Five Questions: We asked, Elizabeth Spiers answered

Welcome to our new monthly feature titled "5 Questions" where every month we will ask someone we find interesting to answer 5 random questions. Like we mentioned last week, Dealbreaker.com's Elizabth Spiers agreed to be our first feature and the following is the result. Continue>> Dealbreaker launched back in March of this year, then soon after came Above The Law. Is Dead Horse Media's strategy to throw as many blogs out there and hope they hit? This seems to be the formula used by many blog publishers Actually, I don’t think it is the formula used by many blog publishers, but then the sample size is pretty small. (How many blog networks are there?) The only blog network that I’m materially familiar with besides my own is Gawker Media and I know they’re not just throwing stuff against the wall to see if it sticks, casual appearances to the contrary. There’s a lot of discussion about where to go next and they beta blog until they’re comfortable enough to launch. If it were a matter of throwing out as many blogs as possible, we’d have 20 out there by now and gawker would probably have a hundred. I don’t feel comfortable launching a site until we have to have some evidence that there’s an ad market for the product, that it fits in with what we’re doing overall, and that we have an editorial team I trust to maintain and improve the site without heavy oversight. Then we launch and see if they work. If they don’t, after a reasonable period of time, we shut them down. And if they do, we expand and try to improve the quality over time. I'm sure Dead Horse has a few more projects on the table. Can you elaborate without revealing too much? I can tell you we’re doing a fashion site because that’s already been reported and there are a lot of fashion sites out there as it is. In that case it’s not so much a matter of finding an underserved category, but executing a specific editorial product. There’s some other stuff in the pipeline, but I haven’t set launch dates yet. Do you answer to Justin Smith and Carter Burden on any issues at all? They’re my investors, so I answer to them as an entrepreneur. My company is expected to meet traffic and revenue targets we all agree upon beforehand. So far we’ve exceeded both, which should continue (knock on wood), so they’re pretty happy. We meet about twice a month to update them on where we are and discuss strategy, etc. And they’re great partners to have because Justin’s very smart about PR and ad sales and Carter’s a tech guy. They’re excellent advisors. Why didn't Dealbreaker follow-up on the Mika Salmi scoop? Or were you leaving that up to the media addicts like Us? I followed up as much as I could. Sometimes you just hit a wall with an item and have to wait for something to happen. My sources were still telling me the same thing right up until Gawker got the memo, so I was basically waiting for an announcement of some sort, which finally arrived, but with salmi in a different slot than where I thought he’d be. (So yes, I was leaving that up to the media addicts like you. Why do the work myself when you can do the work for me?) Is your book, a book we would care to read? It’s not out till next Fall, but if you like dark comedy, you’d probably like it. I’m not sure it’s what people are expecting, though. I think the assumption is that if you’re a first-time novelist without an MFA or a pile of literary journal credits, you’re probably doing some sort of roman-a-clef or thinly-veiled autobiography. As a result, I get a lot of questions about whether the book is about a twentysomething woman who works in media. (It’s not.) The lead character is a 36-year-old guy who manages a hedge fund in Greenwich and we don’t have a lot in common. That said, I don’t dislike autobiographical fiction. One of my favorite dark comedies in recent history was Mother’s Milk, by an English writer named Edward St. Aubyn. (It was published here by Open City.) It’s a nasty, brilliant novel and viciously funny. The main character’s experiences are based in part on things that happened to the writer and it’s very well done.