Splinters

Weekly satirical email newsletter The Friday Thing has moved into the world of book publishing with the launch of The Friday Project. Given the success of The Friday Thing in getting people to pay cash money for a subscription to their scabrous weekly take on world news events, The Friday Project hopes to take it further and get people to pay cash money for books whose content originally began content on the Web.

This has been going on for a while (TV Go Home, Law Of The Playground, A Nice Cup Of Tea And A Sitdown etc) but The Friday Project appears to be the first publisher dedicated to using the web-to-print model as their raison d'etre. It's a great business model - put out a book based on a website that already has a dedicated following and has generated a buzz, plus feel secure that the writing abilities of the author(s) have already been proven to be above those of a shaved chimp. Indeed, with a bit of judicious editing, the entire content of the book can come from the website. The Friday Project plans to publish 2 books this year, and 16 more next year. It'll be interesting to see how far they variate from humour titles and whether their business model lets them take risks on publishing stuff that isn't particularly commercial - and, of course, whether they've any interest in doing so.

One of the books coming out this year is a travel guide, the Insider's Guide to London, presumably the start of a series. The travel book market is a crowded place so clearly they feel they've got a way in to a different audience to whom they can sell the book - if they were just going to dump it on the shelves next to Lonely Planet and the like, I'd imagine it wouldn't get very far.

The Friday Project is currently accepting submissions if you've got a clever web to print book idea.

More on The Friday Project:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia