At the beginning of 2005 I had honestly believed that I was happy, that I was proceeding nicely towards my goal of being famous and successful and rich. But in the weeks after my trip to south London I became more and more anxious; aware that, for all the fun I was having writing about people like Michael – and now seeing my words appear on their business cards – something was missing from my life.
Fame, say.
Or success.
Or wealth.
Or the likely prospect of achieving any of the above soon. I’m wasn’t entirely sure when I’d sleepwalked over the line, but while being a published author and newspaper columnist writing about the troubled dot com industry made me the envy of my friends at twenty-three, it was starting to mark me out as a bit of a loser at twenty-five. The money I was being paid by the Guardian was barely enough to cover my rent, and the royalty statements from the books I’d written since my initial eight showed that I owed Prentice Hall approximately £3, 000 in unearned advances.
And, to make matters worse, the Schadenfreude I ‘d once felt writing about struggling dot commers and their attempts to steer their rickety old ships through the murky post-bomb seas of opportunity was fast wearing off. Perplex City might have been the first new company that made me feel jealous but I knew it wouldn’t be the last.
There ’s no doubt about it, the industry was recovering – proper, stable businesses were being built and people who six months before had been struggling to break even were now starting to get more money from investors and even buyout offers from big media companies. The less Schaden they experienced, the less freude I felt. My jealousy was moving from mild, to strong, to intense to seething.
3.1
There was no single epiphany moment – no episode with me reading about a guy whose company had just been bought by Yahoo! for half a billion dollars that made me throw my laptop to the floor and shout ‘enough!’ before furiously starting to scribble the business plan that would make my fortune.
It would make a neat story if there was, but that ’s not how it happened.
How it did happen was that I had yet another conversation with Clare Christian about how bored and broke I was. It was a conversation we’d had many times before, and Clare always found a way to remind me that, actually, on balance, things were pretty great. This time, though, she was just back from another bout of maternity leave (seriously – for a woman with two children, she seemed to have been pregnant continuously for about five years) and was talking about how she wanted to spend more time at home with her children. The publishing house she was working for had been very accommodating – allowing her to split her time between home-working and the office – but the arrangement was far from perfect.
After both of us saying how we weren’t entirely happy with our lot, for different reasons, we moved on to another subject we’d talked about a thousand times before: how we really should get round to pitching our London by London book idea to a publisher.
London by London was the sister publication to The Friday Thing and was a weekly ezine for people who lived in the capital. It had a simple format: every week people would email in their questions about the city, and we’d publish the best of them. Subscribers – there were about 15, 000 – would be encouraged to provide answers to the questions and those answers would be published the following week, along with a new batch of questions. Simple.
Over the years, we’d built up a vast archive of questions and answers – ranging from the genuinely useful (‘where can I hire a cinema for my birthday party?’) to the utterly fucked up (one subscriber tried to recruit other readers to take part in the ‘perfect’ heist). As a publisher, Clare was certain that London by London ’s huge archive would make a brilliant guidebook but we were struggling to get publishers to agree. Or at least they did agree, but only if we did it on their terms. A typical meeting would go like this:
Us: ‘We have a successful email magazine with 15, 000 subscribers, three years of archive material and between us we have years of experience in writing, editing and publishing. We’d like to make a book.’
Big publisher: ‘We love it! We absolutely love it. We definitely want to do this.’
Us: ‘That’s great – and the best thing about it is that there’s an existing audience for it. You don’t need to change a thing.’
Big publisher: ‘Exactly! And we wouldn’t want to change anything. If it ain’t broke, right?’
Us: ‘Exactly!’
Big publisher: ‘Okay, we’ll just need to run it by some of the people in marketing and see what they think. Can we get back to you next week?’
Us: ‘Sure, we look forward to hearing what they say.’
We’d walk away elated, certain that this time – this time – we’d found someone who loved the quirkiness of London by London, and its bizarre question and answer format as much as we did. And then the same follow-up call would come:
Big publisher: ‘Good news! Marketing absolutely loved the book. Loved it. We’re really keen to do this.’
Us: ‘Excellent.’
Big publisher: ‘There’s just one thing. We’re not sure about the format. We know it works really well on the Internet, but if it’s going to work as a book, we need to position it next to the other travel guides.’
Us: ‘But it’s not really a travel guide. If anything, it’s like a travel guide for people who already live here.’
Big publisher: ‘Oh, no, we absolutely get that, but we just think it would sell more if it took some cues from other titles on the market.’
Us: ‘For instance?’
Big publisher: ‘How wedded are you to the Q&A format?’
* Click *
It was insane. How could these people not see how something with a decent-sized fan base on the Internet could really easily translate into a book? And how did they think that abandoning the big gimmick that made London by London unique – the fact that they were questions and answers provided by real Londoners – could possibly be a good idea? The answer, it soon became clear, is that the publishing industry at that time was scared shitless of the web. The Internet to them was this strange, mystical place where rules of popularity were different, where quirkiness was the order of the day. If something was going to make the transition from the web to books, it was first going to have to be made safe: wedged into an existing publishing format that didn’t freak out the sales teams whose job it was to convince the likes of Waterstone’s and Borders to stock it. The web was something that needed to be tamed, not understood.
We hit one brick wall after another.
I don’t know whether it was having one meeting too many, or Clare’s desire to spend more time with her family, or my jealousy over my friends starting to get successful again – probably a combination of all of those things – but in any case we made our minds up.
Like so many entrepreneurs have done, before and since.
Fuck it.
Let’s do the show right here.
3.2
Juggling our day jobs, Clare and I began to write a business plan for a new kind of hybrid Internet and publishing company. One that would specialise in finding the hottest Internet talent and translating it into brilliant books, without losing the unique voice that had made it successful online in the first place.
In tribute to The Friday Thing, the first business Clare and I had collaborated on, we decided to name our news company ‘The Friday Project’.
Our first challenge when writing the business plan was to figure out why big publishing houses were so scared of the web. It wasn’t that there weren’t rich pickings to be had on there. Thanks to the ease with which anyone could post their work online, the Internet had become a veritable pick and mix of brilliant new writers and illustrators (as well as some terrible ones). And yet – with only a few exceptions – every site that traditional publishers tried to turn into a book had ended up – to use a phrase so beloved of the web, sucking ass. We soon learned that our experience with London by London was just one example of what was happening to dozens – perhaps hundreds – of web authors and editors every year.
To be fair to the publishers, though, the Internet writers didn ‘t do themselves many favours either. Most writers who published their work online had never had to be part of the mainstream ’system’- they had become used to being their own editors, and they hated the idea that they would have to adapt their ‘unique’ voice for a mainstream audience. Book publishing also suffers from ridiculous lead times of up to a year between submitting a manuscript (that is, the text of a book) and seeing the finished product on the bookshelves. To a web author used to the instant gratification of online publishing, waiting six hours, let alone six months, to see the fruits of their labours published was ludicrous.
On the strength of our business plan, and a pilot edition of the London by London book that we produced ourselves, we managed to convince Anthony Cheetham, the founder of Orion Publishing, to invest the money we needed to set up the business. He also agreed to become chairman of the company, giving us instant kudos. With Anthony involved, we were able to get a meeting with the CEO of Macmillan, Richard Charkin, who – unbelievably – agreed that Macmillan would handle the sales and distribution for our titles.
Suddenly The Friday Project was in business, and our launch announcement received a flood of publicity. Well, okay, a drizzle: the two major book trade magazines, The Bookseller and Publishing News, ran nice features about this new ‘web-to-print’ publisher, and Internet journalists greeted us with a mixture of excitement and curiosity. The former wondered whether we were web folk trying to move into publishing, while the latter asked themselves whether we were publishers trying to move into the web. In reality, we were both, something that only really the Guardian ’s coverage of our launch seemed to understand. But then it would: I wrote it.
Regardless of whether we were a publishing company using the web, or a web company using print, one thing was certainly clear – my days as a journalist were over. I had crossed over to the dark side. I was an entrepreneur.
3.3
My new career direction brought with it some major bene fits. For the first time in my life I was being paid a proper salary. And a good one at that. Prior to The Friday Project, my monthly income before tax was less than £1, 000 and, with rent of £650 a month, I was only able to live thanks to the sheer volume of parties with free food and drink that my job gave me access to.
My starting salary at The Friday Project was relatively modest by CEO standards but was more than enough to allow me to buy my own dinner. And buying dinner was certainly a concern as my yearlong relationship with Maggie was long finished, and so were my free trips to the capital’s finest restaurants.
There were other perks, too. During one meeting with our accountant it was revealed that, for some accountant reason that escapes me, Clare and I had been underpaid in the months immediately after starting the company. To make everything balance, we’d have to briefly increase our salaries by £10, 000. Barely able to contain our glee, Clare and I went to the pub to celebrate – and afterwards, on my way home, I decided to send her a text message saying ‘Holy fuck! Ten grand.’ Just in case she’d forgotten.
Unfortunately, in my somewhat tipsy excitement, I texted the message to her landline number, where BT’s text-to-voice technology magically translated it into a spoken message on her home answerphone. I can only imagine how traumatic it must have been for Clare’s four-year-old son to check mummy and daddy’s messages the next morning only to hear a demented Dalek voice chanting ‘Ho-lee fock exclamation mark – ten graynd.’ Clare was less than amused.
I laughed my arse off. Even if it was only very temporary, ten fucking grand was ten fucking grand.
Another advantage to the buzz that surrounded the launch of ‘the world’s first web-to-print publishing house’ was that interesting people from other parts of the media started phoning us up. One such call came a few days after our big launch announcement.
I was about to jump on the tube from my new girlfriend’s house into work. It was pouring with rain and I was about half an hour late – but it was an unknown number so I thought I’d better take the call.
‘Hello, ‘ said the unmistakably American voice on the other end of the phone, ‘is this Paul Carr?’
‘Speaking, ‘ I said, walking through the station entrance and heading towards the escalators.
‘This is Alison Benson calling from Pretty Matches Productions. I work with Sarah Jessica Parker here in New York. We’ve seen some of the press you guys have been getting and we’re really keen to talk to you about a possible partnership.’
Soaking wet, late and blocking the way to the escalators, I didn’t really register any of what Alison was saying.
‘That sounds interesting, ‘ I said, ‘but I’m just about to get on a train. Can you call me back in an hour on this number.’
‘Sure, no problem, ‘ said Alison.
‘Thanks, ‘ I said, hanging up.
It was only when I got down to the platform that it hit me. Oh my God. Sarah Jessica fucking Parker’s business partner wants to talk to me. And I just hung up on her. What kind of fucking idiot am I?
I wanted to run off the train to try to call her back, but it was too late. We were already moving. Oh God. What an idiot.
But then another thought hit me. Sarah Jessica Parker’s business partner wanted to talk to me, but I’d told her I was too busy. Isn’t that exactly what they teach you in celebrity school? Be cool. Act like you don’t care. Make them think you’re doing them a favour?
Yeah, right. I spent the entire journey pacing the carriage, willing the train to skip a few stations just so I could get to the surface quicker and call Alison back.
It wasn’t just Pretty Matches that wanted to partner with us. Over the weeks and months that followed The Friday Project’s launch, our phones barely stopped ringing with an amazing variety of offers and potential partnerships. It turned out we’d accidentally launched the company right smack bang in the middle of a feeding frenzy.
3.4
Earlier the same year, Orion had published a book called The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, written by a pseudonymous high-class hooker called ‘Belle de Jour’. The book had been adapted from a blog of the same name and literary London was aflame with debate about whether Belle was really a call girl or just a brilliant hoaxer. Either way, her book was selling like hot cakes and so everyone was looking for the next Belle. And with The Friday Project claiming to have its finger on the pulse of the web, everyone thought we knew where she might be found.
Naturally, we claimed to know exactly who the next hot sex blogger was – but we were keeping the secret to ourselves, unless we received a very good offer. In reality, we didn’t have a fucking clue. We were spending all our waking hours trying to set up a company – the idea of actually commissioning any books still seemed like a distant dream.
Terrified of missing the boat, I quickly wrote an email and sent it to everyone I knew. It read:
‘Help! I need to meet some sex bloggers, pronto. Anyone?’
From all the replies I got back the same two names kept coming up: ‘The Girl With A One-Track Mind’ and ‘Mimi New York’. ‘The Girl’, as she called herself, guarded her anonymity fiercely, to the point that I later discovered that a friend of mine had actually been on a couple of dates with her and she’d refused to tell him even her first name lest he sell his story to the press or otherwise compromise her. All anyone knew was that she lived in north London, was in some way connected with the media industry and enjoyed having lots and lots of sex and writing about it. Emily swore blind it wasn’t her.
Mimi New York wasn’t strictly a sex blogger, even though she did work in the sex trade. Mimi – again, not her real name – was a Welsh twenty-something Cambridge graduate who had moved to New York on a tourist visa and then ‘forgotten’ to leave. Instead she’d arranged a false social security number and, after a brief stint as a waitress in a strip club and realising that there was more money to be made on stage than behind the bar, she became a stripper at Scores, Manhattan’s most prestigious ‘gentleman’s club’ (think Stringfellows, NYC). Her blog, detailing the life of an illegal immigrant pole dancer, had become something of a sensation.
I fired off emails to both The Girl and Mimi using the addresses on their blogs in the hope that The Girl might be up for a meeting in London to discuss book-related things and that Mimi might be planning a trip back to the UK at some point. They both replied within a couple of days, and the good news was that they were keen to meet. But there was a catch. Mimi absolutely positively couldn’t leave New York because otherwise she’d be busted for overstaying her visa and The Girl was currently out of the country. In New York City.
3.5
Passport in one hand and credit card in the other, the next thing I knew I was boarding a plane for my first ever overseas business trip. My flight got in to New York on the morning of 11 September 2005. There were about two dozen people on board, all of them looking decidedly nervous.
I had arranged to meet Mimi in a coffee bar down the road from her club. Obviously as she was anonymous I had no idea what she looked like, so we’d swapped descriptions by email a few days earlier. I found this almost impossibly difficult: describing myself in purely objective terms without sounding either arrogant or pig ugly. ‘Erm… I’m sort of average height, brownish hair… erm… I’ll probably be wearing trainers.’ She, on the other hand, didn’t need to say anything. I was meeting her just before she started work: she’d be the one who looked like a stripper. I suppose the mental image I had in my head was of a dyed-blonde giant of a woman, with enormous fake tits, wearing a thong and perhaps some kind of plumage in her hair. Sitting in a bar, drinking a cocktail with an umbrella.
On walking in, there was no sign of anyone looking even remotely like a stripper. A bored looking barman wiped down his bar while a busboy scooted around trying to look busy. Perhaps Mimi was in the toilet adjusting her feathers or doing coke off the top of the cistern or something. I did a quick lap of the bar but still no sign of anyone stripperish – just the barman, the busboy and a tiny girl in sweatpants sitting in a yoga pose on a sofa in the corner, sipping a coffee.
‘ Hey!’ shouted the yoga girl, seeing me looking around and apparently without appreciating that the cafe was empty and that shouting was completely unnecessary. I turned round, as did everyone else. ‘Are you Paul?’ Her accent sounded as if a Welsh girl and a New Yorker had been in an accident and had been chopped in half and welded back together again, half and half. A linguistic cut and shut.
‘ You must be Mimi, ‘ I said, feeling ashamed of myself for making such tacky assumptions. Turns out strippers don’t look anything like strippers when they’re not at work.
‘Ruth, ‘ said Mimi.
We talked for an hour or so, with Mimi – Ruth – filling me in on her bizarre back-story. How she’d lied about being able to cook in order to get a job as a chef on a boat sailing to New York; how she’d gone through immigration pretending she was on holiday; the trials and tribulations of getting fake documentation; the community of ‘illegals’ she’d become part of – a community which could only get work in kitchens and strip clubs and who at any moment could find themselves rounded up and deported. Then there was her Mafia clientele, the perverts who assumed stripper was simply a euphemism for prostitute (as the song goes: just cos she dances go-go, that don’t make her a ho, no) and the time she had hidden a wrap of cocaine in her thong and ended the evening bouncing off the walls having ingested the entire contents through her vagina.
Finishing her coffee Muth – Rimi – apologised for having to cut the meeting short but she had to go to work. ‘But hey!’ she yelled from no more than two feet away, ‘why don’t you come and watch me dance later. I’ll get you in to the VIP room. You can have champagne and I’ll introduce you to some people.’
I can honestly say, in the years I was writing about dot com millionaires not one of them had ever closed the meeting by inviting me to come and watch them take their clothes off for money. Oh, brave new world!
3.6
‘ Do you think there might be a book in her?’ asked Clare when I checked in that evening.
‘Among other things,’ I replied.
‘What?’
‘Never mind. Yes, I absolutely do. And we have to publish it. It’s an amazing story.’
My meeting with The Girl wasn’t till the next evening but I’d arranged to meet Alison from Pretty Matches that same afternoon to introduce myself and The Friday Project and to figure out some way that our companies could work together.
The strange thing is that I wasn’t even really a fan of Sarah Jessica Parker – Sex and the City always gave me unpleasant flashbacks to nights in with ex-girlfriends, forced to watch episode after episode while enduring a constant running commentary: ‘Oh, Samantha is just like me’, ‘I love her shoes’, ‘I would so definitely sleep with “Big”‘ and so on and so on as, with every hour that passed, I died a little inside.
But I was a huge fan of HBO, the company that made Sex and the City and the company that was now backing Sarah Jessica Parker’s production company, Pretty Matches. You only have to look at a list of the programmes they’ve been responsible for to see why I held them in such awe.
Six Feet Under
Deadwood
Band of Brothers
Sex and the City
Curb Your Enthusiasm
The Larry Sanders Show .
Hell, they were even first to broadcast both The ‘Thrilla in Manila’ between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier… and Fraggle Rock .
‘Dance your cares away *clap * *clap *.’ What’s not to love?
Delighted that, thanks to my meeting with Ruth – Mimi – I had found at least something to suggest that it might make a good TV show or movie, I jumped in a cab and asked to be taken to Sixth Avenue (I’d been warned not to describe it by it’s official name, Avenue of the Americas – apparently doing so is the mark of a tourist).
Pulling up outside the HBO building – an enormous white scoop-shaped skyscraper – I couldn’t help but feel totally out of my depth. This was my first time in New York and everything about the city – including this building – screamed ‘big time’ and ‘celebrity’ at a volume made only louder by the fact that New York Fashion Week was happening in the park directly opposite and the whole street was awash with paparazzi and models. Jesus, what the hell was I doing there? Bumming around London, meeting Internet celebrities was one thing, but this was HBO and the person I was about to meet was Sarah Jessica Parker’s gal pal and business partner. And she thought I was the one with the magic beans: the one who held the secrets of the Internet and knew the names and phone numbers of The Next Big Thing.
To be honest, at that moment I wasn’t even certain of my own name.
Walking into the vast lobby, I discovered that they take security VERY seriously at HBO, presumably to prevent perennially single women who haven’t coped well with the end of Sex and the City from penetrating the walls and staging a cry-in. A surly security guard demanded to see some photo ID before he’d allow me to sign in and wait to be escorted upstairs. I showed him my passport and waited while he typed the details into a computer, to be stored God knows where. Ten minutes later, Alison appeared.
Wow. Apparently not satisfied with turning me into a gibbering sack of nerves by inviting me to the most visually striking building on Sixth Avenue, opposite a marquee full of supermodels, to discuss the possibility of a TV partnership with a company owned by Sarah Jessica Parker, which was backed by a cable network I was in awe of, Alison had decided to up the stakes by being absolutely stunning. Originally from Arizona but now splitting her time between LA and New York, she had managed to be both West Coast beautiful – blonde, perfect teeth, yada yada – and also East Coast cynical. Oh, and she was funny. Very funny, in fact. I liked her immediately.
We spent an hour talking about The Friday Project, and Mimi and The Girl and all of the other titles we were hoping to publish in the next few months. She even let me look out of her floor-to-ceiling window where, almost a hundred feet below, I could just about make out the inside of the tent where the models were changing their clothes for the catwalk. After I’d finished perving, we turned back to business.
‘You know the deal we should do?’ she said.
Of course I didn’t know what deal we should do. I knew absolutely nothing about television. Christ, I was still learning how the book industry worked.
‘What do you think?’ I said, trying to act like I knew exactly what deal we should make, but was waiting for her to say it first.
‘We should do a first look deal.’
‘Yes, ‘ I said, doing that thing where you point at someone while also snapping your fingers. I immediately felt like a tit.
‘A first look deal definitely works for us.’
Back at my hotel room, I fired up Wikipedia to find out what the hell I’d just agreed to. Apparently a first look deal is an arrangement whereby someone – say, a publisher – agrees to give a TV company a ‘first look’ at anything new they publish. It’s a bit like an ‘option’, but much earlier and with no one getting paid. So what I’d agreed was that, for no money, Pretty Matches would have first refusal over everything new we published. But who cared about the details? The important thing was that we’d done a deal with Pretty Matches; Sarah Jessica Parker’s production company! I was already writing the press release in my head.
But first I had to phone Clare to tell her the great news…
‘Great news, ‘ I said, ‘we’ve done a “first look” deal.’
‘Great!’ she replied. ‘What the hell’s a first look deal?’
Tsk! Honestly! ‘It’s an arrangement whereby someone…’
With Clare up to speed and me giddy with excitement at having met both a stripper who danced for the Mafia and a hot, cynical TV producer who hung out with Sarah Jessica Parker all in the space of a day – and signed a first look agreement – I decided to hit the town. I’d arranged to meet a journalist friend in the East Village for a few drinks: and, God knows, I’d earned them.
3.7
I woke up the following afternoon with a grade A, Ivy League hangover. What the hell had I been drinking last night? I remembered pretty clearly arriving at the bar and meeting my journalist friend. I remember him ordering a Scotch on the rocks for us both and then me matching him – all six foot six former football player of him – drink for drink for three hours. I remember… no, that’s about it. I certainly didn’t remember eating any dinner. I had definitely over-celebrated – and in about three hours I had to meet The Girl. I lay on my hotel room bed with the walls spinning around me, feeling absolutely awful. There was no way on earth I could meet anyone – even if I could have removed the smell and taste of booze from my body. I couldn’t even find the strength to walk to the shower.
I turned on the light above my bed. And then I turned it back off again; the room was spinning even faster now and even the light from the crappy bulb of the hotel-issue lamp was making me want to vomit. I rolled myself out of bed and on to the floor with a thump and crawled – literally crawled – to my laptop which was parked on the windowsill. With the strength of Gunga Din, I opened up the screen – My Eyes! – and bashed out an email to The Girl.
‘ I’m really sorry, ‘ I wrote, ‘but I’m not going to make our meeting this evening. Something’s suddenly come up. Can we reschedule?’
‘No problem, ‘ came the reply. ‘Let’s meet up when we’re back in London.’
Thank God. No harm, no foul. I crawled back into bed and slept until dinner time.
3.8
Back in London it turned out that my no-show had in fact had some harm. Unbeknownst to me, The Girl had already been approached by a rival publisher and that meeting in New York would have been my last – and only – opportunity to sell her the idea of signing with The Friday Project instead. It wasn’t until the book was published almost a year later, with reports that The Girl had been paid a ’six figure’ advance, that Clare finally forgave me for letting the book go. There was no way we could have afforded even a five figure advance, let alone something north of £100k.
Missing out on The Girl, however, made wooing Ruth all the more important. We absolutely had to sign her book, whatever the cost. Assuming, of course, that the cost was less than about twenty grand. Sadly, Ruth had secured the services of one of London’s hottest representatives: bald-headed super-agent Simon Trewin.
‘ Ruth being represented by Simon Trewin may not be the best news for you, ‘ said one of our advisers – a man with decades’ experience in the publishing industry – with admirable understatement. And so it wasn’t. Despite a campaign of flattery, badgering, guilt-tripping, promising and cajoling of such intensity that by the end of it Ruth and I had become good friends, she opted to follow the money, accepting a very healthy six figure advance for the UK rights to her book, to be called No Man’s Land .
‘For what it’s worth,’ I emailed Ruth shortly afterwards, ‘I think you probably did the right thing. We were never going to be able to afford you – and I think you deserve the money. You bloody greedy bitch. But when it all goes to shit with [your publisher] make sure we’re your first call.’
She emailed back ‘Thank you darling – and of course you’ll be my first call, from my Caribbean island.’
I couldn’t resist a quick PS. ‘Oh, and the title is awful – I’d have called it: “Barely Legal: true confessions of a pole-dancing alien in New York”. You’re welcome. ‘
Her final reply: ‘Actually, I agree about the title. I prefer “Lap Dogs”.’
Brilliant.
I’d read a draft of the first chapter of the book by this point and it was everything I knew it would be: dark, honest, filthy, witty, incisive – and, if it weren’t for the subject matter, you could easily mistake the author for a man. And that was certainly a positive thing in the face of shelves full of woman-as-victim misery memoirs that were designed to give men erections and women a feeling of ‘there but for the grace of God’. But I also knew that, as much as I loved her writing, the publishing process was going to be a nightmare for Ruth. You don’t pay a six figure advance and then not expect to mould the book into something ultra-commercial. Sure enough, the book was eventually published in the United States at the start of 2008, three new agents and two different publishers later.
3.9
There were times during my quest to become famous via the Internet that I envied people like Ruth and The Girl. There’s no denying that being a woman who either has a lot of sex or – better still – who works in the sex industry gives you a massive head start in the whole Internet celebrity business. Even before signing their book deals, Belle, The Girl and Mimi had huge audiences for their blogs – comprising both men who got off on the sex talk and (in much greater numbers) women who were fascinated by honest accounts of worlds that ‘nice girls’ aren’t supposed to be part of. Blogs had allowed girls like The Girl to be absolutely candid about their sexual desires and their bedroom adventures, and to do so behind a cloak of total anonymity.
But there is a tipping point; a point at which someone goes from being an ‘Internet celebrity’ to a full-blown celebrity – where their popularity is such that the mainstream media starts to get interested, and people start waving around lucrative book deals. And that’s where things can begin to go wrong. Like it or not, once you start courting celebrity, you lose control of what people say about you. Like it or not, you become public property. That’s the trade-off. The celebrity covenant, if you like.
The reality of that covenant was driven home to author and film industry worker Zoe Margolis one early August morning in 2006 when a man arrived at her front door, delivering flowers. The bouquet was huge and, like any single girl would be, Zoe was flattered that someone had sent them to her. It was only when she saw the note that she suddenly felt sick to her stomach. It read simply, ‘Dear Zoe, congratulations on your book’. The card wasn’t signed.
Zoe ’s sickness turned quickly to panic: this was the day her very first book was due to hit the bookshelves but no one, not even her family or her publisher, knew the real identity of ‘Abby Lee’, the pen name which appeared on the cover. All of the negotiations for the book had been done anonymously, through an agent. Perhaps two people involved in the book knew how to contact her, but they were both trusted friends and were sworn to secrecy. And yet now she’d received a bunch of flowers with an anonymous note. What the hell could it mean?
She didn ‘t have to wait very long to find out. A couple of days later – at just after eleven on the morning of 5 August 2006 – an email arrived in her inbox. It was from Nicholas Hellen, the ‘acting news editor’ of the Sunday Times . The email read:
Dear Miss Margolis,
We intend to publish a prominent news story in this weekend’s paper, revealing your identity.
We have matched up the dates of films you have worked on – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Batman Begins and Lara Croft Tomb Raider – and it is clear that they correlate to your blog. We have obtained your birth certificate, and details about where you went to school and college.
We propose to publish the fact that you are 33 and live in [her address] – London, and that your mother, [her name] , is a [her address] -based [her profession]. The article includes extracts from you book and blog, relevant to your career in the film industry. We also have a picture of you, taken outside your flat.
Unfortunately, the picture is not particularly flattering and might undermine the image that has been built up around your persona as Abby Lee. I think it would be helpful to both sides if you agreed to a photo shoot today so that we can publish a more attractive image.
We are proposing to assign you our senior portrait photographer, Francesco Guidicini, and would arrange everything to your convenience, including a car to pick you up. We would expect you to provide your own clothes and make up. As the story will be on a colour page, we would prefer the outfit to be one of colourful evening-wear.
We did put this proposal to you yesterday, but heard nothing back.
Clearly this is now a matter of urgency, and I would appreciate you contacting me as soon as possible. To avoid any doubt we will, of course, publish the story as it is if we do not hear from you.
Yours sincerely,
Nicholas Hellen
Acting News Editor
Sunday Times
Zoe felt sick to her stomach. The delivery of flowers had been a ploy to get her to open her front door so that a paparazzi photographer hiding across the road could snap an unflattering picture of her. A similar stunt had been pulled on Cherie Blair the day after the new Prime Minister entered office in 1997. It was cruel then, and it was cruel now.
Abby Lee was one of two pseudonyms Zoe used to protect her true identity – the true identity that was about to be splashed across the pages of a Sunday newspaper.
The other was Girl with a One Track Mind.
For almost two years, Zoe had been sharing the deepest secrets of her sex life through her anonymous blog, always being sure to change identities and modify locations so as to ensure that even those she slept with couldn’t identify her. Jesus, she’d even refused to give away her first name on dates. And now some scumbag ‘acting’ (definitely the operative word) news editor was going to out her for – for what? A cheap couple of pages of middle-class pseudo shock? If you close your eyes after reading his email, you can almost see Nicholas Hellen sitting at his desk, imagining he’s Carl Bernstein phoning John Mitchell during the Watergate scandal…
‘Sir, this is Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, and I’m sorry to bother you but we’re running a story in tomorrow’s paper that we thought you should have a chance to comment on… and… um… we’d like a picture of you in a cocktail dress.’
It was vile and hideously misogynistic but in a way inevitable. By the time Zoe’s book was published in late 2006, the line between Internet celebrity and just plain celebrity was blurred beyond almost all recognition. Musicians like the Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom were crediting their MySpace pages for making them stars (in reality, the Internet was just one part of a wider marketing effort; but with so many young consumers spending the bulk of their leisure time online it was a critical part). Bloggers were being invited to appear as talking heads on TV shows and each month dozens of artists, comedians, writers, journalists and filmmakers were making the leap from the web to the mainstream, helped, of course, by companies like The Friday Project.
The moment Zoe made that leap, from blogger to mainstream media player, she became fair game: just another puzzle to be solved by a journalist looking for an easy scoop. But unfortunately for Nicholas Hellen there was one critical difference between Zoe and the countless other people suddenly forced into unwanted tabloid1 celebrity. Zoe was a blogger. And the blogosphere had her back.
The first I knew about the Sunday Times ‘ outing of Zoe was when I received a message from her asking for help. She had come up with a plan to get revenge on Nicholas Hellen, and she needed everyone who knew her and who had their own website to help.
Hellen was going to become the victim of a Google bomb. The Google bomb is a curiously modern but vicious form of weapon. Creating one is a simple process…
First you build a web page full of negative information about the person you wish to attack. In this case, Zoe put a page on her site containing the story of her floral door-stepping, and the text of Nicholas Hellen’s subsequent email.
Then you email lots of high-profile bloggers and site owners and ask them to link to the page from their sites. The only rule is that all of the links leading from the blogs to the attack page must use exactly the same text. Usually the name of the target individual. In this case, then, bloggers were asked to write a short note about Hellen on their sites, with the words ‘Nicholas Hellen’ linking back to Zoe’s page.
The result of Zoe’s Google bomb was devastating; within a few days, Google’s automatic search technology had noticed the sudden appearance of dozens of sites that linked the words ‘Nicholas Hellen’ to this one same page on Zoe’s site. Google’s technology assumed, quite reasonably, that Zoe’s page must be the most important page for people searching for information on Hellen. Why else would it have so many links? From that day on, anyone typing Hellen’s name into Google would see Zoe’s site as the number one result, followed by dozens of other sites, all linking to the same place. At a stroke, Hellen’s online reputation was toast. Much like Zoe’s anonymity. An eye for an eye.
But even having exacted her revenge, the damage to Zoe’s life was irreparable. She had to explain to her parents why their phone was ringing off the hook from other hacks looking to do a followup; she had to phone former lovers and apologise for what they now realised was a very public review of their performance; and she had to quit her job. Her old double life – media professional by day, secret sex blogger by night – was over.
She’d become more wealthy, yes, and offers of TV appearances and film deals were pouring in, but at the cost of her entire life up until that point. Whether she liked it or not, she was now a full-time writer, and a celebrity. Those would be the only jobs she would ever be able to get.
3.10
Zoe’s outing made all of us at The Friday Project think long and hard about how we approached anonymous authors. To so many online authors, particularly bloggers, anonymity was a deal maker or deal breaker when they were considering moving into print. Up until then, we’d promised authors that we would guarantee their anonymity – and, true to our word, we’d been extremely careful to ensure that their identity was only ever revealed to a tiny number of people who were part of the publishing process.
Post-Zoe, we decided to tell authors something different – that no one can guarantee anonymity, no matter how hard they try. We would do everything in our power to try, of course, but if a journalist really, really wanted to know who they were, they’d find out. They’d be able to find a friend of the author, or they’d stake out our offices, or they’d pore through the book for clues (as they’d done with Zoe’s, matching the work schedule she mentioned in her blog with her film credits) and then they’d follow those clues up. If you want anonymity, there’s only one way to guarantee it, we’d say: don’t write a book. Close down your blog, shut your laptop and write a diary. Then burn it. Other than that, there are no guarantees. And don’t believe any publisher who tells you otherwise.
Our new policy received its first test sooner than we’d expected when The Friday Project made its first major signing: the A-list gossip blogger and media ‘insider’ known only as ‘Mr Holy Moly!’ (his exclamation mark).
Mr Holy Moly! ran a showbiz gossip site called holymoly.co.uk which prided itself on not just skewing celebrities, but marinating them in piss and vinegar and then barbecuing them until they bubbled. In addition to a weekly email full of foul-mouthed gossip, the site had two other popular sections: the glorious ‘Cunts Corner’- a foul-mouthed directory of celebrities we love to hate and ‘The Rules of Modern Life’, a list of undeniable universal truths, including…
‘Under no circumstances should two men ever share an umbrella…’
‘Camouflage clothing is rendered useless in towns and cities…’
‘If you’re going to fuck a leopard, make sure you duct-tape its back legs together. And that you’re a leopard.’
and ‘You should never try to milk a dog.’
It was this ‘Rules’ section that really excited us, and we were thrilled (and a little surprised) when Mr Holy Moly! agreed to allow us to publish a spin-off book called The Holy Moly! Rules of Modern Life, a collection of the best rules, brilliantly illustrated by artist Ben Aung. Mr Holy Moly!’s signing was proof positive that The Friday Project was doing something special; he could easily have secured a huge advance for the book from another publisher, but he was determined that the publisher he signed with had to ‘get’ the Holy Moly! site and not try to force the book to tone down for a mainstream audience. I’d been a fan of Holy Moly! from the day it started and we had no intention of toning anything down. No other publisher even got a look in.
The Holy Moly! Rules quickly became our first best-seller, even despite the fact that a scheduled appearance of the book on Richard & Judy was cancelled at the last minute when a producer found out that Richard Madeley had been featured in Cunts Corner.
To celebrate the publication of the Holy Moly! book and the official birth of The Friday Project, we decided to hire an entire floor of Soho House to throw a huge launch party. This was our big chance to set our tone to the rest of the publishing and dot com industries – and so we were determined to make the party as memorable as possible. One of the ideas we came up with was to create real-life versions of the illustrations from the Holy Moly! book: for example, having an ugly man dressed as a leopard handing out dog milk cocktails.
Despite what you might expect, it’s a surprisingly simple matter, in London, to find an ugly man willing to dress as a leopard and hand out dog milk cocktails. In fact, there’s an agency that does exactly that. It’s called Ugly and it specialises in providing models with asymmetrical mouths, wonky noses and crossed eyes, many of whom are happy to dress up as big cats. For a price.
Ugly sent us over a batch of headshot photos to allow us to choose the model who would become our leopard. With Clare and me still running around setting up the company, we left the job of sifting through the photographs to our first proper employee, Heather Smith. Heather had previously been an editor at Prentice Hall, Clare’s last employer, and we’d poached her essentially to look after the day-to-day aspects of publishing books while Clare and I went around raising more money to pay for everything. It’s probably safe to say that, without Heather, The Friday Project wouldn’t have lasted more than a couple of months before either Clare or myself dropped dead.
Apart from being completely indispensable, Heather was also one of the nicest, most professional people ever to have set foot on earth. Ridiculously hardworking and eager to please, she didn’t have a bad word to say about anyone. In fact, she didn’t have a bad word to say – full stop. She was so sweet that, just for fun, Clare and I spent the first three months of her employment trying to make her utter the word ‘cunt’, starting with bribery and moving on to trickery and blackmail. But no matter how hard we tried, her ‘no swearing’ in the office rule held firm to the point that she once scolded our online editor, Karl Webster, after he’d had an argument with some hapless tradesperson or other on the phone.
‘Fucking motherfucker, ‘ Karl had yelled as he’d slammed down the handset.
‘Er… Karl,’ said Heather, smiling sweetly, ‘I’d prefer it if you used the word “mother-effer”.’ Naturally this became a running joke in the office for the next few months.
Another brilliant example of Heather’s niceness came as we watched her going methodically through the photographs from Ugly. She was feeling increasingly sorry for the poor unfortunate ‘models’ whose only chance at making it in show business was to trade off their wonky features.
‘Awww… this one’s not actually that ugly… Well, I suppose he’s quite ugly. I mean I wouldn’t… but… awwww… he’s sweet …sort of…’
Eventually Heather found someone she decided would look ideal dressed as a leopard and, after a quick trip to a costume-hire shop to pick up the costume (including a fake moustache, for some reason), we were all set.
3.11
The big night arrived and, right on time, our ugly man reported for duty. But whereas in his headshot he’d looked bright-eyed and enthusiastic, in the flesh he appeared to be on the brink of death. Pale, trembling and barely audible, there was no way he’d be able to hold a single glass, let alone a tray of dog milk cocktails (actually White Russians).
Seeing our concern, he explained that he was a practising Muslim, and that, as it was now Ramadan, he couldn’t eat a crumb of food or drink a drop of liquid until a very specific time: 7.23 p.m. The party didn’t start until 7.30 so he’d have plenty of time to wolf a sandwich and a cup of sweet tea and all would be fine.
And so it was – except that for the first twenty minutes of the party guests were greeted by a pale, trembling leopard who looked as if he might collapse at any moment. And then, once the sugar rush kicked in, we almost had to scrape him off the ceiling he was so high. At least we could be confident that we were the only book launch party that year to feature a giant ugly leopard wearing a fake moustache and showing all the symptoms of bipolar disorder.
I had also had a brilliant idea for the music. Instead of a disco or something similarly naff, we’d hire an Internet celebrity called Adam Kay to sing live. Adam Kay – or Dr Adam Kay, to give him his full title – is almost certainly the world’s only singing, swearing gynaecologist. He had achieved Internet ‘fame’ with a spoof song called ‘London Underground’ which mocked striking London Underground workers in a variety of colourful and offensive ways, to the tune of the Jam’s ‘Going Underground’. The song had been a huge hit, downloaded over six million times, and we’d quickly snapped up the rights to distribute Adam’s album and also to publish a spoof medical book written by him the following year. This made him, I decided, the natural choice of entertainment to mark out the differences between a Friday Project party and, well, one organised by any other publishing house. How many of our rivals would have a singing, swearing gynaecologist at their launch party? I’d guess not many.
The party got off to a swinging start. I ‘d bought my very first suit for the occasion – £500, a snip with my new salary! – and Clare had put on her best party dress. Heather, of course, looked absolutely perfect and utterly unflappable despite running around behind the scenes to make sure everything was ready. It was essential that the evening went exactly to plan given that we’d invited the great and the good of the publishing and online industries. The waiting staff, including our leopard, were instructed to ensure that the champagne and dog milk flowed freely. And so it did. As I looked around the room, I couldn’t help feeling a huge sense of pride that we’d made it.
There, on a table in the corner, was a pile of Holy Moly! books fresh from the printer, and next to them, piled high on the floor, were the goody bags we’d put together for the night, including a voucher for copies of our other upcoming books, some hilarious Holy Moly! Rules beer mats, a branded mug, various other freebie knick-knacks and the bag itself – a really nice canvas thing printed with our new logo. To anyone walking into that room…
…seeing the CEO of Macmillan deep in conversation with both the former CEO of Orion and the former head of Simon & Schuster; and across the room Mr Holy Moly! (incognito, of course) mingling with the founders of two of the UK’s other coolest cult websites – Popjustice and B3ta – all surrounded by almost a hundred people from various parts of the media. And the press! Both of the major publishing trade mags had sent reporters, as had the Guardian, The Times and the Independent . A photographer flitting around taking dozens of those ridiculous pictures you always see at launch parties of people standing in a perfect arc, chatting effusively and unnaturally for the camera…
…to anyone walking into that room, The Friday Project was, without doubt, a proper, professional company. We were grownups.
Dr Adam cleared his throat and took to the microphone. We’d hired him a huge electronic piano for the night, with two enormous speakers to really fill the room with sound. As he played his opening chord- ‘bllluuunnngg’- a hush fell across the room. The great and the good of the publishing industry waited to be entertained.
It was at that exact moment -’bllluuunnngg’- that I remembered one small detail about Adam the singing, swearing, gynaecologist. The thing that had drawn me to his songs in the first place, but that, with the benefit of hindsight, made him absolutely unsuitable for an audience of people who work in publishing; which is to say an audience that was at least 70 per cent women. Adam was also probably the world’s only misogynist, singing, swearing gynaecologist. Some of the songs on his album were unbelievably sexist – perhaps as a reaction to his day job, or perhaps just a sign that Adam hated women. But surely tonight, looking around the room, he’d stick to safer stuff.
I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer.
Things began safely enough, with a rousing chorus of ‘London Underground’ to get everyone in the mood. Sure, every time Adam sung a line about the drivers being ‘lazy fucking useless cunts’, Heather’s face contorted into a frown and I could tell it was taking all her strength not to shout ‘Er, Adam, I’d prefer, lazy effing useless cees’ but the audience as a whole loved it.
‘Gosh, this is edgy, ‘ thought the publishing types. ‘Not this fucking song again, ‘ thought the web people who had heard it a thousand times when it was doing the rounds of the nation’s inboxes. Then, encouraged by the positive reaction in the room, Adam moved on to his second web hit: a song sung to the tune of Tom Lehrer’s ‘Vatican Rag’ …
Its title? ‘The Menstrual Rag’.
Oh God.
Once a month your girl’s upset
She goes to Boots to buy Lillets.
I looked around the room at the sea of shocked publishing faces – 70 per cent of them women. Oh please God tell me they’re just listening to the tune. The acoustics aren’t very good in here. Please God, please God.
Who was I kidding? We’d hired two mother-effing speakers. He was louder than God – and even more of a misogynist.
It happens every twenty-eight days,
When she’s in her luteal phase.
Around the room, now, no one was talking any more. Wide eyes. Open mouths.
All she does is moan and nag,
You go five days without a shag.
I closed my eyes and necked two dog milk cocktails in quick succession.
There’s no cunnilingus
You can only use your fingers
When she’s using a menstrual rag.
And on and on it went. The Internet people were loving it, of course. There was Mr Holy Moly! hiding in the shadows but unmistakably tapping his feet. There was Peter Robinson, founder of Popjustice.com; he seemed to be enjoying it rather a lot, too.
And there were the publishers. Silent. Mouths agape. And there are my parents, who had come along to support my new venture, delighted that I had a proper grown-up job at last…
Oh God. Oh God.
Heavy flow or gentle spotting,
Running down her legs or clotting
All that lining that she sheds leaves
Nasty patches on your bed-sheets.
Just don’t waste your efforts pleading
You won’t be shagging when she’s bleeding
The Methenamic acid means you might as well be flaccid
When she’s using a menstrual rag.
At least he was medically accurate. God knows it’s not easy to find a rhyme for Methenamic acid. The man has real talent.
Four songs later and Adam took his bow. I cheered wildly, as did at least 30 per cent of the room. Everyone else looked horrified. I wondered whether I should introduce the leopard to Emily, who was standing by the bar ordering a Screaming Orgasm, just to create an even more awkward moment.
Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Sara Lloyd, Business Development Director for Palgrave Macmillan. Sara was an extremely important person and, unmistakably, a woman. ‘Well, I can honestly say, ‘ she began, choosing her words carefully, ‘that I’ve never – ever – been to a book launch like this.’
I necked another dog milk cocktail, grabbed Emily and a few of my web friends and headed over the road to the pub for a postmortem.
In the final analysis, it was clear to me where we’d gone wrong with the party. It wasn’t that we’d misjudged our audience. No, that wasn’t it at all. The problem was that everyone in publishing has got so used to book launches being staid affairs, perhaps even without a gynaecologist singing about menstruation, that they were just unprepared. If we were going to make the publishing industry realise we were a cool and edgy Internet company, we’d have to keep throwing parties until it sank in.
And so it was that we decided to throw our second party a few months later, just in time for Christmas. But this time we’d be a bit more low key; ease people back in gently. Just some mingling, a festive glass or two of cheap house wine and not an ugly leopard in sight. What could possibly go wrong?
3.12
In hindsight our mistake with the Christmas party – if we wanted it to be low key and low cost – was to host it in a champagne bar smack bang in the centre of London: the International on Trafalgar Square. I’d been to another party at the bar a few weeks earlier and I’d assured Clare that, while it was definitely upscale, it was also on one of the busiest tourist corners in London and so was perfectly able to cater to the cheap end of the market as well. If we stuck to house wine, and strictly limited the amount of money we put behind the bar, we could make the whole thing very affordable indeed.
The event kicked off at 7.00 p.m., which would have been exactly the right time had we not decided to have our team Christmas lunch immediately beforehand, at the St Martin’s Lane Hotel. Given that we started on our first pre-lunch cocktail at noon, and drank at least four bottles of wine between the four of us over food, by the time we rolled up to the International, half an hour or so before the advertised kick-off time, we were already pretty drunk, even by our standards. Which is to say we were verging on hammered. And with a little while to go before the first guests were due to arrive, Clare and I decided to order one quick bottle of house champagne for ourselves and the team, to round off the afternoon’s celebrations.
‘ We’ll have finished it before everyone gets here, ‘ Clare reasoned. ‘And after that we’ll just buy cheap wine for everyone as they arrive.’
‘ Good thinking, ‘ I agreed, swaggering over to the bar, my credit card in hand. Just one bottle. Something modest. Best not repeat the bar tab from the first party, I thought.
No sooner had we popped the cork on the bottle than our first guest arrived, one of our newly signed authors, James Lark. Rude not to give him champagne while we were all drinking it, we reasoned. One more bottle won’t hurt as long as we switch to wine after that. And with that, I grabbed James and demanded ‘Right! Follow me! You’re having champagne.’
‘Are you guys drunk already?’ he asked, not realising that, as we’d started at noon, there was no ‘already’ about it.
‘Not in the slightest,’ I slurred, throwing his scarf over the bar.
In the interests of accuracy, I should say that Clare and I have different recollections of how the evening ended. For example, she insists I scared away the head of sales of one of the major publishing houses by falling over a footstool and landing on him. I maintain he was leaving anyway and that he took my toppling in good spirits. Clare insists that she didn’t offer James thousands of pounds for the rights to his first novel; I insist that I had to stop her from giving him a contract right there and then, drawn on the back of a cocktail napkin. But we do agree on one thing: neither of us has any real recollection whatsoever of how the evening ended.
Other things we do agree on…
A couple of hours into the party, the house champagne ran out. We started drinking the next least expensive. Until that ran out. The last three bottles of the night were bottles of Cristal. We drank a champagne bar dry. We’re still proud of that.
At the end of the night, Clare handed over her credit card, only to be taken to the manager’s office to speak to the bank. The final tab was so large that the bank needed special authorisation to process it.
Clare left the bar without her credit card. Having successfully remembered her mother’s maiden name and authorised the transaction, she simply turned on her heel and walked out of the building. She has no idea how she got back to the hotel she’d booked for the night to avoid having to travel home. I had to pick up the card the next day, after a meeting with our very unamused accountant.
I got into a heated argument with the Russian bouncer over whether it was acceptable to kneel down in the middle of a crowded champagne bar when there were no seats. I then got into a second argument about whether it was possible to be thrown out of your own party. The Russian bouncer won both of these arguments, by a mile.
Adam Kay, the swearing, singing doctor turned up at one point, and immediately had a bottle of champagne thrust into his hand by someone. He later arrived back at his girlfriend’s house in the early hours of the morning, miraculously clutching a full glass of champagne.
It was a hell of a night.
3.13
Starting The Friday Project had given me access to almost as many parties as I’d gone to as a journalist, even if Clare and I were the ones paying for them, but it had also given me something even more valuable: ownership of shares in a company. Or ‘equity’, as entrepreneurs insist on calling it.
This equity was the thing that had really transported me from one side of the fence to the other. In the evenings I was still hanging out with the same dot com entrepreneur mates that I spent time with when I was a journalist – still drinking the same overpriced beer – but now, rather than being an observer and friend, I was part of the equity club, too. We were all on the same team.
With every book The Friday Project published, so the value of my ‘equity’ increased. Hell, I didn’t even have to write the damn things: someone else did all the hard work and we packaged their words and sold them. I had none of the disadvantages of being a columnist – the crap pay, the living from week to week, the having to have your own ideas and write your own words – and all of the advantages – namely being schmoozed by people with more money than God and slowly increasing my personal wealth. And as a nice added bonus, the PR girls in publishing are astonishingly hot, compared to the slightly less hot dot com ones I met through my Guardian column. In PR, as in life, the pretty girls preferred literary types over web geeks. There’s no doubt that, by combining publishing with the web, I had found my ideal career.
There was just one slight problem.
Me.
3.14
For all the downsides, the life of a freelance journalist is by no means an arduous one. Breakfast is at noon, your hours are set not by some all-seeing boss, but by the daytime TV schedules (as a freelance, I tried to have lunch at around Diagnosis Murder o’clock, with elevenses around quarter past Columbo ) – and the equivalent of dress-down Friday is not putting your dressing gown on over your boxers. Evenings tend to be spent attending press parties or hanging out with other journalists, bitching about mutual friends.
For all of publishing’s reputation as an industry that survives on boozy lunches and inflated expense accounts, it turned out that running a small publishing company was actually astonishingly sensible – and bloody hard work. This is something I hadn’t really anticipated.
While covering the dot com world, I ‘d visited companies like Yahoo!, with its free jelly beans for visitors, and Google, with its free meals for all (cooked by the chef who used to serve the Grateful Dead) and its giant space hoppers in the lobby. This was how I imagined start-up life to be.
At the end of one dot com party I ‘d found myself at, the founders had decided to drag the last remaining guests off to a strip club in Farringdon to round off the night. I’d never really understood the point of strip clubs and why they were better than normal clubs, which were cheaper, less sleazy and there was at least a slim chance that you might end up going home with the person dancing in front of you. But an after-party is an after-party.
On arriving at the club, the bouncer decided that one of our group couldn’t come in as he was wearing jeans and trainers.
‘You can’t come in wearing that, ‘ he sneered.
What he didn’t realise was that the scruffy oik had just signed a deal that would make him a millionaire many times over. Unfazed, the young founder simply pulled out his black Amex card and a huge wedge of £50 notes and sneered right back at the bouncer, ‘This is what I’m wearing. What exactly is the problem?’
As is by magic, the dress code suddenly became far more relaxed and the group was welcomed with open arms. The life of a young entrepreneur.
They say that the Queen thinks the world smells of fresh paint, because that’s all she ever smells; to a journalist covering certain aspects of the dot com world, the whole thing smells of parties, jelly beans, booze and fun. It’s 80 per cent fun, 20 per cent hard work. And sky-high valuations. And my job had been to hang around with these people, then to roll up at my desk at noon and work through the night. Like many hacks, I always managed to achieve far more between the hours of 6.00 p.m. and 6.00 a.m. than I could during normal working hours.
And that’s what I went into The Friday Project thinking I could replicate. Thinking that Clare and I would be able to create something akin to a crazy Internet company that just so happened to publish books. A sky-high valuation, but with all the security and (gasp) revenue of nice, safe old publishing. And I still wanted to get to my desk at noon and work through the night after everyone had gone home.
Yeah!
No.
What it turns out what we’d created – with our publishing investors and our roots in ‘old media’- was a traditional book publishing company that happened to understand the Internet a lot better than any other traditional book publishing company. And as a traditional company, there were rules that needed to be abided by.
For a start, forget what you’ve heard: the boozy publisher’s lunch is a myth, as are the red-nosed publishing execs who arrive at their desks at eleven, lunch at noon with an author and spend the rest of the day schmoozing and boozing. In reality, people who work in publishing today are by a huge majority young, female graduates from good universities who have an absolute laser-like focus on advancing their career. They are very dedicated, very smart and absolutely fucking terrifying. These people think nothing of arranging a meeting at 9.00 a.m.! 9.00 a.m.! To me that’s not a meeting; that’s a court date.
Also, as far as I could tell, every single one is called Emma or Clare.
I’m not kidding about the Clares: in our small company of five people, we had two Clares. We had as many Clares as we had men. I’m prepared to believe that’s a ratio that stands up industry-wide.
But still, despite my initial shock at being expected to do a grownup job for my new grown-up salary, I was determined to keep the dream alive to some extent, by ticking a few of the sensible boxes while Trojan Horsing (yes, as a verb2 ) some dot com fun in the back door. I’d come in for the early meetings, and I’d put on a suit for the investors and I’d do my damnedest to learn what business things like EBITDA3 meant and why, in publishing, when someone talks about turnover, they mean the amount of money that bookshops take from customers for your books – not how much of that money the publisher actually receives.4 But then, by night, I’d still hang out with my dot com friends, finding new possible authors and plotting ways to make our books more interesting and exciting and, oftentimes, more offensive than anything else on the market.
The road to hell is paved with such good intentions. Try as I might, 9.00 a.m. meetings just didn’t work for me at all. My body was absolutely incapable of adjusting to a normal working day and as a result I’d often be found still at my desk at three in the morning, eating cold takeaway and catching up at work, knowing full well that, factoring in an hour’s journey home to my flat in Crouch End, there was no way on God’s green earth I’d be back when everyone else arrived the next day, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. My working habits were summed up perfectly when the Bookseller wrote a profile of me which began and ended as follows:
Paul Carr is by turns the professional entrepreneur and the overgrown student hurling himself into whichever wacky scheme catches his attention. He got outrageously drunk at the Nibbies; is ‘pathologically late’ for meetings; and confesses to being an ‘arrogant little shit’ but he must be doing something right… Carr’s enthusiasm is transparent: ‘I love it. If I were able to get bored in this environment, I’d be mentally ill.’ His enthusiasm is to be believed: according to Macmillan c.e.o. Richard Charkin, he regularly emails at 3am. ‘He is an extraordinary young man; incredibly bright and incredibly hard-working, ‘ he says.
The Nibbies are the very prestigious trade awards of the book industry. Held annually in the God’s waiting room that is Bournemouth, I defy anyone to survive them without getting outrageously drunk. And, frankly, you haven’t lived until you’ve woken up in the wrong hotel room, wearing a tuxedo, and with pockets full of sand.
When the pro file appeared, my friends were entirely split as to whether it was positive or negative. Generally, my publishing friends thought it was a stitch-up-’outrageously drunk!’ ‘arrogant little shit!’- I can’t believe they said that.
‘ They didn’t, ‘ I protested, ‘it was me who said that, they were quoting me.’
‘You described yourself as an arrogant drunk? To a reporter?’
‘Um…’
My web friends, on the other hand, thought it was brilliant. To them, Oscar Wilde’s maxim had always stood them in great stead. To them, in an industry so driven by hype, every additional column inch was an additional few thousand dollars on their company valuation. I was very firmly in their camp and I immediately pinned up a copy of the article behind my desk, next to the Evening Standard article about thinkofthechildren.
3.15
By the time January rolled around, I ‘d basically given up trying to impress the publishing people and had decided on another tack. Business was going well – we’d published three books in the last two months of 2005 and were on track to publish an impressive twenty-five titles in 2006. Our priority now was to raise more money, and we’d decided to do this by becoming a public company, which basically involved spending a lot of time with lawyers and accountants and then convincing people to buy shares in us.
It seemed pretty logical that Clare would take charge of schmoozing the publishing people while I concentrated on mixing with the web types and generally creating a bit of hype. I was certain that, if everyone was talking about us and we’d attracted the coolest web brands to publish with us, then a sky-high valuation would surely follow.
It certainly seemed to be paying off. If the publishing industry wasn’t sure whether The Friday Project was a new kind of hybrid dot com/publishing company, the media certainly was starting to make its mind up that we were. We were getting a ton of press, with a new article appearing in some newspaper or other every week claiming we were the future of publishing.
But, if the media was lapping up our image as ‘the publisher of choice for the web generation’ (our words, reprinted in the Observer ), then surely our next announcement – which came just before the start of our Public Offering process – would blow their minds, and change The Friday Project forever.
It started with a story in the Bookseller . Scott Pack, whose job as head buyer at Waterstone’s had led to him being thought of as ‘the most powerful man in publishing’5, had announced his resignation. What was curious about the story was that Pack had apparently no plans as to what he was going to do next. He’d just decided that he’d had enough of his present job and wanted to see what else was available. At the same time as I was reading the article, across London Clare was doing exactly the same. When I phoned her she beat me to the punch before I could even get a word in: ‘Have you seen that Scott Pack is leaving Waterstone’s?’
‘Yes! That’s why I was calling. Do you think we should invite him to lunch?’
‘That’s what I was wondering, ‘ Clare replied. ‘But there’s no way he’ll join The Friday Project. Everybody will be trying to get him.’
And she was right. The Most Powerful Man In Publishing would, at this very moment, be drowning in a sea of emails and fruit baskets from every major book chain and publishing house in the country inviting him for lunch as they tried to schmooze him into working for them. It’s hard to think of a bigger coup for a publishing house than having Scott on board as the ultimate gamekeeper-turned-poacher.
‘It’s worth a shot, though – no? I mean, nothing ventured. And, hell, we’re cooler than everyone else anyway. We can let him create his own job and he’ll have more fun with us than fucking WH Smith or Orion or someone.’ I sent him a short email. Would The Most Powerful Man In Publishing be interested in having a chat about possibly coming to join The Friday Project, in exchange for a sack of shares and a huge amount of autonomy in shaping the commercial side of the business?
When his reply came the very next day I was amazed. Amazed he’d even bothered to reply at all. We’d met Scott a couple of times to try and persuade him that Waterstone’s should buy vast quantities of our books and he ‘d always been a model of courtesy and professionalism. In fact, we were always amazed to discover that he’d actually bothered to read the books we’d sent him, before deciding whether to order them. You’d think this would be a basic requirement for a head buyer, but with an estimated 206, 000 titles being published in the UK each year – more than in any other country – he’d be forgiven for skipping a few. And as professional as he was, we thought this might be one time he wouldn’t bother answering.
And yet he had replied: ‘Always up for lunch and a chat.’ Over the best mixed grill in west London (the Kew Grill, Scott’s favourite restaurant, near Waterstone’s HQ: we’d done our research) we explained to Scott how him joining The Friday Project would be a partnership made in heaven – we would get someone in the business who actually knew about money, and how to spend it sensibly, and he would get to channel his years of experience in creating best-sellers into a different path: talent-spotting new authors. The Most Powerful Man In Publishing politely listened to our pitch and asked all the right questions, but we all knew – Clare, me, Scott – that there was no way on earth we could compete with the big boys. Still, just by having the meeting we’d shown ourselves able to fight on the same battlefield as the major houses. We were nothing if not plucky.
A few weeks later, at about ten at night, my phone rang. It was Clare, chasing, I thought, some publicity material I’d promised to have finished that afternoon but was only just getting started on. I almost didn’t answer in case she told me off.
‘I know, I know, I’m almost done, ‘ I said, not allowing her to get a word out.
‘Have you checked your email?’ she asked. She sounded breathless and somehow high-pitched, like someone who had just won the lottery, or lost a 100 metres sprint.
‘Um, no… what’s up?’
‘Just check your mail.’
‘Um… okay…’
Click .
Click .
Pause.
Click .
Pause.
‘Oh. My. Fucking. God.’
The following day we told everyone in the office the news. After serving out his notice period, The Most Powerful Man In Publishing would to be joining The Friday Project as commercial director. Of all the big fucking deals there have ever been in my life, this was the biggest fucking deal of them all.
The only catch was, we couldn’t tell the press for a month or so until all the details had been finalised. I was like a three-year-old with the world’s coolest secret. It was excruciating.
When the news finally broke, a few short weeks before our Public Offering closed, we couldn’t have hoped for a better response from the press. The Observer said it best…
Last week, Carr and Christian made a move that [William] Caxton, a world-class hustler, could hardly have bettered. After weeks of rumour, The Friday Project sent the literary blogosphere buzzing announcing the appointment of a ‘commercial director’. Who could this be? Was he a nethead? An internet geek? A coke-snorting nerd in trainers? No, he was …Scott Pack, former Waterstone’s executive and enfant terrible of British book-selling.
During his tenure as chief buyer at Waterstone ’s Mr Pack became a love-hate figure in the book trade, admired for his energy, loathed for his brash outspokenness and apparent indifference to traditional book culture… Where the new energy will take the Project is anybody’s guess, but, overnight, the company has transformed itself from an interesting start-up to a serious player and one that understands the rules of the game .
A serious player.
3.16
While we waited for Scott to work out his notice period and arrive in the office, our party schedule continued apace. The first Holy Moly! book had been such a success that we decided to publish a sequel a few months later, which, of course, called for another extravagant launch- this time on the roof terrace of the Century Club on Shaftesbury Avenue.
For the months following the publication of the first book, Mr Holy Moly! had been waging an online war with the Metro’s showbiz columnist, Neil Sean, who Moly! relentlessly mocked for simply recycling celebrity press releases and branding them as ‘exclusives’. This was a perfectly fair accusation, as anyone who has ever read Sean’s column, ‘The Green Room’, will testify.
But despite basically deserving everything he got, Sean had reacted angrily, threatening to call in the lawyers if Mr Moly! didn’t quit with the name-calling. There was just one catch – poor old Sean didn’t know who Mr Moly! was. He was anonymous, after all. And so he hatched a plan – he would gate-crash Holy Moly!’s book launch and confront him on his own turf.
The party was in full swing when he arrived, with about three hundred people crammed into a space designed for half that number. I spotted him first, and ran – literally ran – across the room to tell Clare.
‘ Tell me, please God tell me, that’s who I think it is at the door.’ ‘Where?’
‘The door, the door! Look’
‘I can’t see any – Oh, brilliant!’
When they make the movie of that evening, the entire room will,
as one, go silent, a piano player will stop playing and there will be an audible gasp as the rest of the room notices crap gossip royalty walking among them, searching in vain for his nemesis. In reality no one really gave much of a shit. But I did; I gave an absolute shit. If this didn’t get us in the diary columns the next day, and raise our value by a few quid, I didn’t know what would.
At the launch of Toby Young’s book The Sound of No Hands Clapping, about his attempts to break into Hollywood, two guests had ended up having a fist fight, guaranteeing column after column of coverage in the New York press. There was a very real possibility, if Sean managed to track down Holy Moly!, that tonight we’d witness the very first Friday Project murder.
I bounded over and shook him warmly by the hand. ‘Hello, Sean, ‘ I said, introducing myself.
‘Neil.’
‘Sorry?’
‘My name’s Neil, it’s Neil Sean. You called me Sean.’
‘Oh, yes, sorry Sean. Sorry. Neil. Sorry, Neil.’
I attempted to keep Sean talking while our PR girl, Charlie, went off to warn Holy Moly! what was happening. As we talked, it became clear, to my absolute delight, that Neil Sean is almost exactly as much of a tool in person as he is in print. Our conversation – and I will never forget it as long as I live – went like this:
Neil Sean: ‘The thing you have to realise is that I really don’t give a shit about what people say about me.’
Me: ‘Which is why you’re here. To tell Holy Moly! that he hasn’t bothered you.’
Sean: ‘Exactly. Thing is, at the end of the day, I know I’m successful and I get paid a lot of money – and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters when you look back at your life. How much money you’ve made.’
Me: ‘Quite right. What matters is what you take with you when you die. At the end of the day.’
Sean: ‘Exactly.’
I wanted to like him – really I did – I wanted him to be different from Holy Moly’s caricature. But no, as I watched this man flitting around the room, trying to find someone who could identify his online tormentor, I couldn’t help but think he deserved everything he got. And as soon as Sean left that’s exactly the point I made to the anonymous figure who had been standing behind us the whole time, listening to our conversation. And Mr Holy Moly! completely agreed.
3.17
Scott ’s arrival at The Friday Project led to a huge burst of publicity – to the point that, by the time we’d closed our Public Offering, we were so oversubscribed with people wanting to buy shares that we had to send back more than £50, 000 to people who we couldn’t accommodate. There simply weren’t enough shares to give to everyone who wanted to buy them.
In the end, the offering raised over half a million pounds and turned The Friday Project into Friday Project Media Plc.
Scott couldn’t have been more valuable to the company: he knew more about why books sold – and why they didn’t – than anyone else in the country; he knew what covers worked, what types of books people bought at what time of year, and how best to spend marketing money to get the optimum results.
His head for figures, his innate understanding of the publishing industry and his clear benefit to the valuation of the company weren’t the only ways in which he and I diverged. We also differed in that Scott understood that expensive launches and PR campaigns rarely shifted a single extra copy of a book, especially compared to the same money spent to promote a book in store. Launch parties were basically an ego stroke for authors and a chance for publishers to get drunk in the name of work; in publishing it was sales – revenue – not hype that meant success.
He was absolutely right. We’d launched the highest-profile new publishing company in Britain, we’d published some amazing books, we’d built a killer team and we’d had a fucking great time. But now the party was over, and in the most literal sense. It was time for us – me – to grow up and get on with the hard work of running a public company.
I should have been happy but of course I wasn’t. I wasn’t in it for the money – I wanted the fame, goddammit, and the truth is, with every day that passed, that goal seemed more and more at odds with what was best for the company.
But what was the alternative? Quit? Walk away from my first proper salary because I wanted my face in the papers and to be feted at parties? What was I, twelve years old? And if I didn’t want to be running a proper company then what exactly did I want to run? A pure web company? Who says that would be any more fun anyway?
The truth is, I was being pathetic. I’d seen a great idea turn into a proper company – with proper revenues and a proper staff – and there I was itching to leave; to have a new idea; to do something else. What the hell was wrong with me? I resolved for once in my life to be grateful for my lot and to sit down and get on with it.
And then two weeks later, 9 October 2006, this happened…
YouTube.com, the video-sharing site started by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen the previous year, was sold to Google for $1.65 billion.
One. Point. Six. Five. Billion.
A company founded four months before The Friday Project.
A company that mixed old media (video content) with new (the web).
And the kicker?
Chad Hurley was – and still is – two years older than me. Chen is a year older. And there they were, on the front cover of every paper, from the New York Times to the Financial Times to Newsweek to Time magazine.
All my jealousies – my burning ambition to become a web celebrity – came flooding back.
One. Point. Six. Five. Fuck. Right. Off. Billion. Fucking. Dollars.
Just to put that in context, according to Forbes magazine, Blockbuster Video – an actual company with actual shops in every continent of the globe except Antarctica, actual paying customers and millions of actual videos and DVDs in stock – was worth ‘just’ $710 million, or $0.71 billion. Based on the price Google had paid for them, YouTube was worth the same as two Blockbuster Videos. After just eighteen months.
That’s just bizarre.
Chapter Four: ‘Jealousy is the mother of invention’…
- And in this instance the Sunday Times had proved itself to be precisely that. [↩]
- In the Internet era, all nouns have become verbs. If you don’t believe me, Google it. [↩]
- Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. [↩]
- I still have no fucking clue; it’s insane and totally meaningless. [↩]
- The first time I met Scott, I wrote up the experience on The Friday Project blog, describing him as ‘the man a publisher like me would gladly fellate if it would make him more likely to buy our books’. [↩]
One Quibble on Chapter Three: ‘You can lead a leopard to dog milk…’
Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore is the painfully true story of how Paul Carr attempted to become a dot com billionaire and in doing so lost his reputation, the love of his life and very nearly his freedom. It was originally published in 2008 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and is available in all good bookshops. The complete ebook edition is available free via this site for reasons outlined here.
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