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3rd December 2008

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The long bad Friday

22.05.08 Alison Flood

You live by the sword, you die by the sword. In The Friday Project’s (TFP) case, the sword was the ­internet—the brave new world that offers almost infinite possibilities, and just as many perils.

Launched in June 2005, TFP began flying its colours as the first mainstream publisher to truly tackle the web. It aimed to produce books inspired by popular websites, and promised to thoroughly engage with the internet community.

Taking content from such sites as “London by London” and Tom Reynolds’ blog about life in an ambulance, TFP intended to “truly put the internet at the heart of our publishing strategy”, as publishing director Clare Christian said at the time. Editor-in-chief Paul Carr was more bolshy. “We may crash and burn, but it will be because we screwed up,” he declared. “And if we make millions, then it’s our success.”

It was screw up rather than success. In March, TFP went under, prompting an unprecedented storm of online vitriol from the very community it had courted.

“Self-deception when you are in a financial hole is as bad as when you are in the grip of an addiction,” wrote author and blogger Susan Hill. Vanessa Robertson at Fidra Books blogged: “As they disappear in a whirlwind of debt, The Friday Project has been shown to be no more than spin and self-promotion, masking the fact that although they had some great books on their list, they had no idea of how to run a business.”

So what went wrong? “Mismanagement in a lot of ways, bad luck I’m sure, and books not doing as well as we’d thought,” says a decidedly shaken-looking Christian. “We spent too much money on promoting ­ourselves.”

Carr, in his up­coming memoir Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore (Weidenfeld, July), has many a tale about the excesses of TFP. He writes about hiring an entire floor of Soho House to launch The Holy Moly! Rules of Modern Life, and drinking a champagne bar dry at TFP’s Christmas party a few months later.

TFP got off the ground with £100,000 seed capital from Quercus chair Anthony Cheetham and his wife (agent Georgina Capel), a DTI loan of £100,000, £50,000 from Christian and Carr’s parents, and £51,000 from Christian herself. By May 2006, it had raised a further £520,000, ­giving it the impetus to grow extremely rapidly; by the time TFP went under, it had 70-odd titles on its backlist, with 60 more in the pipeline. As late as July 2007, Christian was adamant that she “never wanted TFP to be another small independent, growing organically over years and years, and the area in which we are publishing made it even more critical to grow rapidly”.

Books that have done well for the independent publisher include Tom Reynolds’ book of his blog Blood, Sweat & Tea: Real-Life Adventures in an Inner-City Ambulance, which has sold 19,796 copies through Nielsen BookScan to date; The Bumper B3ta Book of Sick Jokes (31,095); and the aforementioned The Holy Moly! Rules of Modern Life (11,252).

Seconds out, round two

By February 2007, TFP began a ­second round of fundraising, aiming for £620,000. Then, Out of the Tunnel by Rachel North, a summer title it had projected sales of more than 30,000 for, underperformed, selling only 5,000 copies. Fundraising, scheduled to complete by the end of June, was delayed by a further two months. The main backers also decided at the last minute to withhold £150,000, dependent on future performance.

Christian knew TFP had to have a good Christmas 2007 to pull itself out of deepening debt; the company made a loss of more than £700,000 in 2006 on turnover of around £350,000.

The decision was taken to print Christmas titles in large numbers, as TFP would have no time to reprint to demand, and believed it had a strong line-up. Christian stresses that the decision was taken by TFP’s board of directors, not just her. A letter to creditors states: “This was a calculated risk which would give the company an opportunity to generate sufficient revenue over the Christmas period to continue trading into and through 2008.”

Christian says it became apparent that TFP would not meet its Christmas targets, “and we had to take drastic action”. MediaFund, a publishing mergers and acquisitions brokerage, was appointed to ­handle a sale to another publisher, “but the business was too big”, Christian says. “We’d already published 65–70 books, with 60 on our forward list—it was a big financial commitment.” No purchaser was interested in the list in its entirety, so TFP ceased to trade on 26th February, with an administrator appointed. Pack puts his side of the story in his blog, here.

According to documents at Companies House, the blogs-to-books publisher owes a total of £1.79m, with creditors including Anthony Cheetham (£60,000), Midas PR (£13,234) and Snowbooks (£5,088).

After much wrangling—and internet anguish—HarperCollins ended up acquiring, for a “nominal sum”, certain assets of TFP out of administration: 30 author contracts (10–12 backlist, the rest frontlist, Christian says); the website; the brand; the goodwill (Christian gives a wry smile); and the continued employment of herself, Scott Pack and managing editor Heather Smith.

A sustainable model?

The book trade continues to speculate about the downfall of the pub­lisher which was for so long its darling (Christian won young publisher of the year at the Nibbies in 2007; The Bookseller tipped TFP as a start-up to watch in 2006). Was it the business model itself that was flawed?

The blogs-to-books (“blooks”) genre is a relatively young one, with publishers still feeling their way into what works and what doesn’t. High-profile deals for bloggers hit the headlines regularly. Agent Patrick Walsh of Conville and Walsh is often involved—he wrapped up a six-figure deal with Michael Joseph in December for Single Mother on the Verge.

Walsh has also just struck a deal with Virgin for Charlotte Moerman, who blogs at www.raisingkids.co.uk, and will offer to publishers a book from blogger and Daily Telegraph columnist Dulwich Mum in the next two weeks. “It’s very early days for these blogs to books. I certainly haven’t worked out, and publishers haven’t worked out, what the market is. I guess it is people who buy fiction in paperback in W H Smith and Waterstone’s who would buy these books—which tend to be non-fiction—as if they’re fiction.”

Walsh—who also agents queen of the blooks Belle de Jour—believes that for a blook to work, it has to offer more than is freely available on the web. “I feel that that is where TFP possibly went wrong. They seemed to basically slip covers on a website, whereas you want more.”

Literary agent Simon Trewin of United Agents, who struck a six-figure deal for “Petite Anglaise” blogger Catherine Sanderson with Penguin, agrees. “I felt that with too many of TFP’s books, what they’d done was taken the blog and ­printed it out, put it between two covers and sold it—nothing else other than that.”

He points to “London by London”, a blog he enjoyed. “I got the book but thought it was like a frozen moment in the time of the blog. You want a book to be a living, breathing object with its own integrity—this was like looking at holiday photos when what you wanted was to be on holiday.”

With Petite Anglaise, Trewin and Sanderson used the blog as the basis for a book, rather than just reprinting the blog’s best bits. Trewin says: “We could have gone down the route of just taking a lot of extracts from the blog, but we felt the thing to do was to think what kind of book to write. I think of a blog as a never-ending story, with no narrative arc—what you need for a book is a beginning, middle and end.”

Despite this, and the raft of pub­licity Petite Anglaise received, it has only sold 3,868 copies since publication in February as a £12.99 hardback. The wrong format? Not necessarily: Anya Peters’ misery memoir blook Abandoned: The True Story of a Little Girl Who Didn’t Belong has sold more than 150,000 copies since publication last May, despite being published as a £12.99 hardback.

“We ummed and ahhed long and hard about doing it in hardback,” says Michael Joseph m.d. Louise Moore. “On the strength of the PR we got—which was wonderful—we thought it would work, but we ­realised that the hardback market is tough.”

A paperback reinvention next January will be “big”, Moore promises. “We possibly should have done it in paperback originally,” she says, adding that Single Mother on the Verge will be a paperback original when it is published in 2009.

Sex and war

Just as in any category of publishing, there are blooks that have worked and those that haven’t. Non-fiction appears to work best, with sex memoirs (Belle de Jour, and Girl with a One Track Mind’s 135,000-odd sales) and military accounts (the first being Salam Pax’s The Baghdad Blog, published in 2003 and with more than 8,000 sales) doing particularly well.

Fiction from blogs has been less obvious; Gollancz discovered fantasy author Scott Lynch through his blog, where he was posting extracts from The Lies of Locke Lamora, and swooped on world rights; TFP published Caroline Smailes’ In Search of Adam in March (it has sold 1,333 copies to date).

“It has to do with the fact that personal blogs have been autobiographical, getting something off your chest,” Walsh says. “Fiction blogs don’t work as well, so books developed out of them have tended to be non-fiction, but I’m sure that will change.”

Independent publisher Marion Boyars has published two titles from blogs—Baghdad Burning by the anonymous blogger Riverbend, which details her life in Baghdad and was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and Chocolate & ­Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier. Publisher Catheryn Kilgarriff says sales of each top 30,000 around the world; in the UK, sales of Baghdad Burning are around 10,000 copies.

Kilgarriff believes the key to their success is the fact that if she had come across either in manuscript form, she would have been inter­ested. “And I can categorically say that having an internet presence provided a market for their books, even if, as in the case of Riverbend, the book is identical to the material on the internet available for free. A book is something portable, comforting, even when not being read, and something to treasure. Thankfully, the book form has been enhanced, rather­ than replaced, by the internet.”

The success of Belle de Jour, Anya Peters and others was perhaps more down to the publicity they received than the instant audience a blog provides; Belle won a Guardian award for her blog, prompting a flurry of interest in it and in her identity, while Peters’ story of child abuse had ob­vious appeal for the misery memoir market. But it has meant that a horde of bloggers believe a book deal is in their sights, egged on by the plethora of “tutorials” and “mini-courses” online.

Trewin says: “Some people start a blog, and in two weeks say: ‘Where’s my book deal?’ We can all sniff out those types—people who are setting up a blog merely to get a book deal. You’ve got to go in with a healthy degree of cynicism.” He does hail the new route to publication the blog provides, however: “These days there are lots of different routes to entry, not like the old days when all you could do was send in your manuscript.” The publisher’s job—just as it is with a slush pile—is to sort through the dross to find the gold.

The rebirth of TFP

Back at TFP, the first book from within its new home in HC’s literary wing Press Books will be Nasim Marie Jafry’s fictionalised account of suffering from ME, The State of Me, due in July.

Christian also has plans for “creative development”: “There are ideas I’ve had that we’ve never had a chance to do . . . I’ve been spread so thin.” These include making author pages on TFP’s website wikis, so that authors and readers will be able to add and change information. “Maybe people could upload ­videos of themselves reading the book, and win ­copies,” she says, acknowledging that with the bad name TFP currently has online—and the ­barrage of anony­mous aggression it has received—people might have to register to be able to do this.

The rescue by HC has prompted a fresh wave of online bitterness, with authors and creditors asking why, when they haven’t been paid, the directors of TFP should end up safe and sound at HC.

Christian insists that it would have been easier for her to wash her hands of the affair and walk away; that the HC deal means that some of TFP’s authors still have a publisher; and that those who continue to trade with it will be paid for the work they have done.

“Every single decision I’ve made was done to result in the best outcome for as many people as possible,” she says.

Media Flagship Feature Scott Pack The Friday Project Home Clare Christian Alison Flood