Wish You Were Here (40 page)

Kanwal cited the Joni Mitchell song “You never realise what you’ve got until it’s gone” in connection with Douglas’s death. “I was as upset as at the death of my own father,” he said.

Douglas’s role in Silicon Valley and the whole IT revolution is more subtle and important than it may at first appear. His sales in the USA were always huge, especially among high school kids and college students, and with a readership almost certainly more male than female.*
 
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Some of those teenagers grew up to be the technologists and engineers of the IT revolution. Certainly Douglas commanded enormous respect among the techies. When he was with The Digital Village, Robbie Stamp, a decent family man who can talk to an Olympic standard, recalls the awe that Douglas could evoke:

Douglas was a big star. There was part of him that took pleasure in it, but would get embarrassed if you told him. I remember going to meetings at Microsoft and being with junior programmers who were simply overwhelmed, especially if they hadn’t been expecting to see him. In one set of meetings, with a woman called Linda Stone who works at Microsoft, we were wandering around the offices in Seattle and went into one. There was this guy who was so excited he literally could not speak.

When it came to inventing gadgets, Douglas burst through the barriers of the conventional by positing the fantastic. Why add a cosine key to a calculator when you could be developing an interactive, constantly updated talking encyclopaedia with attitude? It is not too far-fetched to say that a generation of clever American techies grew up with their imaginations fired by the guide itself in
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The Palm Pilot and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) might never have been developed without the seed planted by Douglas a decade and a half before they first came onto the market.

In fact the
New York Times
*
 
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quotes Bob Stein as crediting Apple with unintentionally creating the first electronic book in 1991 (Sony’s Discman had failed, possibly because the screen was too small). Apple, with their new generation of snazzy portables, seemed to be the business, “complete with animation, drawings and hypertext links.” The early titles were, of course, the
Hitchhiker’s
trilogy plus Michael Crichton’s
Jurassic Park
and Martin Gardner’s
Annotated Alice in Wonderland.
Years later Douglas was peeved when Stephen King was the first major author to publish a novel on-line. “I should have done that,” he told me.*
 
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But, despite some brilliant technology and all the benefits of search engines, the book market has by and large remained stubbornly wedded to blocks of laminated wood-pulp.

When the idea of joining a new media/technology company reached Douglas, it was not a bolt from the blue. The ground had been long prepared for him to be receptive to such a suggestion. Robbie Stamp, Managing Director of The Digital Village, was working as a producer for Central Television in 1991. He takes up the story:

The way it happened was this chap, Paul Springer, who was a would-be film producer, had managed to get a meeting with Douglas. He was hoping Douglas would help him to write a feature film of an idea he had. So he and I went to see Douglas in his house in Islington with those great big, huge sofas in that upper room in Duncan Terrace. He was charming, and played Bach to us because there was a point he wanted to make about music and mathematics. I just thought: “What a fascinating man,” and we stayed in touch.

We had lunch periodically, and I think that one of the projects he was looking to do was a big series about evolution. He’d been looking for a producer to work with, and that was another reason why we were talking because with my TV producer’s hat on, maybe I could have been that person . . . He would have been a superb live storyteller, and a really good presenter because he had that fantastic capacity to find the image, the metaphor,
the
way of describing something even if it’s quite complex. He had a number of TV ideas though, frankly, in the end he got fed up with having to go through the “pitch.” He felt that he had established himself by then, and that TV producers could approach him with projects.

At that stage I was going to be leaving Central [TV] for a variety of reasons, and I’d decided it was time to set up a company. I’d been looking at cable opportunities at Central and I had an idea for a company called Cable City. I’d been examining the economics and had felt that they did not work unless you could do two or three low-cost channels from the same base technically—satellite sharing and so on—so you had the opportunity of building cable channels and of using the material you were creating to distribute through other media.

So I was talking about this idea to Douglas, and he said “How much would it cost to invest in this company?” And I plucked a figure out of the air and said “£25,000,” and he said, “Well, I’m in.” And that was that, really. That was how The Digital Village [TDV] started.

Of course, there were hurdles to overcome. It took some years before the company was funded and running, or jogging a bit. Douglas still had a book to write (destined to be published nearly ten years later as
The Salmon of Doubt
) and his publishers around the world were getting cheesed off with being kept waiting.

In fact, he took a bruising blow to his morale when his long-term publisher, Sue Freestone (whom he had followed from Heinemann to Cape) suggested that his non-delivery was hanging over them like some terrible illness that neither wanted to mention, and that it would be a lot easier for their friendship if it were not. Through a rococo process of corporate assimilation that characterized publishing in the eighties and nineties, she was then in the huge Random House complex. It happened that Random also owned the assets of Heinemann, following their acquisition of the Reed Trade Publishing Group. Simon Master, who had been at Pan when Douglas began his career there as a writer, was also at Random as Group Deputy Chairman. The contractual complexities are too boring to recount, but what happened essentially was that Random decided to get out from under its obligation to publish Douglas’s next book by selling its interest to Pan, its co-venture partner and Douglas’s faithful paperback house. This was prompted by Random’s decision to say no to the
Starship Titanic
novelization; evidently at a senior level (for Sue would not have been able to initiate this on her own) their commitment to their wayward author was wavering. In fairness, Douglas was already over half a decade past his deadline.

Random was not exposed by having a huge amount of money out on signature. On the other hand, they did have a substantial liability if and when Douglas delivered his next novel, as they would be obliged to pay him a large delivery advance. In the circumstances it seemed to make sense to consolidate all his work with one publisher, Pan, and its hardcover imprint, Macmillan. Douglas, insecure as ever, felt that Random’s decision was hardly a vote of confidence in him. They clearly did not believe that he would deliver or, if he did, that it would be a worthwhile commercial bet to hang on.

The argument that followed was exacerbated by the fact that Heinemann had the rights to an attractive hardcover omnibus of the
Hitchhiker’s
novels which was still selling over ten thousand copies a year. OK, said Ed Victor, if the rationale for this assignment of the whole contract to Pan is to publish Douglas under one roof, please could we have the hardcover omnibus rights back too? Ian Chapman at Pan then offered £50,000 to buy the rights in the omnibus from Random. In fairness the loss to Random would have been the entire margin on the sales so £50,000, though a decent offer, did not represent the profit on those sales for much more than a year. Publishers hate giving up copyrights for these are all they possess, and there is a certain intangible loss of credibility in the trade when the booksellers notice the change of publisher. Simon Master said no. Ed and Simon argued. Battle lines ebbed and flowed. Douglas himself wrote a plaintive letter (unusual in itself, for he was not a frequent correspondent) to the formidable Gail Rebuck, the boss of Random UK, asking for the omnibus to be released. The answer was still no. Random House was within its rights, of course, but this decision was exceedingly hard-nosed.

Part of Random’s icy calculation to reassign their contract may have been based on the market’s notorious amnesia. Although Douglas’s body of work was more than respectable, it’s damaging if there are too many years between each book. The momentum is lost. Commercially he was still big, but not quite as hot as he had been. Besides, Douglas no longer had the genre to himself. Terry Pratchett’s humorous Discworld novels were deservedly selling by the truckload.*
 
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What’s more, they were being written at exactly the right rate of one per year.

It was important that Douglas not stall completely, and, after the agony of
Mostly Harmless,
it looked very much as if he might. Ed Victor was so concerned that he had rented Douglas the top floor of his office in Bedford Square in the vain hope that having a place to write would make the whole process seem more like a routine, just a job where you did your stuff without too much anguish. There Ed and his sympathetic colleagues, particularly Maggie Phillips and Sophie Hicks (now joint Managing Directors), could keep a kindly, well-focused eye upon him.

For a while Douglas kept quiet about his interest in The Digital Village, but then Ed was approached by Weidenfeld & Nicolson to see if Douglas would create—or at least present—a series of non-fiction science CD-ROMs. Publishers at the time were twitchy about the new media and anxious lest their book sales evaporate while they were still struggling to understand the new ways of distributing what everybody learned to call content (a hateful word that seemed to homogenize everything). Publishers owned a lot of “content” and hoped that the CD-ROM would offer a supplementary market for it. There is now a market that exploits the huge storage capacity of the CD-ROM. However, for most general applications, it turned out that there was already a well-established technology that got the vote of the general trade—a portable, cheap, searchable, user-friendly, large-capacity information module requiring no power by hours of daylight, and with an indefinite storage life. It was called a book.

Douglas had to come clean about his interest in TDV, and a meeting was arranged with him, Robbie, Ed Victor and Douglas’s lawyer, Leon Morgan, in Bedford Square. Ed was not thrilled, and confessed to Robbie later that his intention had been to squash the idea. But he was won over and became a supporter with a place on the board. Besides, he could see that Douglas was not in the writing vein and that this new venture gave him an interest and stimulating company.

With Douglas as the resident genius and brand name, and Apple likely to come in as strategic partners (which they did in 1996), plus some serious TV experience and general management
nous
from Robbie, TDV looked a good bet. At this time investment in Internet-related companies in the UK was still gathering momentum. It was a couple of years before stories were appearing in the press that a company worth sixpence on Thursday had floated on the market on Saturday, thereby making two speccy sixteen-year-olds and a venture capitalist obscene wads of money. Nevertheless, feverish rumblings had started. Retrospect lends a spurious clarity to one’s view, but in the mid-nineties the atmosphere was heady. The possibilities of the new technology, and the uneasy sensation that the ground was shifting beneath one’s feet, were enormously exciting. The feeling that the technological tide might go out leaving a few dying species of commercial dinosaur dehydrating on the beach added to the urgent sense that this was a technology that had to be embraced.

Robbie began to pull all the strands together. Douglas, Robbie, and Robbie’s former boss at Central, Richard Creasey, were the three original partners. Robbie recalls:

We took our first offices on top of Ed’s in Bedford Square, and wrote a business plan and found other partners. Then Ian Charles Stewart joined us as the business brains [a smart ex-Pearson’s venture capitalist]. He had a lot more fund-raising experience than I had. Richard Harris joined us on the technical side because I knew we had need of technical expertise. And we had Ed on board, and Mary Glanville [a lively, clever TV executive] joined us to help with the TV deal-making and so on . . .

So that’s how we got going. There was a huge amount of excitement. We raised seed capital relatively easily from [venture capitalist] Alex Catto to whom we had been introduced by John Lloyd. Alex came in at an early stage, buying 10% of the company for £400,000. I think it was 19 December 1995 when we closed that deal—and what a wonderful feeling it was. I really felt that we had a shot at building something very special.

With the initial investment and with the expert help of Ian Stewart, Robbie finalized a professional business plan complete with spreadsheets that looked set to march confidently into the future. Those nasty figures in brackets were soon to be replaced by positives. Now it’s too easy to say that some of the assumptions were founded on false premises. Nobody at the time knew how quickly the fundamentals were changing. The best advice about on-line advertising revenue, for instance, predicted some remarkable growth, and it was by no means clear then that the access providers, the ISPs, would hog so much of that income. New technologies like nano-billing were also coming on stream that would make it possible to receive tiny amounts of money from multitudes of people in such a way that the cost of collection was low enough for the exercise to be worthwhile. The problem with nano-billing was that the availability of the means did not create the market; people tend to go straight to the source if they are buying on-line rather than paying a fee, however minuscule, to be linked to it. All this, however, is post-hoc wisdom. At the time the potential looked exhilarating.