Since Daisy Alioto co-founded it in 2021, the Dirt media ecosystem has become a waypoint for off-the-beaten-path cultural commentary. With a focus on the infinitely fertile intersection of digital technology and culture, Dirt's offerings take diverse forms: it produces weekly podcast interviews with everyone from indie booksellers to venture capitalists; publishes omnivorous criticism and reporting through its flagship brand; and has sprouted niche offshoots for tennis, design and interiors, and books.
Dirt Books, the brand's new publishing imprint, is the "slowest media" they've done to date, Alioto said. The imprint will launch this June with Lauren Napier's Tattooed, Pierced, and Fucked Up: A Scene Memoir 2004–2008, a multimedia account of the Vans Warped Tour era. Geoffrey Mak's Total Depravity, a debut novel set in Berlin's rave scene, will follow in November. These first titles emerged from direct relationships, Alioto said, but Dirt Books will ultimately open to submissions.
Dirt plans to publish at least two titles per year moving forward and will sell through a range of digital channels, including Bookshop.org and Shopify. It is in the process of seeking distribution to bookstores through Asterism, and is being advised by industry veterans including Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter, Trellis Literary agent Allison Devereux, and author and publicist Sarah Jean Grimm.
PW sat down with Alioto to talk authenticity, curation, and how Dirt Books plans to be a new kind of press.
On your website, you state that part of Dirt Books' mission is to highlight "the subcultures driving artistic innovation." Did you intentionally select books that focused specifically on music scenes, or was that coincidental?
It just sort of happened that way, but I ultimately feel like they're a great pairing. It was a way to plant a flag and show what our taste is with a limited sample size.
I am sort of on the record as being "anti-scene," in the sense that the word "scene" has become a way to denote a group of people that are more interested in the social production around art and proximity than they are to actually creating art. But I also think that it's still a really useful word, because it represents people coming together around a shared interest. And when you have a scene that is at the fringes of culture, ultimately what happens is it exerts a gravity on the perspective of the mainstream.
If you look at what happened during the Warped Tour era, it happened almost a little too well. You can track that timeline in Lauren's book, where a lot of the acts she was most interested in never became household names, but she was already starting to engage with the rise of bands like Cute Is What We Aim For, which truly became pop-ified punk. I love a pop-punk band, don't get me wrong, but I think the sort of skepticism of people who were in that original scene towards that was, here's music that mimics our the conventions of our genre, but does not hold our values. I'm really interested in how, when something starts on the fringe and then becomes mainstream, how do you keep the values inherent in that form?
Geoffrey Mak's novel feels very journalistic. Do you think that reportage element is central to your identity as a publisher?
Geoff's book is a thriller, but there's a lot that's almost like a novel of manners, where you're learning about the social codes of Berlin's nightlife culture through the text. A lot of the habits and the rituals and the practices of people who enjoy raving were pulled from Writing on Raving, the essay collection Mak edited with Zoë Beery and McKenzie Wark, and reproduced in a very accurate way in this novel. It's almost like a corollary to his nonfiction.
My background is in journalism, so I think for a text to feel like it's true to the subject matter, even if it's fictional, is naturally important to me. What we're really talking about is authenticity, and that is definitely a driving value in building our list. Authenticity, in the sense that it denotes accuracy, has been watered down over the last 10 or so years; it has come to mean representing every single experience or identity. You can't do that in one book. Lauren's book is very specific to her experience. Geoff's book is an imagined experience with a very specific group of people, grounded in very accurate details. As I build up my list, what I'm going to be looking for are books that are authentic and experience-forward, but not necessarily identity-forward in a way that feels limiting.
What made you want to go into books? What is the hole in publishing that you hope Dirt plugs up?
I think there is a lot to be said about legibility, and how what is legible to a reader is not necessarily what is legible to a publishing house. When a publisher is buying a book, they're trying to anticipate whether it's going to be legible to a reader, but the fact of the matter is, nobody really knows. I never worked in traditional publishing, but I can say, as somebody who reads a lot of books, what I'm looking for is not necessarily a straight story that can fit into a Publishers Marketplace blurb. What attracts people to books, especially right now, is much more nebulous—they could be encountering them in a number of different environments and need them to be recommended, possibly multiple times, before they stick.
I think that's where it comes back to authenticity. My expectation is, if the author's heart, soul, experience, perspective, and individuality has gone into the book, then that will always find an audience. I am really into marketing, but I'm into marketing the book after it's been made—not into anticipating what the marketing language of a book has to be to justify its existence. I think great art justifies its own existence, and then smart people know how to get it in front of the right readers. Part of the reason why we wanted to have our own press is that I just can't see a situation where books grow out of the Dirt ecosystem, and then we have to market them to an editor at a publishing house before they can get made. It felt like too many layers between our curatorial eye and putting something into the world.
Do you see yourself as a disruptor?
I do have frustrations with the mentality of this is how things are done, so this is how they must continue to be done, but I don't necessarily see myself as a disrupter. I think every independent operation in publishing is additive.
I think I feel less threatened by the ecology of self-publishing and BookTok than the average person that works in publishing, because the goal is to get people to buy books at the end of the day. A book isn't a band t-shirt, but I think a lot of us would get out of our own way if we would think of it as more like a band t-shirt than not. I don't think there's anything dirty in that. Of course, I want readers to be critics, but also, a reader is a reader. At Dirt, we're selling a good, but the ideas behind it ultimately are not touched by that commercial relationship. I guess it's just that eternal balance between falling into the poptimism trap of let people enjoy things, but also not hiding behind a hierarchy to determine what gets made.
