Dissection of The Friday Project

Via Ian Hocking at This Writing Life.

Scott Pack, publisher of the Friday Project, writes in the Bookseller about the demise of the company.

"I could fill this column with a list of contributing factors, but the truth is that if we had sold more books and produced them more cost-effectively,­ then the business wouldn’t have gone under. Mistakes were made. These have proved extremely costly to both people within the business and, more importantly, to those outside it with a vested financial interest. When a company goes bust, creditors are often left out of pocket. That is certainly the case with TFP, but there is also the added weight of shareholders losing their investments and a number of authors now having no home for their books."

In the same issue, the Bookseller tells the fuller story of the Friday Project from an independent perspective.

"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. 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.” "

Of the titles published, losers included Out of the Tunnel by Rachel North, "a summer title it [TFP] had projected sales of more than 30,000 for, tanked, selling only 5,000 copies" and Caroline Smailes’s In Search of Adam (it has sold 1,333 copies since publication in March). These and other titles are compared with "blog-to-book" Anya Peters's Abandoned, selling over 150,000 copies, published by Michael Joseph. Various people are quoted as stating that TFP's problem was publishing "frozen blogs" between covers, rather than developing the "neverending story" of the blog into the "narrative arc" necessary for a book.

What now? From the Bookseller: "After much wrangling—and internet anguish—HarperCollins ended up acquiring, for a “nominal sum”, certain assets of TFP out of administration: 30 author contracts....; the website; the brand; the goodwill...; and the continued employment of [publishing director Clare Christian], Scott Pack and managing editor Heather Smith."

Comments

[Henry Gee]

Oooh, you've gone all pink. Will you be reviewing chick lit from now on?

[maxine]

It's supposed to be purple, Henry! You can never tell what these colours are going to look like in everyone's browsers. I prefer the blue but Typepad say there is a bug in it, so it's purple until they fix it....