Add a new holiday to your calendar: Phil and Kaja Foglio, creators of the long-running webcomic Girl Genius, have dubbed Jan. 12 Girl Genius Day. "We're hoping you'll do something suitably mad and/or steampunkalicious for the occasion," they write at their site. In particular, they are hoping you will buy a copy of Agatha H and the Airship City: A Girl Genius Novel, which is based on the comic and officially went on sale yesterday. The idea is to give the book a boost in the Amazon ranking, a la Machine of Death, and hopefully bring it to the attention of booksellers.

In fact, the Night Shade Books site already shows the print version as "sold out," but that turns out to be a good thing, as Phil found out when he asked:

Everybody thinks this book is going to do well, so everybody "ordered heavy", so they'll have a lot of books ready to meet demand. Great. Now there's performance anxiety. And the publisher is still sold out, but they fully expect that they will have to reprint. The question is when. Thus they are now waiting to see how quickly the shops and wholesalers "sell through' on the books they have in stock.

There are also two e-book editions, and this is where it gets a bit sticky. The Kindle version is $7.99, but you can also buy a DRM-free e-book edition from Webscription for $6. Obviously these sales won't count in the Amazon rankings, though, so fans might want to consider whether it's worth spending an extra two bucks to help give the Foglios that boost. If it helps, today is Kaja's birthday as well, and if you're in Seattle, you can wish her well in person, as the Foglios will be doing a book signing at Ravenna Third Place Books.