Samizdata

Damian Thompson at the Telegraph is circumspect, but he quotes Jamie Dettmer, former war correspondent for the Times, who is not:

It has been common knowledge for years among British and American reporters that Bob can just make things up or lift other’s work without attribution and embellish it. I recall him doing it to me on a story in Kuwait about the killings of Palestinians at the hands of Kuwaitis following the liberation of the emirate. I remember also the time Fisk filed a datelined Cairo story about a riot there when he was in fact at the time in Cyprus.

Pope’s theory on this — why Bob gets away with it — is that fellow members of the press corp don’t like to dish the dirt on their colleagues. “The one time I decided to let it be known that a fellow reporter was cheating and passing off others’ work as his own, it was I who became the odd man out, an informer with a chip on my shoulder, and standing joke,” he writes. He notes also that “editors are reluctant to challenge established writers.”

It is noticeable that this collegiate solidarity only fractured when Fisk himself offended against it, by insulting fellow journalists.

(Via Tim Blair, also of the Telegraph, but a different one.)

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.