Peter Cox’s Blog

The Friday Project has been much in the news of late. Apart from having a major talent for self-publicity, it’s founders, Paul Carr and Clare Christian, also blog to an astonishing extent (as does their Commercial Director, Scott Pack). I wish they would tell me their secret: how do they find time to blog? Especially in a start-up company, where there’s never enough time to do all the important stuff. Or maybe blogging is the important stuff. Anyway, I wish they’d share their time management secrets with the rest of us time-poor stresshounds.

Paul Carr is a new-media whiz, which means he can see the future of the internet and net-related thingummies more clearly than most other people. Paul’s blog features his opinions about the wide world of publishing; such as this little gem, that hilariously begins “Seriously just fuck right off…” I don’t know how he comes us with stuff like that, it’s a killer. By the time I got to “Oh fuck off, you grubby money-grabbing bitch”, I’d wet myself multiple times. It’s a hoot.

Anyway, apart from high-octane blogging, The Friday Project (TFP) says that they are “the only publisher to specialise in bringing together the worlds of publishing and new media”. In other words, they look for websites to turn into books.

Now, this begins to worry me. Websites are websites, and books are books, and sometimes one crosses over and becomes the other, but mostly, they don’t. For perfectly good and understandable reasons.

I’m also a bit concerned by TFP’s claim to uniqueness. I can think of at least one other company, Rudius Media, who seem to be operating in the same ballpark. Rudius have already had a NYT bestseller in the unlovable persona of Tucker Max, who engagingly introduces his own website by all-too-correctly stating “I am an asshole.”

In bloggum veritas.

But back to TFP. “Such has been the Company’s impact”, they state in their prospectus, “that authors are keen to sign up with it and accept small advances even when major, traditional publishers have offered them significantly better terms.” Well, this certainly isn’t music to my agent’s ears. But perhaps I’m just being boring and old-media.

“There is a vast amount of innovative content available on the web”, says TFP, “much of it ideally suited for development into books.” I don’t know – I just don’t know. Maybe there is. Maybe I’m visiting all the wrong websites. Or maybe I simply don’t know how to turn websites into commercial books.

I suspect that’s probably what TFP think.

But they’re very tactful about it. Instead of saying “you are old media and you don’t know your escape key from your alt key” or something equally withering, they diplomatically put it down to “the considerable cultural differences between the Internet community and the publishing world”. I deeply appreciate their forbearance.

Maybe TFP will see books where legions of other editors couldn’t – and I wish them luck in their desire to “become a strong acquisition target within the next three to five years”.

I’ve been on the internet for such a long time now that I seem to have heard those words before somewhere…