(Photo by Kristen Gardner) - Steve Sutherland, Jeff Gilbert, Matt Carson, from left to right.
I decided to write about Matt Carson when I found out he was a Christmas nut like myself. His two-year quest to write and self-publish a Christmas book called “The Attic” is an instructive tale of a resourceful entrepreneur.
The Christmas book odyssey eventually would lead the 36-year-old Fauquier County businessman to start a pair of Web development businesses, one of which is an ambitious enterprise called BigTeams.
But he had me at the Christmas book.
Carson said he was inspired to write after seeing Santa Claus fall off a roof and die in Tim Allen’s 1994 hit movie, “The Santa Claus.” In the movie, Tim Allen puts on a Santa suit and eventually morphs into the big guy himself.
He thought the movie demeaned St. Nick.
“I thought, ‘Any idiot cannot put on a Santa suit and become Santa,’ ” said Carson, who credits his aunt’s Christmas gift shop in Prince William County with instilling in him a love for the holiday.
So he set out to write a story to put Santa in a better light, hammering out a 104-page book in 1997 in just a few days while he was a student at West Virginia University. The story is about a kid who goes into his parents’ attic, finds a journal about his grandfather’s trip to the North Pole and learns how grandpa gets rescued by Santa Claus.
After writing “The Attic,” Carson set out to learn how to sell the book. He went to the local library and read up on how to start a small business. He then called Barnes & Noble to find out how to get his book on its shelves. The folks there told him his first step should be to get an ISBN number (International Standard Book Number), which is required if you are going to sell a book.
He also was directed to a book distributor, which is a middleman that buys books from publishers and sells them to stores. The distributor gave him idiot-proof instructions, such as making sure pages had numbers and the title was on the spine. He also received tips such as how to lobby retailers so they will sell his book and give it good display. In other words, salesmanship.
Next he went to the Fauquier County courthouse and registered a publishing company in the name of Carson’s Pub. He drew a beer mug and used it as the company logo.
To prepare the book for sale, a painter friend of his aunt’s drew a picture of Santa Claus for the cover. He used his middle name to invent a new name for the author — Matt Amick — because he thought the name Carson as both author and publisher would look cheesy.
Carson started calling printing companies, asking how many copies he could get printed for $5,000, which was all he had in his bank account. (He had saved the money while working basic jobs at Oasis Wineries in Hume, which was owned by the father of Tareq Salahi, the notorious White House gatecrasher.)
He eventually found a Charlottesville printing company that produced 12,000 copies. He asked Amazon to carry the book. The answer was yes, but Carson had to have a Web site.
Carson couldn’t afford to build one professionally, so he offered to fix the transmission on a buddy’s 1988 Saab. In return, the Web-savvy friend built a Web site for “The Attic.”
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