Scalzi's route to fame was quirky. His AOL columns got him a huge online following (as well as getting him into stuff like the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader -- when I was working on that, my boss stumbled across some of Scalzi's humorous essays online and said "We have to buy this guy's stuff, it's good" -- so I can honestly say that I have edited Scalzi's nonfiction). He wrote an SF novel (Agent to the Stars) just to see if he could and put it on his website; it got so many hits that it got publishers interested in him. All this was long before the glory that was Bacon Cat.