A lifetime ago, back in 2004, I
became a book publisher: co-founder of The Friday Project, a publishing house that promised to adapt the web?s creative talent into awesome books. This wasn?t print on demand, it was real, live publishing: we paid our authors (including the occasional advance), we partnered with publishing giant Macmillan for distribution and our books could be found in actual book stores. It?s hard to say if we rode the bloggers-with-book-deals wave or if we helped precipitate it. All I know is, for a brief period starting about five years into the present millennium, every online hack and her dog was being offered a six figure sum to turn her livejournal about love or sex or working in an office or cooking like Julia Child (or
all of the above) into the next bestseller. Big online brands got in on the action too with Gawker and Postsecret and every other site north of a million page views being handed a fat check. There were even agents who specialised in blog-to-book deals, most notably ICM?s Kate Lee who achieved her own
meta-micro fame by helping high profile bloggers break through. Twelve months later came the deluge of remaindered books.
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