Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for the ‘ezines’ Category

The Writing on the Wall

Recently, I mentioned the Christian Science Monitor’s recent decision to end it’s daily print publication and transform into a fully digital publication. Today, I was reading the first part of a two-part interview with CSM’s editor-in-chief, John Yemma explaining the decision. According to Yemma, “. . . the writing [was] on the wall . . . , the Internet user patterns and reader preferences [are] changing the business model of print. Print [is] becoming increasingly untenable, especially for the Monitor, which has an international audience. We just don’t have enough reach with our print product, but we have great reach with our web product.”

Basically, he was saying what I’ve long said to writers who balked at seeing their work published online. Alhough a small press literary publication isn’t the same thing as the CSM in terms of genre or circulation, a print literary publication cannot compete with an ezine in terms of exposure. Aside from printing costs and other expenses related to print publishing, it’s a lot of work to distribute and sell a print literary periodical. The circulation is typically small and takes some time to sell-out an issue. Typically, much of what is circulated goes unsold and unread. The typical ezine has an international reach that is difficult, if not absolutely impossible for most print literary zines to manage. Whether you are a writer or a publisher, there are clear advantages to Internet publishing. The fact that a mainstream publishing organization is wising up to this should serve as a kind of epiphany for those in the print media who are holding-out for some kind of miracle that would preserve their world.

This post is sponsored by Leptovox.

The Last Days of the Mimeograph Kid

In 1960’s, when those young boom generation poets and pundits were spewing their screed into waiting mimeo presses, I sincerely doubt any of them could have imagined the coming of the digital revolution and how it would change publishing. My generation — generation X has been lucky in a way. Gen Xers like myself are old enough to remember the small press the way it used to be and young enough to see the digital small press emerging in its embryonic stages. The first time I was exposed to a personal computer back in the 1980s when the first Apples and Ataris and Commodore 64s were rolling off the assembly lines you could almost feel the vibrations, the ripples in the universe. The 1980s and ’90s saw an explosion of new small press publications the likes of which even the mimeo revolution couldn’t touch in sheer numbers.

With the advent of the World Wide Web, however, what we think of as the small press has changed and expanded to include more and more non-traditional means of production. The spider traps have been set and those who haven’t embraced the new order are just flies for the spider to feed on.

Zines and literary journals that don’t have at least a marginal presence on the Internet are failing to find a significant audience. More and more publishers are either moving entirely to the Web or publishing as part of a Web/Print hybrid. Social Networking and email micro-blogging has replaced older, slower, less efficient means of communication and promotion.

The mainstream publishing media, though even slower to see the writing on the wall, is itself waking up to the fact that the traditional paradigm is dead, dead, dead. Just today, we learn that the Christian Science Monitor is shifting from a print operation to an online-only operation. This is very telling. If a long-standing, mainstream news magazine like CSM sees no future in traditional print media then it’s clear to me that those of us in the small press who’ve long embraced the new media have been right all along. There has been a definite paradigm shift and it doesn’t mean that print media has no role to play in the future — it simply means that print as a medium is no longer the wellspring from which all written art and information flows. I’d go so far as to offer that, if you are thinking about starting a print literary journal right now, you’d have to be an idiot not to at least have a grass-roots following for yourself and your prospective publication online before sinking money into a print-based project.

But that’s just my opinion (albeit one that others are starting to share). In any event, those last few hold-outs still clinging to that romantic vision of the “good old days” of rogue basement zine publishers are in danger of becoming irrelevant and extinct.

The small press is dead — long live the small press!

He Must’ve Written His Story in Crayon

I think I mentioned in a blog awhile back that editors of literary magazines gossip about writers just like writers trade gossip about editors. Yes we do. We chat about writers we like and writers who are difficult, dreadfully untalented or a few cans short of a six-pack. And so, it wasn’t much of a surprise when Cindy Rosmus, editor of Yellow Mama emailed me today to ask me if I’d ever heard of a guy named Dean Grondo:

John:
Attached is the correspondence between me & this complete asshole whose story I rejected on 9/4.
Ever hear of this jerk?
If not, be forewarned!

I hadn’t heard of him. Cindy was irked to say the least about a rude response to a rejection she’d sent him. Apparently, he’d submitted a story. I haven’t read the story so I cannot attest to the fairness of the initial rejection — although, knowing Cindy, I suspect she had good reason to give the man the big kiss-off:

Dear DC:

Thanks for sending “You Have God to Be Kidding.” Sorry, but I can’t use it for YELLOW MAMA.
Good luck placing it elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Cindy Rosmus,

YELLOW MAMA

But, this guy responded with the following:

Every 6 weeks it’s the same fucking thing! I send these goddamned “What happened to my story?” flares out to you incompetant assholes who wouldn’t know how to publish a fucking Bazooka Joe gum wrapper! So: WHERE’S MY STORY?! DID YOU USE IT? WHERE’S FUCKING THE MONEY!? Due to time constraints I’m forced to use this form letter and I offer my apoligy for this.
Dean Grondo

PS: YOU GOT MY ADDRESS FOR THE MONEY?!

Nice, huh . . . Way to impress an editor, guy. Seriously, I don’t know what I find more insulting — his tone or the fact that he seems to be an illiterate fucktard.

Cindy responded:

Dear DC:

Check the date on this. You’ll see I didn’t wait 6 weeks, just 5 days and I am not an “incompetent asshole. ”

That is no way way to write a query letter.

Cindy Rosmus.

YELLOW MAMA

Apparently, this cretin is starting to get a bit of a reputation for this sort of behavior with editors who reject his work. One editor (who didn’t want to be named on this blog) reported his own encounter with Dean Grondo this way:

. . . he sent me something once, and I told him in a very polite way I couldn’t use it, and he called me, quote: ”An unprofessional faggot punk.” I told him, he was an unprofessional asshole, and he replied ”You wouldn’t say that to my face.”
To which I replied, ”Oh, yes, I WOULD.”
Stay clear of him. I think he is unbalanced. “

Unbalanced? Who knows? But he’s certainly not an uncommon occurence in the small press and he’s certainly not original. What he is, truly, is dumb, dumb, dumb. Just a widdle ole baby kicking and screaming in his widdle ole baby bedding. And that’s too bad. It’s counter-productive for any writer to take a rejection personally. Getting one rejection from an editor doesn’t necessarily mean that everything you will submit to that editor will be rejected in the future. So, who really loses when a writer, having gotten a rejection, responds with an insult? The editor? No. Hell no! An editor has plenty of material to choose from, so he doesn’t need your work in particular. He will just stick your name on his personal blacklist and probably warn other editors about your dumb ass — and they’ll tell 2 editor friends and they’ll tell 2 editor friends and so on . . . and so on . . . . You will get the reputation for being an asshole. Even if you are a decent writer, you will eventually get to a point where almost no one will read your work. And if you are a shit writer and you have the personality to match . . . well, you see my point, don’t you. So let that be a lesson to you, Dean Grondo. Were I you, I’d write a nice, long apology letter to Cindy and any other editor you’ve ticked-off with plenty of ass-kissing and groveling. Blame your behavior on an aneurysm or a personality disorder. Who gives a fuck? Just get your mind right if you want to be a writer and be taken seriously and respected.