Gotham Books announced the acquisition of the book, titled Behind the Bell, last summer. It was going to be salacious! The deal memo promised "sexual escapades among cast members, drug use, and hardcore partying." Thanks to Mr. Weisfeld's handiwork, Mr. Diamond was paid a healthy advance in the low six figures. 

The book first hit a snag when Mr. Diamond's ghostwriter, Alan Goldsher, was taken off the project for what Mr. Weisfeld described obliquely as "scheduling issues." But he was replaced, and eventually a manuscript of sorts was completed. 

What happened next is a matter of some dispute. According to a well-placed source, the manuscrupt Mr. Diamond and his ghost handed in was deemed unpublishable by Gotham editor Patrick Mulligan, partly because it contained many assertions about cast members from Saved by the Bell that Gotham felt were unverifiable.  

"That's 100 percent bogus," Mr. Weisfeld said today, stressing that the decision to drop the book from Gotham was a mutual one. 

"It wasn't the right home for the book," Mr. Weisfeld said. "Sometimes people don't gel. There were no problems whatsoever—just, things didn't gel. If things don't gel, you stop and move on. I love Gotham Books and Penguin, and Patrick Mulligan is a great editor. I look forward to selling them books in the future. This one just wasn't meant to be."

O.K.! 

Bill Shinker, the publisher of Gotham, would not go into any detail on his Screech experience. "It just didn't fit our publishing program," he said. 

Fans of Mr. Diamond need not fret, however, as his book will see the light of day despite Gotham's reluctance to play a role in its publication. Mr. Weisfeld announced today that the book has found a home with a small Montreal-based operation called Transit Publishing, which publishes another one of Mr. Weisfeld's clients, the celebrity scribe Ian Halperin.

Transit hit it big recently with Mr. Halperin's fortuitously timed Michael Jackson book, which was in the process of being printed when Jackson died last month. Mr. Weisfeld and Transit chief Pierre Targin—whose previous publishing venture reportedly ended in bankruptcy in 2005—arranged to stop the presses and instead sell the rights to Mr. Halperin's book to Simon & Schuster. The book, renamed Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson, was rushed into stores earlier this month through the S&S's pop culture imprint Simon Spotlight, and landed at number one on this week's New York Times best-seller list. 

Transit will publish Dustin Diamond's book on Sept. 29. "This book is freaking incredible!" Mr. Weisfeld said. "Everyone that reads it loves it, and [it] is truly one of my favorites of all time." 

'Twas a time when a book deal born of a blog was surprising (remember Julie and Julia?). These days it seems more and more like people start goofy Web sites practically counting on seeing their stuff between two covers.

Anyone who has followed the sales of these types of projects in recent months—the latest was “Look At This Fucking Hipster,” which was sold to St. Martin’s Press last week—will not be surprised to learn that the editor who acquired “Texts” for Gotham is Patrick Mulligan, one of the earliest and most consistent champions of the form. Over the past two years, Mr. Mulligan has signed up books based on Web sites such as Chuck Norris Facts, I Can Haz Cheezburger, Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle and, most recently, GraphJam.com.

“Not all websites make great books,” Mr. Mulligan said in an email. “You have to be confident that you can curate the material in such a way that it still hits its audience while also taking advantage of the book medium. For the books that I've worked on… my aim is that the person in the bookstore who picks up a copy will fall in love with the material the same way as someone who stumbles onto the website.”
 
The “Texts From Last Night” book, compiled by a pair of friends from Detroit named Benjamin Bator and Lauren Leto, was agented by William Morris Endeavor’s Erin Malone, who is also no stranger to this cottage industry. Ms. Malone previously struck gold when she got six figures from Random House back in March for a book based on “Stuff White People Like,” which wound up spending weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

Though Ms. Malone has sold several other blog-based books (among them We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion and 1,000 Awesome Things), she refuses to think of them as being part of a distinct category based on where their source material comes from.

“I don’t like to look at these books as ‘blog books,’” Ms. Malone said in an email. “I consider projects based on websites in the same way I consider any other book idea, which is: do I think it will make a great book? And if I do, I go from there.”

She indicated that one reason there have been so many books sold in recent months on the strength of blogs is that the Internet allows anyone who has an idea an easy way to test it out. “And so I do think that’s where we will continue to see more books come from,” she said. “Down the line I imagine it will become as accepted a starting point as anything else.”

According to Ms. Malone, "Texts" will be published as a trade paperback original early next year.