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The Most Controversial Thing I Ever Sold ($9,390 in 1 Night)
Did I go too far?
Issue #113
I’ve been away with my partner for the Easter break and haven’t had time to go op shopping. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a pretty wild story for you. It’s not thrifting content, but it is selling, just not other peoples donated items.
This is a story about creating my own physical product when I was 23 years old. A product that resulted in death threats, online hate, Where’s Waldo threatening to sue me, huge media coverage and a large check deposited into my bank account. Let’s get into it.
Mat.
P.S. you can listen to an extended version of this story on Flip Weekly’s podcast.
In This Issue
The Most Controversial Thing I Ever Sold
When I was in my early 20’s I was in full on creator mode. Fresh off the back of making $125,000 in a single weekend with a viral website I wanted to move on to something tangible. I had been building ridiculous viral websites for over a year and had the urge to focus and create something I could physically hold. No more rushing to put a project out, a good quality product requires time, and lots of it.
It was March 2015; I was 23 years old with a lot of ideas for physical products but only 1 I was obsessed with. I had grown up with books like Where’s Waldo? and always found the illustrations to be creative and low-key funny. Characters making faces, pulling pranks, hidden Easter eggs, that sort of thing. I had my mind set on creating something similar, but in my own avant-garde, early 20’s attention-seeking edgy way.
From a very young age, all the way back to when I was importing and selling products from China at 16 years old, I understood that nothing is out of the realm of possibilities. If you want to do something, the only thing stopping you is you. Certain tasks may be tricky, but there’s always a way.
I didn’t need to contact a publishing company to create this book, I could do everything myself. After all, I only need an illustrator, graphic designer and a printing company. That’s easy. The hardest thing is coming up with an idea for the book.
I was spitballing ideas around with everyone that would listen. What’s hard to find? What are people looking for? What can we have a bit of fun with? What’s something relevant that will get attention around the world? Eventually the perfect idea popped up.
“What about the missing Malaysian airplane?”
At the time it was perfect. Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 had disappeared off the face of the Earth 12 months earlier. The mystery had dominated headlines daily and conspiracies were popping up left and right. You could barely go a day without hearing about this missing plane.
23 year old Mat thought this was genius. No-one could find the plane and with all the speculation surrounding where it could be means we can hide parts of the plane in several different scenes and locations on each page. Not only that, I could have a lot of fun incorporating cameos by celebrities and getting really absurd with it.
Instead of rushing like every other project of mine, I wanted to plan this out. I got together with a friend and we brainstormed all of the potential scene locations. The conspiracies at the time were wild.
“It’s in Russia!”
“The North Korean’s captured it!”
Great, let’s lean into that and then go even further into the absurd and put the plane in Hell. After all, if we have a Hell scene we can then decide who gets to make a cameo in Hell. This part of the project was incredibly fun, the list of celebrities, politicians, CEO’s all making appearances was hilarious. Some of the Easter egg suggestions were so ridiculous that my friend suggested I put myself in Hell. So I did.
Along with these people, I needed to decide what readers were actually going to be searching for. It wasn’t going to be MH370 fully intact, it was going to be debris. Landing gear, luggage, oxygen masks, the black box recorder and a captain’s hat were to be strewn throughout all of the different scenes.
The planning took several weeks. There were re-writes, cameos removed and re-added, last minute scene changes. I knew that I needed this fully finalized before I moved on to the next stage. There’s nothing worse than hiring somebody to work on your project when it’s not fully formed – you’re wasting everyone’s time including your own.
We land on 12 scenes in total:
1. Airport
2. Area 51
3. Australia
4. Hell
5. North Pole
6. Ocean
7. Moon
8. Jungle
9. North Korea
10. Pakistan
11. Russia
12. Tropical Island
As absurd as the suggestions, besides Hell and the Moon, pretty much every one of these locations was at one point suggested as the location of MH370.
After finalizing everything, the next step was to find an illustrator. It sounds easy, right? Pay a freelancer or a company, they illustrate, hand it over and you’re set. Not quite. Not only do you need to find somebody within your budget, you also need somebody that is available for several months. Add to that that this is a search and find activity book about a missing plane carrying 239 people, it’s not exactly something they could put their name on.
I talked to a lot of illustrators who were extremely talented but they wouldn’t include certain elements and took a moral stance. For a project like this, censoring is a big turn off. I wanted to go hard, ruffle some feathers and cause a stir, it’s how this book was going to sell.
It’s now the middle of April. It took a while, but I finally found somebody who was okay with the subject. Did they approve of it? No, not really, they didn’t want any credit. Were they okay drawing it? Sure. 5 days after meeting, all questions were answered, samples were drawn, a contract was drawn up and payment was made.
For the rest of April and June, the illustrator was working extremely long hours, every single day illustrating my vision. He would sketch up backgrounds for approval, add in all of the cameos, work on the filler, get my tick of approval and then color the scenes.
Sketches followed by inking.
Seeing the moon location come to life with Gina Rinehart as Jabba the Hut was incredibly satisfying. A few of the other cameos included:
1. Steve Jobs in Hell
2. Putin riding a horse shirtless in Russia
3. Grandma hunting reindeer at the North Pole
4. Budgie the Little Helicopter at the Airport
5. Xenomorph’s at Area 51
6. A tuna eating a lion on the Island (homage to The Other Guys)
7. ET on the Moon
8. Nigel Thornberry in the Jungle
9. Dennis Rodman in North Korea
10. And lots more
At the same time, MH370 is in the news every day and I’m starting to stress. If the plane is found, the project is essentially dead and all of the money I’ve invested so far would be lost. This is playing on my mind and I start to slip into old habits. I want this project launched as soon as possible and a few corners were cut, specifically the background extras of scenes. These are people with unique facial expressions and features and they all need to be sketched and colored, that takes time, a lot of time. I opt to scale down the number of people in the background.
July rolls around and the illustrations are complete. I’ve been talking to a book publishing company in Australia called Publicious and by July 22nd , I have the first proof copies in my hands, a very small paperback and a good quality hardcover. The book only had 12 scenes with each spread across 2 pages; the paperback was very thin, it almost felt like a brochure. I didn’t think anybody would spend money on it, so I opted for the hardcover and created a few extra inner pages.
There it is.
I placed an order of 50 books for $941.95 which were to be sent to journalists and bloggers I’d previously spoken to in the hopes they would write or talk about it.
The first gamble.
So what’s next? We needed to create the website so people could buy the book. We’re not selling on eBay or any 3rd party website; it’s all direct to consumer. This was another fun creative task. When you first landed on the website MH370 would fly across the face of the website only to never be seen again. We had Easter eggs in the code, jokes on the front-end and small previews of the scenes on the homepage. You can still see the website via Archive.org.
An early social media tile.
We’re making a lot of progress and getting ready for launch but we still need inventory. I can’t buy the books in 50 lot increments; the cost per item is too high. In order for me to sell at an affordable price, I need that unit price to be close to $5 or below. To do that, it’s risk taking time.
I need to purchase 2,000 books for $10,132.47 which gives us a cost per book of $5.07. If every book sells revenue will be close to $30,000 with profit of around $20,000. That’s not too bad considering if it’s a huge success I can always reorder and have this recurring income or even sell the entire project.
Not long after crossing my fingers and placing the order, a company had caught wind on what I was doing. I received a letter from Walker Books Limited. Yes, not an email or a call, a letter via Registered Mail.
1/2
2/2
Walker Books Ltd. is the publisher and the exclusive publishing rights holder on behalf of Martin Handford, the author and copyright owner of the internationally acclaimed Where's Wally books.
Uh oh.
We understand your above-named book is imminently to be published and it has come to our attention that the blurb on your pre-order web page for this title, now picked up by most of the news media and no doubt internet selling sites, states that your above book is "Where's Wally inspired".
Not good.
This statement creates a clear and overt association between your book and the Where's Wally books by trading off the name, reputation and goodwill of our books and we are therefore writing to put you on notice that use of such a statement or any similar statement creating an association with our books constitutes an infringement of our rights.
Waldo is not congratulating me on the book.
Furthermore, both Walker Books Limited and Martin Handford do not wish the "Where's Wally" name to be associated with a book making light of such a tragic occurrence.
Yeah, that makes sense. They give me 5 days to comply with their demands which you can see in the letter. At this point in my life I’d have received plenty of these kinds of letters but they’re still frightening.
The demands seem straight-forward, remove Where’s Wally from the website and we’re good to go. The only issue is that I put “Where’s Wally inspired” on the actual book.
I should never have mentioned it.
23 year old Mat did not run anything past a lawyer. Smart, right?
I send a desperate email to the printing company telling them my predicament and pray they haven’t started the print run. If it has, I’m completely screwed. If I can’t sell the books I’m out of over $10,000. If I do sell them I will 100% get sued by a huge publishing company which would cost me a hell of a lot more. This must be karma catching up to me.
I receive an email back from the printing company. The run hadn’t started. We’re safe. I let out a sigh of relief, have “Where’s Wally inspired” removed from the book and we’re good to go. Crisis averted, but man, what an idiotic mistake on my end.
In response to Walker Books Limited, we sent them some fan mail because I’m desperate to have the last laugh.
Playing with fire.
Of course this was against legal advice which said:
“It may be wise considering the first possible infringement not to provoke the rights holder and publisher. I would advise against posting the drawing online or distributing the drawing.“
It’s now October and it’s time to launch this book. Vice was the first to write about it and on October 20th , this article went live. From there the news articles and blog posts snowballed with other media outlets picking it up including A LOT from within Malaysia.
Just a short glimpse of the media attention.
I also received several Facebook messages from family members of people onboard the flight. Orders were flooding in and so were the death threats and hateful messages. In typical 23 year old Mat fashion, we had a contact form on the website and if the user selected the “complaint“ option we would auto-generate a subject line of “I’m a little bitch“.
This journalist called me a “shameless author“.
For the rest of the month and all of November the project was hectic, especially with Christmas just around the corner.
A lot of domestic and international orders.
As December hit I was encouraged to do a Reddit AMA, basically a Q&A on the social media website Reddit. To my surprise it went well… really well. The post received thousands of upvotes, over 2,500 comments and for me it was an incredibly fun weekend of answering questions. You can read it here but be warned, I was not sober for 99% of the AMA.
The AMA resulted in 36,133 visitors to the website, 626 books selling which resulted in $9,390 in revenue. Not too bad for a Saturday night that I don’t remember.
Over the next few weeks the orders continue rolling in but I realize quite quickly that a marketing strategy that relies solely on media isn’t sustainable. To be honest, I didn’t think that far. Yes, I did pay for and get a barcode for the book with the hopes they’d be carried in-stores but that never happened. Despite Where’s Bin Laden being carried in most major bookstores, Where’s MH370 was apparently just too offensive.
I have no idea what this article says, but I bet it’s not good.
Don’t get me wrong, I did try and continue to generate press, and in some cases it worked. I created an entirely fake newspaper with a cover that read MH370 was found and North Korea was to blame.
Could have been another lawsuit.
I had the local newsagents put aside their unsold papers and I layered my fake covers over the top. After that, they were taken to Martin Place and I paid a couple of people to hand them out to morning commuters.
Resulted in a bit of online traction but not much.
Fast forward 12 months and sales eventually dwindled down to 1 or 2 a week and having made my money back I lost focus and moved onto other things. It was also at this time that I was able to reflect on the project and realize that this isn’t something I’m proud of. 239 people died and thousands of other people were affected by the disappearance of MH370. I jumped on the tragedy a mere 12 months after it happened, right when the families were grieving and holding out slivers of hope.
I learnt a lot from Where’s MH370 and no longer create projects intended to shock or offend. All of the remaining books were thrown out. I’d rather focus on helping people, solving their problems, not creating them. It’s one of the reasons why I started Flip Weekly.
As for MH370, to this day it’s regarded as the greatest mystery in aviation history.
End.
I know this has been a bit different, I appreciate you making it this far. We’ll be back to regular scheduled programming very soon. Thanks again for reading, I’ll see you again next week.
Mat.
Goosebumps Whatnot Update
First off, if you haven’t joined Whatnot, do so by clicking here and you’ll get free credit.
Second, a small delay as Australia Post have screwed up the delivery.
Classic.
That said, we should have the auction go live before the 16th of April. I’m extremely keen, so sign up to Whatnot, follow Retro Rescuers and you’ll be notified when the show is going to go live.
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