This promise can be fulfilled with either publishing medium, but what a print publication offers that electronic cannot is the tactile experience of holding a bound journal in your hands. Hunger Mountain of the Vermont College of Fine Arts publishes both print and electronic versions of each issue. As Miciah Bay Gault, Managing Editor, puts it, “Our print journal is important. Writers want to be published in print. They want to hold that relic in their hands. It gives credibility to the journal.” Rosa del Duca, Managing Editor of Mary Magazine, adds, “I like to hold something in my hands and physically mark it up.” And while Christian Peet, Founder and Publisher of Tarpaulin Sky points out that their online journal has a wider readership than their print publications, “By contrast, I still love paper, and so do a lot of other people. For that reason we do a print journal also.”

Aside from the physicality of the print reading experience, subscribers to a print journal are more apt to read the issue cover to cover. As Gault puts it, “Readers who have a print journal in their hands will read it thoroughly. Users on a website will flip through the issue, a page here and a page there.”

The credibility factor is also an issue. Because electronic publishing is so low-cost, the perception is that the works being published are second rate. And as Michael Czyzniejewski of Mid-American Review points out, with so many web journals popping up online – one a day on average he believes – it’s hard to build a strong reputation.

Finally, just as electronic publishing has opportunities particular to its medium, so does print. Jodee Stanley of Ninth Letter shares, “A big part of our mission is to explore creative ways of making use of the printed form. We try to do things in our print publication that could not be duplicated electronically … In general, there are a number of readers who are only comfortable with the printed form. There is a natural desire to hold an artifact that is an essential part of the aesthetic experience. That desire may become diluted by the presence of digital media, but I don’t think it will ever completely disappear.”

Ultimately, however, content is key – for readers and editors alike. “When you have the journal in your hand,” says Laurie Ann Cedilink of Gulf Coast, “and you are absolutely crazy about the content – that’s a wonderful feeling.”

• Blackbird receives 750,000 individual visits annually, according to founding editor Jeff Lodge at the Virginia Commonwealth University
• Barnstorm shows 30,000-40,000 readers a month, according to Matt Thompson at the University of New Hampshire
• Hunger Mountain of the Vermont College of Fine Arts publishes both print and online versions of their journal; while their print run is 1,000 per issue, they receive an average of 200 readers a day on their online version – or more than their entire print subscriber base in just one week

While the artifacts of print journals are losing support due to financial and cultural pressures, online journals are rapidly becoming the preferred mode of production, distribution, and art form. In addition to showcasing creative writing that is fresh – sometimes written just weeks or months before it is published, as opposed to books that are at least 2 years old before they reach readers – online journals offer modes of presentation not possible in print, including audio, video, computer graphics, digital animation, interactive fiction, hypertext, blog posts, and more.

When asked why Drunken Boat, an international online journal of the arts, was designed as an electronic journal instead of print back in 1999, founding editor Ravi Shankar first pointed to the cost-effective benefits of the medium. With recent MFAs from Columbia University and Parsons School of Design respectively, he and partner Michael Mills, a visual artist, were saddled with student loans but propelled to publish the work of their friends and professors, and to solicit work from writers and artists they admired. He then explained:

“There’s a secondary reason that we began publishing an electronic journal – that is the egalitarian distribution of art. We wanted anyone who had a PC and an Internet connection to be able to see what we published. What we didn’t forsee but what became readily apparent after our first couple of issues was that we were reaching people in far-flung parts of the world. All of a sudden we were receiving submissions from Australia and China! I continue to see that as the greatest advantage of electronic publishing: that for the fraction of the cost and overhead, you can publish something online that will reach a significantly larger audience. We have a larger audience than The New Republic and I daresay our annual budget is 1/100th of the size, if not smaller.”

Shankar continued with his third reason to publish electronically, and that was because “Drunken Boat is heavily invested in publishing work that utilizes the medium of the web as part of its compositional strategy. So much of the work we publish – hypertext, digital animation, sound art, video, web art, interactive fiction, blog posts – simply could not exist in print. The Internet is going to fundamentally change human communication much the way the printing press did, and we’re just in the initial stages of seeing that transformation take place. We want to utilize the medium of the web to highlight those kinds of dynamic works that simply could not exist in print.”

Drunken Boat has been mentioned on BBC-Vietnam, featured at a conference in the Netherlands, and is widely loved in Australia. So perhaps what electronic publishing offers best of all is interconnectivity with an international literary community. With WordPress-supported journals in particular – like Hunger Mountain – readers are invited to respond through the Comments feature at the end of published material. The reading of today’s literary journals, therefore, is no longer a flat experience but the beginning of a conversation on what is – or isn’t – outstanding contemporary literature.

Related Reading:

Former Book Designer Says Good Riddance to Print

Community Building

• Build community around the journal by creating personal, ongoing relationships with contributors 
• Send one e-mail a month to your e-list – no more or it gets too much, no less or they forget about you. Weekly is too much; monthly is appropriate.
• Build your audience organically by having some patience and letting people come to you; don’t overdue it with email blasts and online publicity
• Encourage editors to respond to emails in personal ways, including signing their own name when rejecting submissions
• Build a sense of trust among other literary journals, and focus on cross-promotion not just of your journals, but of the artists and writers for whom you share a mutual appreciation

Blogs & Social Networking

• Blogs are flickering fireflies of promotion; make connections with both new & established ones
• Tap into the blogosphere with a niche genre
• Use your blog for in-depth content – book reviews, interviews, spotlights on contributors
• Create a Facebook page for the journal & encourage your editorial board & contributors to use their personal FB pages to announce new issues
• For online journals, use social networking & interactivity tools to find a way for readers to be able to discuss what they’ve just read 

Word of Mouth

• Mail your call for submissions to all department heads you can get email addresses for
• Make sure your faculty who have connections talk up the latest issue among their writer friends, colleagues, and in their classrooms
• Some of your better known contributors will bring a lot of people to each issue, with their mailing lists, students, and colleagues, plus in Google searches of their name
• Pitch to Poets & Writers & try to get special issues reviewed in other popular literary outlets

 The Real World

• Give the journal some sense of presence in the world by holding readings and events in the community
• Attend conferences and book fairs, most especially AWP’s book fair, where you have a captive audience actively looking for new journals to read and submit to.
• Put up posters around campus
• Hold poetry slams and other student readings at the local bookstore, library, or other literary outlet
• When your literary journal is established and has built a solid reputation, pitch it as a learning tool for English courses in high schools and undergraduate programs
• Sponsor live events open to the public, inviting artists in multiple genres together; these will help you connect to your readership and create a lot of energy around each issue. 

Novelty Ideas 

• Provide your contributors with announcement cards that they can spread around
• Make a hand-made version of your first online issue, which you can pass out at local readings and at the local book fair. Make about 500 of these mini-mags (2 in x 2 in). People enjoy the novelty of these hand-made items, which will drive traffic to your site & they can keep as a momento.

I’m halfway through my note-taking of the interviews I’ve conducted in the past 2 months, so this is just Part I of a compilation of promotional advice from various editors. If you enjoy this stuff like I do, and/or have some marketing tips of your own to add, please “Leave a Response”! 

• Develop a clean, sophisticated design for your site – this will announce the value of your enterprise more than anything else
• The best marketing technique is simply to publish excellence from a variety of writers, new and emerging; for journals, less can be more – publish only the stories, essays, and poetry that blow you away
• Create an opt-in e-mail listserv and/or e-newsletter for your journal
• Exchange links with other magazines
• Network; as your community of writers and readers grow, correspond with friends around the world on a daily basis
• Send out press releases when something new & exciting is going on (first issue, first big-name author, new web redesign, new columns/features, etc.)
• Attend the Annual AWP Conference Book Fair
• Participate in various writing conferences across the county, including the Sewanee Writers Conference & the Bread Loaf Writers Conference
• Sponsor or co-sponsor readings and presentations at the AWP conference
• Hold readings of selected work from the latest issue of your journal in your local community
• Post new features on your website every 1-2 weeks
• Archive the online journal permanently in libraries worldwide through the LOCKSS program initiated by Stanford University
• Register and keep your profile up-to-date in Duotrope’s Digest – best registry of online journals available
• For online journals, it’s important to have some print marketing materials to hand out, such as postcards w/ photos from the latest issue
• Seek out “Best of the Net” – every literary journal can nominate poetry there
• Nominate your best work for the Pushcart Prize  
• Use your blog to weigh in on the discussion surrounding today’s literature; be brief & don’t be afraid to say something confrontational if you believe in it
• Post 1-2 new posts per week on your blog; content can include quick interviews with writers in magazine, promotion of events, special events of interest to writers in regional area
• Send especially exciting issue links to popular blogs
• Announce your “birth” at newpages.com
• When first starting out, solicit many of the MFA departments in the country; it’s a quick way to get submissions
• Purchase an ad in a magazine that most suits your journal’s style to announce your presence
• Use Twitter – a most important marketing tool because a lot of book lovers, authors, and literary journal folks are on it. Use Twitter to announce links to new blog posts, interviews with a best-selling author, most recent issues, etc. Retweet anything from any of your authors
• Take adequate time to help your publication find its audience; be careful not to cross the line into blind, belligerent promotion…!

In my research of 126 literary journals associated with MFA programs, most have a blog for marketing purposes. Some, however, are using it for an operational and/or design tool.

At Mary Magazine, the editorial staff use their blog as a submissions manager. Managing Editor Rosa del Duca gathers all submissions and posts them into an internal blog that was designed by the University’s IT team. The submissions are sorted by genre, and all readers and editors in each genre read them electronically & give their honest feedback with the Comments tool. If any submission gets 2 “no’s,” then it doesn’t make it into the magazine.

Mary’s blog is “definitely not for a public audience,” Rosa points out.

The student staff at Barnstorm have pushed the possibilities of WordPress to a new level for electronic publishers. They’ve recently re-launched their online magazine with, as stated on their About > Welcome page:

“…a major face lift, nipping and tucking our templates, sucking the fat from our style sheets, and generally goosing our aesthetic. In the process, we switched over to a rolling content format (so now, you know, we work the same way the internet does!) and combed through an avalanche of solicitation in search of the next great voice.”  

What this means is that they’ve tapped into the tagging power of WordPress for both operational and publishing purposes, and have put the magazine on a publishing schedule that’s in sync with their web audience – not the issue-focused readers of print journals.

As Matt Thompson, Editor-in-Chief, explains, “Our journal was originally designed with a pre-blog mentality, when everything was hardcoded html and you had to take the site apart to add or change anything.” They then redesigned with WordPress to take advantage of its archiving feature. In its latest redesign, they now use tags and categories to shoot posts into parts of the site they want it to go. So if it’s a poem it gets tagged in the poetry category & automatically publishes under that heading, and if it’s an essay it goes to their non-fiction page, and if it’s a blog post it gets tagged as such and publishes under that tab. 

“A minimal amount of html coding is needed so future editors of the magazine can easily take over,” Matt says. For now, different genre editors enter the selections in WordPress as a draft, and Matt, as editor-in-chief, is the final reviewer before hitting the Publish button.

For both internal and external design purposes, the folks at the University of New Hampshire’s MFA in Creative Writing program “bit the bullet” and allocated department funds to hire Collective Standard for the job.

The editorial staff at Barnstorm is also taking advantage of the ability of WordPress to set posts to automatically publish on any given date. “We’re doing away with an issues format,” explains Matt. “We’re going to have a rolling content format instead. The 1st week we’ll publish poetry, the 2nd week nonfiction, the 3rd fiction, and the 4th our blog which is either an interview with an author or a book review.”

While the submission process will stay the same, the publishing process “takes about the same amount of time, because you can get the stuff into the system ahead of time. The genre selections are all lined up to publish automatically on the day they’re supposted to.”

The icing on the cake, for Matt, is the eternal shelf life of an electronic literary journal. “Once you put up a new story it’s there for perpetuity. You never have to take it down.” All the more reason to “comb through an avalanche of solicitation in search of the next great voice”… That voice will have a far reach – in both audience and time.

 
Related Reading:

• Pros and Cons of Using a WordPress Blog as Your Entire Business Site
• What’s the Deal with HTML, CSS & WordPress?
• Easy publishing tools for online journalists

If you really want your authors to reach a wide audience, get them published in an online journal. If you really want your authors to get some solid credentials under their writing belt, get them published in a print journal.

Daniel Lichtenberg, Managing Editor of 14 Hills and MFA student at San Francisco State University (SFSU), isn’t sold. He is finding that as the electronic and print publishing worlds merge and morph, reputation and readership are increasing in both directions.

For the first time in a long time, 14 Hills, a print journal, is increasing its print run by 100 copies, from 500 to 600. The last 3 issues have sold out, Dan says, due in large part to his staff’s focus on social media marketing.

And on the flip side, Dan’s marketing acumen at a print journal caught the attention of an esteemed online literary journal – La Petite Zine – where “the best of the best are submitting work” and “the quality of work of both well-known and unknown writers is outstanding,” according to Every Writer’s Resource.com. Dan is La Petite’s Managing Editor, charged with viral marketing.

“La Petite Zine is the new media version of working at a literary magazine on par with The New Yorker,” says Dan, whose title, The Ancient Book of HIP, was published by 14 Hills Press in 2009. “The visibility will be great for my book and my career.”

How is Dan producing “sold out” issues of 14 Hills? Well first off, he has a 5-student marketing team whose job is to create 1 or 2 posts per week on their blog promoting the lit journal. The content consists of quick interviews with their contributors, promotion of program-related events, talk of events of interest in the San Francisco area, and anything else they can think of.

Then there’s Twitter and Facebook. While Facebook is a must, Dan says, Twitter is an emerging and “most important” media marketing tool, as a lot of book lovers, authors, and others in the literary community frequent that space. He notes that the majority of their website traffic comes from their Twitter account, where they post announcements of new issues, links to their blog posts, and “re-tweets” of any big name people associated with 14 Hills.

“Once you come into the world of Twitter,” says Dan, “it becomes obvious what to do.”

In addition to drumming up interest via social media marketing, Dan and his team peddle issues the old-fashioned way – in person. Every issue has a launch party, where featured authors that live locally or are in the area come to read. At a recent launch, it was “crazy,” Dan says. “We had 5 or 6 authors fly in from all over the country.” These events are promoted heavily, and Dan has seen the audience triple in size – from 50 to 150 – leading to the purchase of at least 100 copies of the featured issue at each event.

As senior editors, Dan and Editor-in-Chief Christopher Hayter feel their primary obligation to the authors published in 14 Hills is promotion. “Most editors will probably tell you the best part of the job is believing in the selected contributors and exposing their work to the world. But I think a lot of literary journals fail at this. The expectation is that if you’re published in a print journal, somehow your career will take off. But a circulation of 5 or 600 is not going to do it.” That’s why having an online presence outside the MFA community is vitally important.

“I’m proud of how we promote our authors,” says Dan. “If a magazine doesn’t do that for their writers, then it fails them.”

Related reading:

• Fictionaut
• The Social Media Marketing Blog
• The New Rules of Social Media
• 14 Hills Twitter

You’ll find all this and more at Born Magazine, where writers and interactive designers collaborate together on experimental projects created exclusively for electronic publishing. Here, “readers” don’t lug the weight of traditional print publishing through the experience of sharing the heart and mind of a poet or writer. No one is missing anything here – not illustration, nor the layout of the pages, nor the cozying up to a new issue of your favorite publication in your hands. This is an online magazine truly devoted to a new kind of reader. One open to imagination unlimited.

Check this out for yourself. Zoology is the latest sample of more than 400 projects Born Magazine has given birth to since 1996. (Quick tip: click on the pulsing dots to move forward.)

At Born Magazine, writers team up with artists, musicians, programmers, and other creative folk to develop “media-rich art that explores storytelling” in an innovative way.

I am thrilled with this discovery – not because we have the resources to do anything close to this kind of publishing, but because it reaffirms my faith in publishing possibilities.

Beth Staples, the Managing Editor, selects, supervises, and advises an editorial staff of graduate students and an intern staff of undergraduates. She does all of the production work for the journal, as well as handles subscriptions, website & blog updates, coordinating volunteers, and overseeing marketing and grant-writing initiatives.

Submission Process

Recently HFR switched to an online Submission Manager to track the submission process. Submission Managers are becoming increasingly popular among literary journals for a number of reasons. As Beth points out:

“Counting every piece of poetry, prose and art, we receive about 10,000 submissions a year. We respond to every submission. We decided to (finally) adopt an online submission manager for many reasons:

• The environment
• The ease of submitting
• The ease of reading submissions (no need to come into the office)
• The ability to track submissions more easily
• It makes lots of manual and labor-intensive parts of the process (logging submissions into a database, finding and tracking withdrawals, responding to rejected manuscripts, responding to status inquiries) go away.

We chose the submission manager software created by One Story.”

Editorial Process

HFR, edited by MFA students in both the Creative Writing and Arts genres, publishes between 30 and 75 contributors per issue, twice a year. Editors read first as Associate Editors for HFR through at least 2 semesters, then are invited to apply for Editor positions, which they serve during the 2nd half of their 2nd year, or the 1st half of their 3rd year in the program. 

Each genre has 2 editors who collaborate together on their choices for each issue. The students receive credit for the editorship. While members of the MFA faculty serve on HFR’s advisory board, the student editors have the final say on what gets published in each issue. 

Your Process

What do you think of students – who are immersed in learning their craft – acting as Editors for established and emerging writers? How do you think editors should be selected – by faculty, fellow students, a dedicated “managing editor” hired for this purpose, an advisory committee? If you work at a literary journal associated with an academic program, or if you’re a student in any such program, let’s hear your thoughts.

Related Links

• Visit Hayden’s Ferry Review
• Read a review of Hayden’s Ferry Review

Think not about how much you enjoy writing, but how much you enjoy reading. Think about how much spare time you have. And how supportive you are of others. And how you do, in general, with the commitment thing.

Think about your time, money, goals, resources, passion. It’s a lot to take on – a lot to gain (stories upon stories, the immersion in the art of words) and a lot to lose (time, and in some cases, money).

Consider sisters Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies, founding editors of the acclaimed Glimmer Train. They started their venture in 1991, fueled by their love of reading and their desire to enlarge their perspective of the world through emotionally meaningful literature.

Today they receive 40,000 submissions a year for a quarterly print publication with a circulation of 12,000. Just look at the numbers. As Linda pointed out to me, “there are so many more writers than readers at this point in time.” With 750 submissions a week, that’s an extraordinary amount of time that Linda and Susan spend on the simple act of reading.

Linda assures me that the last 20 years of devotion to this work has been worth it. She says:

“Although there’s been no financial profit from operating Glimmer Train, it has far exceeded our expectations. We read nearly 40,000 stories a year (including a fair number from other parts of the world) and – for readers – that is absolutely joyful. One of our primary goals has always been to publish the work of emerging writers, which we do, of course, and a surprising bonus has been to discover that agents and publishers, who read Glimmer Train, search our pages for new writers to promote.”

She continues:

“Because we are a print publication, we are not in a particularly good position to address launching an online literary journal, but it seems that these are shared requirements for maintaining a literary journal of any kind: the love of reading, and the willingness to commit a large portion of one’s life to reading and promoting other people’s writing.”

I, personally, am a slow reader. I write fast, but read slow. My faculty mentor for my second semester assured me I was “a very sensitive reader,” but I know for a fact that it takes longer than it should to get through a single memoir. Clearly, to launch this journal I will need a lot of help from a group of strong, thoughtful, enthusiastic readers.

Note to myself: make more friends.

• Read a review about Glimmer Train
• Read more about How to Publish a Literary Journal

This idea emerged from the student readings during our residencies at Enders Island. How responsive the audience was to the readings, how emboldened the students became once their voices were heard! Imagine if they each had a chance to widen their reach through the program’s online literary journal?

I am finding, however, that literary journals have a history steeped in the tradition of selection, and editors and publishers pride themselves in their selective process. I am hearing from editors who have anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 submissions per year, for issues of approximately 200 pages 1-3 times a year. Imagine the effort – all those writers and all those readers!

As Jay Bates, founder of a river and sound review: serious literature with an unpretentious soul, pointed out to me, not every writer is entitled to be published given the large number of writers in the world. 

Says Jay, “Emerging writers, in my opinion, place too much emphasis on getting published as opposed to honing the craft. Being published is seen as an affirmation of our work as writers – and frequently more than our work, but an affirmation of us personally. If this is the driving purpose behind publishing student work, I would warn you of diminished credibility as a publisher, whose goal (in my opinion) should be to publish a product that is of greater benefit for the reader. So no, I don’t think everyone deserves their voice to be heard in readings or read in print. In junior high or high school, maybe. But in graduate school or afterward, no. Outside of high school, to encourage attention to all voices perpetuates artistic entitlement. And I’d sooner suffer a flock full of fools than one entitled writer.”

What are your thoughts? What should the primary focus of an online literary journal be? And is there room for experimentation, for voices of varied ability and experience, for the unpolished and polished to coincide?

On this blog, all voices are welcome!