awake?

"You know you love me," Cecily von Ziegesar signs her Amazon review of her own latest book, the Gossip Girls series prequel It Had To Be You. And you know what? We kinda do, because Cecily has had the balls to risk biting the hand that feeds her by calling her publisher out on doing what sounds like a really incompetent job of publishing her book.