John Lindsay is not the prototypical published author. By
all accounts, he is not quite a prototypical human being.
Lindsay is a 27-year-old homeowner and an admitted (functioning)
alcoholic.
His website dontevenreply.com, a crass collection of email
threads in which he “fucks with gullible assholes for profit”, netted him a
book deal with Sterling Publishing, a contract with an entertainment agency and
meetings with the likes of Viacom to pitch a pilot produced by Joel McHale, all
before his 26th birthday.
The key to his success?
“Not giving a fuck, I guess. Or just being an unrepentant
asshole.”
I am acquainted with Lindsay through a collection of mutual
friends, but tracking him down for an interview has been daunting. Over the
last few months, he has been in and out of the United States performing his
“adult” job as a solutions consultant for a small collection of undisclosed insurance
companies. Writing has always been a hobby of Lindsay’s, but only a series of
fortuitous circumstances lead to it supplementing his income. Talking about his
writing, subsequently, came across as the last thing he felt like doing.
After a few weeks of text messages back and forth, I finally
track him down on a Friday night after agreeing to meet at the Sprout Music
Collective in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I walk in to find Lindsay sitting at
the bar sipping a double Jameson neat. “I just got back from Puerto Rico last
night on a redeye,” he tells me, his voice sounding worn.
“I’m leaving for Ireland in two days. Don’t make this feel
like work.”
I casually try and jump into conversation by asking him how
he likes Puerto Rico. He tells me that he enjoys the weather, but he is in and
out of taxis and meetings too frequently to enjoy the local culture.
“The beer is shitty, anyway,” he warns. “Seriously, it will
make you shit your pants.”
“I work with computers,” he tells me when I ask about his
day-to-day work. “I let rich people who run insurance companies look at their
iPads to figure out they can jack up insurance costs on women who drive SUVs. “
John Lindsay’s sense of humor is rooted in vulgarity and
shock tactics. He tells the type of jokes that don’t need punchlines, and he
sells them with a stonewalled poker face that makes you wonder if he’s actually
kidding or if he’s really that fucked in the head. Any semblance
of political correctness is foreign to him.
There’s a funk band, complete with a horn section, half-assing
their way through a Black Sabbath medley.
“This band is fucking AIDS,” he deadpans.
His expression reminds me of the last time we were in a room
together. We played Texas Hold Em’, and the man took everything but my
underwear.
I ask him if he’s played any cards lately.
“Yeah, I flew out to Vegas for a weekend a month ago. I got
comped rooms and the flights were cheap enough. I lost 500 bucks, but fuck it.
The booze was free, too.”
Lindsay tells me he is a “spontaneous kind of cat” when I
press him on the spur of the moment vacation. This type of spontaneity is what
sparked his entire writing “career”.
The entire thing was an accident.
“I didn’t have a car. I was on craigslist trying to find a
cheap vehicle and every time I thought I found a deal, I kept getting dicked
around by people. I was getting pissed off and then I saw this stupid bitch’s
ad. It was just…it was just so entitled.”
“It read something like ‘I need a brand new Ford Explorer
for me and my 3 beautiful children and it’s gotta be this and that and ‘blah
blah blah’ and it’s gotta be 1500 bucks. I was like “fuck this”, and I just
started messing with her. I tried selling her O.J’s Bronco, all torn to shit,
stuff like that, and she got so upset that I just kept doing it because it was so
funny. I got her 4 or 5 times and then I decided, “eh, that was pretty fun.”
“So I started trying to bait other people into shit like that,
and it just became it’s own thing.”
That thing quickly morphed into an internet phenomenon.
dontevenreply.com, equipped with Google’s advertising services, started
generating John upwards of a few hundred
dollars a month. Reddit and similar website sharing communities ate it up, and
soon enough copycat pages were attempting to recreate and, in some cases, flat
out plagiarize his work.
Through it all, Lindsay kept pumping out new material.
He tried to convince a woman looking to find after-school
transportation for her daughter that she needed an armed motorcade and military
convoy, complete with a Deer Hunter-style
testimonial from a colleague.
He tried to sell a fully automate Glock 18c handgun
“disguised” by a plastic Solo cup to a man looking for stealthy weaponry. When
the man declined, he offered a case of Sprite containing a “badass M16” as an alternative.
He offered an 18-year old college kid looking for summer
employment a job cutting up dead horses with a chainsaw and disposing of them
in his neighbor’s lake.
He even tried to barter his “whore of a wife” for a 1994
Jeep Wrangler.
“All I needed was an idea, and with the amount of dumb shit
you see on craigslist on any given day, it wasn’t hard. Once I had someone on
the hook, I just wanted to take it as far as I could. I was weaving it into my
day to day. I could do it from work, or at home, or even at the bar.”
Entertainment agents flooded his inbox, and talks of a book
deal materialized. Lindsay started to realize the potential for monetization
was high.
“Maybe after a year, some guy emailed me and was like ‘you
know your ads are the wrong size?” So I changed them and, then…holy shit,
pretty much.”
Lindsay signed with an agent and started taking meetings. He
eventually signed a deal with Sterling Publishing, a New York based company not
exactly known for their work in the comedic non-fiction world.
“When I went in there, it was all young kids, and one of
them came up to me and said ‘dude, thanks for writing this book, because we do
mostly self-help shit and it’s boring as hell, and this is the first exciting
thing we’ve ever had.”
His towering epic, Emails
from an Asshole, was released on April 1st, 2010 to moderate
critical acclaim and, according to his agent, impressive sales. It contained
70% new material and a “greatest hits” collection from the website.
“It’s like Sasha Baron Cohen on the internet,” proclaimed
Jane Wells of CNBC.
Show runners at MTV and Comedy Central starting calling,
intrigued by the back-and-forth interactions within the book. They envisioned a
Crank Yankers style show based around
his ideas, with live actors reenacting the dialogue.
Meanwhile, Lindsay continued updating dontevenreply.com and
started considering ideas for a follow up.
“We were supposed to have a second book, and in the final
stages they made me an offer for more money than the first one. Then they
pulled out.”
“We found out the president of Sterling was super fuckin’
offended by the first book and wanted nothing to do with me going forward.”
What started as a few running gags on a crudely designed
website was making actual waves in the publishing world.
“They pretty much burnt their bridge with ICM (the entertainment
agency representing Lindsay) with that one. I don’t know what happened after, but from
what I’ve heard, that really fucked up their relationship with (Sterling).”
He went on to take a few meetings in Los Angeles with a
group of television executives, but after talks of a possible holding deal,
nothing ever materialized.
“They said they were trying to get away from the whole
‘reality’ thing, which is weird because that shit is bigger now than it’s ever
been.”
Although his experience working within the entertainment
field may have ended abruptly, Lindsay is still receiving royalties from sales
of the book (“apparently it’s selling well in France, which is fucking
bizarre,” he quips) and advertising revenue from dontevenreply.
He seems content with how his foray into the publishing and
entertainment industries played out. He owns a house in West Goshen, a suburban
neighborhood 35 minutes southwest of Philadelphia (“a fucking tree fell through
my roof last summer,” he casually mentions) and clocks 40+ hour weeks at his
consulting job.
As Lindsay orders another double Jameson, I ask him if his
experiences with the industry left any lingering bad taste in his mouth.
He looks as if he is in deep thought and inhales deeply as
the tone-deaf funk band continues hammering away in the background.
Then he snickers and calls me a pussy for ordering a beer
instead of whiskey and gives me the kind of candid answer you might expect from
a guy who’s only published works label him an asshole.
“There’s a ton of those blog-to-book things now, and it’s
their desperate attempt to cling onto the way times are now with the internet.
They have to deal with Amazon and Kindles, e-readers, all that shit. They’re, I
don’t know…trying to capture youth again?”
“Fuck ‘em.”
