I admit to Googling my own books from time to time. (I know, I know! You’ll go blind if you don’t stop doing that!) Since I haven’t yet seen any royalties (or reviews) yet for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I searched for it. Google now has a page topper, generated by AI, I suspect, that goes across specific searches such as for a person who’s got some internet presence, or a book. Not all books get such a banner, however; yes, I’ve looked. My Sleepy Hollow book, however, pulled up a page topper. It was still a work in progress, however. By the way, I did this search with results not personalized; Google knows people like to see themselves topping a page. So here’s what I saw:
Okay, so they got a number of things right. This is the correct book and the description seems correct. The publication date is right and I did indeed write Weathering the Psalms (still my best selling book). But what’s going on with Wal-Mart? They have the title correct but that picture? Although I watch a lot of movies, I’m pretty sure this one has nothing to do with Sleepy Hollow. What I tried to do in that book was find every extant movie on the story and watch them. It is possible I missed some (the internet isn’t built to give that kind of comprehensive information, which is why human authors are still necessary). Besides, AI has hallucinations, and this seems to be one of them right here. It couldn’t find a copy of the cover of my book (which appears on the left-hand side, but apparently the right…) so it filled something else in instead.
None of my other books get their own banner/topper on Google, except A Reassessment of Asherah. That isn’t my best selling book, but it is my most consulted. That banner, however, also has mistaken information. It says it was originally published in 2007. The original date as actually 1993. Web-scraping may not help with that. The book, as originally published, didn’t have an ebook, and the information about it largely comes from the second edition, published by Gorgias Press. But then, only humans are concerned with such things. There are no sultry women staring out of one of the topper windows, so the images appear to be correct. That’s one of the funny things about being a human author—you want the information about your books to be right. Of course, I should probably cut down on the Googling of my own books. It’s unseemly.