It’s All Their Fault

Last year The Friday Project published The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas and enlisted the 350,000 followers of the 42 contributors to help define the content and shout about it to their friends. The result was that on the hottest day of the year, two months before publication, it jumped into the Amazon Top Ten bestseller’s list. This year we decided to take the reader’s involvement in a book’s publication a step further. What would happen if we asked people to contribute to a book of their own?

An election will be called next week, and one of the most contentious issues is the mess that the Baby Boomer generation has left for the Facebook generation of First Times voters, as pointed out by everyone from India Knight to Jeremy Paxman. Into this perfect storm The Friday Project are publishing It’s All Their Fault: A Manifesto http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8593210.stm.

This is a terrible time to be young. Every baby in the UK is born owing £22,500, a share of the £1.4 trillion credit crunch bail out. The average student graduates £20,000 in debt. The prospect of paying off that debt and saving for a deposit for a one bedroom flat is remote, and it is all the fault of our parents. Anyone under the age of 35 is living in the shadow of the Baby Boomer Generation who grew up in an era of rapidly growing prosperity, drew wages from jobs for life, got their education for free, and bought multiple cars and TVs that they didn’t need. There are roughly 650 days left until the Boomer time bomb goes off and they reach retirement, cease to pay taxes and start drawing pensions. We can not stop the bomb, or undo the debt, but we can remove the Boomer politicians from office. It’s All Their Fault provides all the tools needed to kick them out of power. David Willetts MP has picked up on it already in The Pinch, but at £18.99 it will hardly be top priority to debt-saddled students.

The first edition of It’s All Their Fault will be published the minute that election is called and will be launched with Vice Magazine online and Don’t Panic Media, who have a combined reach of nearly a million target market readers. At www.itsalltheirfault.com readers will be able to read the entire text for free, and download, for free, a sample chapter to share with their friends. They will also be able to buy a print on demand edition for £4.99 or the eBook for £3.99 which will be the first eBook in the UK to feature author-curated hyperlinks to videos, audio clips and other multi-media content.

They will find details of every single MP and PPC from the three major parties – including their age – and will be invited to email a letter to them raising their concerns. Readers will then be invited to add their own comments, respond to the manifesto’s agenda and the best of these comments will be added to a second edition of It’s All Their Fault that will be published the moment the election result is announced. This will be truly a manifesto written by the people, for the people.

Publishers have talked for a while of bringing authors and readers closer together – but what about turning your readers into your authors, and make them integral to content creation? The Atheist Christmas campaign showed the people want to get involved and with the election the audience and the technology are ripe for the picking. Log on to www.itsalltheirfault.com to see what happens when the reader takes control.