New site captures authors' identities and won't let go

Without permission or advance notice, FiledByAuthor has cataloged the information of about 1.8 million authors into individual pages. There are biographies, photos, links to purchase books from online retailers and links to share the author's FiledBy page through a dizzying list of social networking sites. And everyone is there, from the novice self-published author to Stephenie Meyer.

In fact, Stephenie "Twilight" Meyer is the site's most-viewed author. But while this might appear to be a tacit endorsement, Meyer has nothing to do with the site.

After FiledByAuthor creates these Web pages, it then "invites" authors to "claim" their free pages. For a fee -- $99 or $399 per year -- an author can raise their membership level to "verified." This allows an author to gain more control over his or her page, being able to do things like add more than two links, use a blog tool, manage a calendar.