The Friday Project…from the other side

It was inevitable that when The Friday Project became part of HarperCollins, there would be much hand-wringing in the trade, as well as both negative and positive comments from those who stood to lose most from it, but, from the perspective of one on the inside of the behemoth that is a large corporate publisher, I wanted to offer a different take on what it might mean, and represent, both for us and for the small company that has just become part of our operation.

The Friday Project is tiny compared to some lists in a company of this size, an imprint amongst dozens now, and perhaps as one person commenting points out we, in-house, and the staff of The FP believe that, like the TARDIS, they can be bigger on the inside than on the outside. But I think this is much bigger than adding a few books and staff to our lists. It raises the sort of questions that the likes of other book-bloggers are asking all over the net, and have been for a while: how can publishers, in a notoriously slow-to-market business, with massive overheads and tiny margins, make the most of the exponential changes offered by the internet? How can we find the best writers and help them reach their readers as efficiently, as profitably and as successfully, as possible? How can we mimic the success of the music business, and find new talent, and new ways of distributing that talent, worldwide?

The Friday Project has, as far as I’m concerned, been trying to do just that, discovering writers in non-traditional ways, in ways that are much more akin to the way new generations are discovering them, via blogs, websites and social networking sites. From inside the very traditional iron gates that adorn our offices, where advances and agents generally still rule our acquisition process, that is a challenging, disturbing and yet refreshing approach.

It questions how we publish on every level. Why do we usually pay advances, sometimes unearnable ones? Why pay so much for a book that it creates a publicity splash but also a backlash if the book doesn’t work (the inevitable ‘ner-ner-ner’ that follows the failure of a high-profile and expensive purchase) and prevents us buying the next one, because the unearned is so huge? Why do we often publish into hardback first, even when the writer is unknown and many consumers will wait for the paperback, or forget and move onto another, available in paperback now, title? Why do we still distribute our titles primordially through shop retailers, rather than our own online channels?

The Friday Project hasn’t answered all these questions for itself, but it was, and is, actively asking them. And being so much smaller, it can try out possibilities faster than a larger corporate. Because publishing is an incredibly slow machine, with what I sometimes think are far too many cooks. Writer friends are always asking me why it takes so long from the delivery of a manuscript to its publication and sometimes when I try to explain that process, I ask myself the same question. Some of the answer comes from the fact that, by the mere fact of working in such a large company, a lot of different departments have a say and a stake, mostly, but not always, for good reason. We also have systems that were developed in the past, and need moving into the future. The Friday Project will gain TARDIS-scale from us, but I’m hoping that we’ll gain from learning how a smaller company operates, how it produces books on time with fewer people, digitally and with shorter lead-times.

In some ways the arrival of the likes of the Friday Project in the publishing trade is reminiscent of the rapid development of internet business models in the late 90s. Cities like Cambridge in the UK and San Francisco in the States were full of start-ups and every venture capitalist with money to spare was throwing money at them, determined to be part of the revolution, even if the business plan consisted of nothing more than an attractive website.

Few of those initial businesses survived: Amazon did but who remembers BOL now? Many of those eager vc’s lost thousands. But that insane period of development gave us the internet sites and companies that do work, sites that have changed the way we consume everything, from food to news, the ones where the business model was not just based on a dazzling website with no idea how to make money from it.

The Friday Project was, is, a pioneer, an attempt to re-shape a publishing model that desperately needs it. Yes it hasn’t worked, yet. And although it may be the first and most high-profile publishing company to suffer for trying something new, it won’t be the last. The new models that spring up outside the established and slow-moving infrastructures that most publishing houses inhabit, will eventually be at our gates, not behind them. Those who learn from and embrace different models, and the possibilities of change that they suggest, may still be here in twenty years. Those who don’t, well, they will go the way of the written letter, into history.