A Holiday Window That's Pretty Much Done (and Very Much Swell), Plus Fake Blog Comments That Mimic Authenticity, But Are Still Seemingly Posted From People Who Don't Speak English as a First Language.

1. We have a Christmas window. Soon it will have books in it and I will take the picture at dusk, when you don't see a reflection of me taking the picture!

2. Stacie and I were talking about the new generation of spammy comments on blogs. It used to be that the comments were pretty much nonsense. The next phase were vaguely on the topic at hand. But now the comments coming in often try to refer to a particular book in the post. I received one this morning on our bestseller roundup that included Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus.

The problem was that this wasn't really a post about The Night Circus, the way the comment indicated. And the comment acted as if The Night Circus had either not quite come out yet or was just releasing. Hey, why not just print the comment?

"This is one of the most anticipated books of the year- its author received a pretty massive advance from Doubleday and the rights to the movie adaptation have already been purchased by the makers of Twilight (EEK). I generally am wary of hype and am nearly always wary of novels about the circus. But the cover on this one was too great to resist!"

The giveaway is that the poster's name links to a website that is about wealthbuilding. Another one I got was for a multi-level marketing site. Stacie thought that if I did a search on the comment, I'd find it on several other sites, probably originally lifted from one of our website competitors. So, alas, much as I love getting real comments, I don't actually post the fake ones.

That said, we also love The Night Circus, as well as its cover. Though one of my booksellers said she prefered the jacket on the advance copy.