Dymaxicon doesn’t accept ‘submissions’. I’m not a particularly submissive person, and I have always resented that writers were always cast in a submissive role… no one should ever be in the position of accepting or rejecting.
So says California-based Samizdatista Hillary Johnson about Dymaxicon, the new model publishing company she set up as an imprint of Agile Learning Labs. Yes, a software development coaching firm is its own publisher – and is putting titles on the market that cover everything from gardening to scrum (the geeky kind, not the rugby kind). Free from the politics and restraints of traditional publishers, Johnson is highly selective about the titles Dymaxicon puts out, and her gamut-running taste leads to releases such as a graphic novel telling the true story of two teenagers on a killing spree in the 1950s:
The model is simple: No one makes money unless the books sell, and Dymaxicon does a straight 50/50 split with authors. The publisher earns its half by editing the work, formatting it for a range of electronic reading devices and apps, marketing the work (including creative, easily shareable book trailers), and making sure the entire distribution process runs smoothly. Titles are available both in electronic form and, for more money, as hard copies.
So what kind of results are Johnson and her authors getting with this approach?
Nancy Rommelmann, another friend of Samizdata, has released one novel and one essay with Dymaxicon. The Bad Mother quickly became a cult favorite novel, and was downloaded more than 1,000 times within hours of Dymaxicon launching a promotional giveaway (you can still get it for free as I type). Her essay on growing up as a rebellious teen in 1970s Brooklyn, The Queens of Montague Street, hit number seven – and is still climbing – on Amazon’s bestseller list of biographies and memoirs of journalists, topping titles by Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, and Barbara Walters, among many other celebrities. It was also named the number one long-form read of the week by top online outlet Longreads, with dozens of other blogs lauding the work as well worth the 99 cent price.
David Swinson, a former police detective, film producer and music promoter who released his first novel for Dymaxicon after a career of working with the likes of Nick Cave, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Social Distortion, saw his book A Detailed Man rise to the number one spot on Amazon’s list of bestselling noir titles. The murder mystery also hit Amazon’s Top 100 overall list of Kindle bestsellers.
The fact is, you can publish your writing on Amazon if you have 99 cents. (If you are an Amazon Prime member, it is free.) Yes, blogging has enabled anyone to publish their thoughts without cost for years now, but putting your writing into a digestible format and capitalizing on Amazon’s distribution platform is kind of a big deal. Just because it is not difficult to do does not mean it is easy to do well – which is where a publisher like Dymaxicon comes in. This new model means that revenue-sucking intermediaries like agents can be bypassed completely, as can dealing with traditional publishing houses (if one was ever lucky enough to get that far in the first place). As Johnson says:
The way literature gets produced in our world seems positively medieval. Not to mention anti-creative. Publishers are gate-keepers, deciding who gets to be heard, and the process of putting a book out is glacially slow, linear, and hierarchical.
Not anymore, though. So if you have always fancied yourself a novelist in the making, or think the series of email rants you send friends might make for compelling content to read as a collection, consider making an author of yourself. All you have to lose is the expired excuse that it is hard to get published.
Very, very interesting. I have a decision to make about how several dozen hard copy books get published electronically.
Dymaxicon certainly will be on my shortlist of recommended publishers.
Yes, publishers act as gatekeepers, but they also act as a quality sieve. How good they are at this is rightly a matter for discussion, but having perused a few fan fiction sites, as well as a couple of self publishing ones, I appreciate that someone out there is winnowing out a lot of dross which I therefore don’t have to sort through.
I suppose a system of user rating might help to address this, but also maybe not. Any suggestions here? Or shall we be passive and just wait and see what solutions the future throws up?
Amazon recommends does the job for me, aka the wisdom of crowds.
I don’t need some sub-Marxist pseudo-intellectual who got a job in a publishing house because the owner fancied him/her to decide what I should read.
What Antoine said. Amazon’s recommendations are very useful for a great range of products, and books are only different because there’s a personal taste for style involved. The various preview features that exist now mostly alleviate that problem.
Cats: the latter. Who knows, maybe there’s room for the old-style publishing houses as well – no one said we have to totally do away with them. What is obvious is that they are in great need for some healthy competition, and outfits like the ones mentioned here and others seem to be it.
A 50-50 split of profits from sales seems very fair to me, especially with Dymaxion taking on the job of editing,formatting and promoting the resulting book. In my own circle of indy-writer friends we used to comment (laughingly) that writing the book itself was only half the job – marketing it was the other half!
And I do believe that the’look inside’ feature on internet vendors like Amazon.com is the single most valuable way for a reader to judge for themselves the quality of a book. If a literary agent or a publisher can tell by a couple of pages or a chapter or two that a book will appeal – than certainly an ordinary reader ought to be able to do that also. When I consider if I should accept an offer to review a particular book, being able to ‘look inside’ was the deciding factor. Those times when I went on the basis of the publicity material or someone elses’ opinion and skipped over ‘look inside’ – I usually regretted it.
I currently have six HF novels out there and selling respectibly well – and without DIY publishing and POD technology, I’d probably never have even gotten one of them into print.
A publisher once turned down one of my novels with the words: “That’s not the kind of thing I see people reading in the subway every day.”
Feel free to draw your own conclusions as to why I will never sign with a traditional publisher. (I say “never” with the qualification that in order to change my mind, I would have to be paid an advance and agree to a royalty scheme which would make publishing me unprofitable. Ergo, not gonna happen.)
I have three novels coming out within the next two weeks (one brand new, two previously published in paperback), with a third (new) by the end of March, another two (new) during the middle of the year, and one more by year’s end. All will be published through Amazon.
Harper, Doubleday, Random House and the rest can kiss my African-American ass.
Hmmm. 50/50. Most writers pay tax + 15% to their agent *then* get royalties after their advance makes a profit from the publisher. Depending on what the writer’s day job pays this model might or might not be beneficial.
I am very excited about new publishing models online and agree that the current publishing paradigm is where music was ten – fifteen years ago. But, please, do not underestimate the tsunami of crap out there, nor the ability of some in publishing to spot a diamond in the rough.
Writers will use all models to move content and make a buck, the market in it’s brutal and unequivocal wisdom will decide.
The 50/50 split is a hangover from the punk record label days (and the ‘grunge font’ is a giveaway). It seems to work okay, there were a few of them about in the early 2000s, usually advertising on the intello side of punk in places like Punk Planet magazine, but this was before e-publishing.
I’m a book designer and just got some very, very favourable quotes for print and binding from a fine bindery in Yorkshire. Anyone?