The WriteOff – soft launch
Resent, in case you missed it. We're still coming for you Traitors...
Quick note - this is the same email as sent yesterday, but resent in case you missed it, and also (since it’s about live testing the crazy new idea we’ve had) also fixing some issues that have shown up already. If you’ve already signed/shared/tried to share - thank you so much! And if you don’t know what this is about, read on, it’s fun!
I‘m long overdue an update, and it’s impossible to sleep on a Ryanair flight, so I might as well start writing.
We’re on our way back from London, where we attended the Self Publishing Show Live – a huge author conference that happens every year. Which means I’m also going to be super busy, because I’ve now seen all the business things I should be doing but definitely aren’t. Hence me becoming super efficient and writing this while enjoying the finest in-flight comforts that 29 euros (return) can buy.
But this update isn’t really about publishing. It’s about the rapid expansion and hopeless optimism of our latest crazy side project: The WriteOff.
I mentioned it last time, though I kept things fairly low-key, because we weren’t sure how realistic the idea was. So for many of you, I expect this is the first you’ll have heard of it.
What is The WriteOff, then?
The 30,000-foot description – geddit? – is that it’s a TV show for books and readers that we’ve decided to make. Think Bake Off, but for books.
The plan is to lock eight bestselling authors into a luxury villa and have them compete, in pairs, to write the best novella they can in just one week. We film the whole thing, then cut it into episodes for TV. At the end, the surviving teams’ stories are published together in a book, viewers read them, and vote for their favourite.
Best Story Wins.
Why?
The short answer is because we think it could be fun.
The slightly longer answer is that I once did something similar myself, and I’ve thought about it ever since. A few years ago, María and the kids left me alone at home while they went to Spain to visit family. It was half-term, I was dogsitting (not in the doghouse) and for reasons I cannot remember, I decided to see whether I could write a complete book before they got back.
The week became a very intense, slightly weird creative experience, not dissimilar to my time in the jungle living off bugs and ayahuasca (joking). The result was Killing Kind, the 20,000-word novella I offer as a free taster of my writing. To my eternal surprise, people have often written to tell me how much they like it – sometimes more than my full-length novels.
The WriteOff is essentially that, but bigger, with much more famous – and probably better – writers, and lots and lots of cameras.
Also, baking, sewing, pottery and flower arranging all have their own TV shows, and books – the thing that actually fills our shelves and a good portion of our lives – somehow don’t. We think this is a strange oversight that someone should fix, and nobody more qualified has stepped forward.
When I last wrote, the plan was to make the show ourselves, inviting authors we’d met at conferences and who we thought would be interesting on TV to take part, dusting off the old handycam I’ve got somewhere in the loft - and putting it all up on YouTube. But now that we’ve spoken to a lot of people in television, we’ve realised that plan would have to change.
The format, as we want to run it, is far too expensive to make ourselves. For context, our first budget came to €40,000, which we thought was an awful lot of money. That then grew to €80k, then €120k, then €200k, and currently sits at around half a million pounds for one season – as well as being technically quite difficult to pull off.
Now, you might think – if you’re a sensible person – that a sensible person would give up at this point, go back to writing books, or perhaps do something that might bring in some income instead of costing a small fortune?
You might be right. You’re definitely right. But we’re not sensible people (maybe it’s the Spanish sun?)
Instead, we’ve gone very much the other way, and decided we’re going to get the show made anyway. Just not by us.
We’ve decided that if we’ve accidentally designed a proper TV show, we need to get it commissioned by a proper TV company – Amazon, the BBC, Netflix, whoever makes the most sense.
How are we going to make Netflix make us a TV show? We have a plan for that too.
The eight bestselling authors we plan to put in the show – all more bestselling than me, by the way – each have an audience of readers who like them, possibly even love them, and who would quite probably watch a TV show with their favourite author in it.
We’re going to ask those readers to add their names to a campaign saying they’d like to see the show made. Shortly, I’m going to ask you to do the same.
The hope is that if we can reach the not-at-all-plucked-out-of-the-air figure of 100,000 names, we can take that to Netflix, the BBC and the rest, and they can see that an audience does exist for a show like this.
It’s not just proving the audience though. Alongside working out how much the show would cost and how to get it made, most of our time has gone into working out what the show really is, and how to make it something people will genuinely want to watch. This has also been the really fun bit.
Partly because it’s the closest to what I do anyway – visualising worlds and ideas in my head – but also because it’s where we’ve got to feel like fancy TV executives. We’ve had meetings with actual TV producers and discussed everything from edit suites and camera rigs to the strange job titles at the end of TV shows. I now know what a best boy and a gaffer are, although I do confess I’ve forgotten again.
But it’s these people – the TV producers, not the best boys – who have told us that the show we’ve developed is the sort of thing a BBC or Netflix could actually commission.
If we get their attention.
It’s important to add that this is a long shot. Not quite a moonshot, perhaps, because TV does get made, and everyone knows the moon landings were filmed in a basement in Arizona. But the point stands, this isn’t a given - but you really can help, and we’d love you to do so.
We’ve built a website that explains the idea rather better than I can while wedging my elbows into the man in seat 11B, who is pretending not to read this but quietly intrigued. It lets readers add their name in support. It’s free, I hope it’s fun, and you can be among the first to join the side project to the side project: The WriteOff Book Club.
You’ll understand when you see it.
You’ll notice not many people have signed yet. That’s deliberate – you, dear reader, are the soft launch.
It’s all built, it all works. The plan now is for actual people to look it over, click the buttons, possibly break the buttons, and – if so – drop me an email to say what worked and what didn’t.
The big push, where I ask everyone I know to share it far and wide, comes a little later, once we’re confident everything holds together. But do sign up, please do share the links (if it goes viral that’s not a bad thing). And do join the Book Club (you might even win a mug).
Anyway. It’s approaching that time when I need to return my seat to the upright position, stow my tray table, and start praying for a safe landing and an immigration officer in a good mood. Here’s a pretty picture of a cloud while there’s still time.
So here’s the website again:
Please look it over. Please click some buttons. Please share it with friends if you want to. And please let me know what you think.
Gregg
ps the London show was a week and a half ago, the final website checks took rather longer than I thought.
Super fun idea!
What if, instead of two well known authors, you combined one well known with one lesser known?