Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for the ‘Magazines’ Category

Come On In, the Door Is Closed

I stumbled upon this old blog post today in which the blogger — who was at the time a college student (probably graduated by now) expressed shock and outrage that his university’s undergrad literary magazine only featured writing from members of that publication’s own staff and that the writing was, in his estimation, quite awful.

The undergrad lit mag published by my own alma mater was exactly like the publication discussed in that student’s blog. I remember they had a slot on the publication office door for students to place submissions into, but unless you were on the staff, your work was routinely ignored. It was a clique. The publication deteriorated so badly over the years that the publication was eventually forced to open submissions up to graduate writing students in order to spare it from being cut out of the budget.

So, my initial reaction to this kid’s blog was, “What? This is surprising to you?” Undergraduate literary magazines are financed by the colleges with money collected from fees tacked onto your tuition bill. These publications are produced by the students for the campus. They are not normally sold or distributed off-campus (unlike prestigious lit journals affliated with graduate-level writing programs which accept mostly submissions from non-student writers from outside the campus and are distributed off-campus through subscription or shelf sales). Figure that only a small portion of the student body is even interested in submitting to these publications or even reading them. The vast majority who are interested usually make-up the staff of these rags. It stands to reason that if they are in charge of choosing the work that appears in these magazines and are also the very people who are submitting to them, then these publications will contain their poetry. It’s not exactly a crime to put out an inferior literary publication (although it probably should be), but this sort of thing illustrates why an essentially closed submission policy is not conducive to producing a quality publication.

I’ve dealt with this subject before, and I don’t really think I can add anything to it, although prior to this, I think I was mainly talking about the difference between solicited v. unsolicited submissions in which case, a “closed” submission policy has a slightly different meaning. No, I guess what I’m getting at is that an undergrad literary magazine is a perfect case study on how not to publish a literary magazine that people actually read.

Aside from the quality control issues, there are marketing and distribution issues. Let’s say you and a few of your pals want to start a print journal. A college publication is financed by the college. It’s in the annual budget. ‘X’ amount of dollars are allocated for the sole purpose of printing ‘X’ number of copies every semester. But you and your pals don’t have that luxury because you are self-financed. If your intention is to publish more than one issue, you have to sell subscriptions, you have to go after an audience of more than few people and you can’t just give away your entire press run. Which brings us back to quality control because if you don’t publish good work by good writers, there is no raison d’être for your publication. And this brings us back to undergraduate literary magazines because what is the purpose of these publications? Aren’t these publications just an excuse for a bunch of young wannabes to have a literary circle-jerk? Ya think?

Revenge of the Troglodytes

Back in June, I responded to an editorial written by Ron Offen in my blog post “Gotta Be a Troglodyte If You Don’t Drive on the Electronic Superhighway.” Well . . . Mr. Offen is back with the second part of this editorial in the current issue of his poetry journal, Free Lunch. In “Poetry and the Web II: The Ephemeralization & Degradation of Poetry,” he takes his anti-Internet argument a step beyond and condemns ezine editors for publishing poetry online:

” . . . in recent years there has been a proliferation of so-called ezines appearing (I escew the term “published”) online. The reasons are primarily financial and practical, but are also philosophical. That an online e-zine is cheaper and easier to produce than a printed magazine seems obvious. The philosophical reasons are less so . . . . if such naysayers of print are right (which is highly doubtful), why would e-zine editors, who presumably care about the future of poetry, trust its future to a medium that is essentially anti-poetic? Why would they promote — to coin a word — the ephemeralization of the art?”

Where do I begin? That this sort of screed deserves a response, there is no doubt, but the reasoning behind his argument is spinning faster than a hamster’s treadmill and it’s making me dizzy. The credibility of Offen’s conclusion rests solely on the reader’s acceptance of that conclusion as fact rather than as a half-baked opinion. Aside from his own prejudices against web-based publishing the only thing he offers in support are the opinions of Nicholas Carr, a critic of new media and computer technology whose myopic and decidedly dystopian view of the future is well-known — and well-documented (ironically) in his blog RoughType among other venues.

Mr. Offen’s argument against poetry on the web in general and ezines specifically boils down to three reasons: Internet technology is unreliable, The writing in ezines is of a substantially lesser quality than what is published in print, and lastly, that ezine editors believe that print is obsolete and are hell-bent on killing print as a medium.

The idea that web publications are impermanent and, therefore, unreliable is not a new argument. Ezines go under just like print zines and, yes, that sometimes means that the poetry disappears at some point. But it’s absolutely disingenuous to suggest that print publications are more reliable than ezines because “when a print magazine that has published your work goes out of business, you still have a hard copy of your work.” That’s just silly. Most print poetry publications have a very small press run and an even smaller net circulation — which means that a lot of that published poetry isn’t even being read. And who is reading it? Offen asks “Who is . . . visiting [poetry ezines]?” (which I will address shortly), but who reads print literary journals? I’ll tell you who: the poets who submit and are published in those journals, professors teaching in writing programs and a scant few diehard fans and critics who are even aware of that print journals existence. The vast majority of readers are not interested, have no reason to be interested and have no means of accessing these publications. University libraries that used to routinely subscribe to and archive small press literary magazines now do so sparingly if at all. Failed magazines are largely forgotten, their issues languishing in shoe boxes, closets, lost to collectors of rare literature or just plain lost. So are print poetry publication really more reliable? I’m thinking, not so much. And as to who is reading poetry ezines . . . well, the same people who read print zines — and some people who don’t routinely read print zines or poetry in general. I will use one of my own ezines, The 13th Warrior Review, as an example. It gets regular traffic from well over 30 different countries representing every continent on the global map except Antarctica — thousands and thousands of readers each year who appreciate and love good poetry and not only read each issue but return time and time again to reread favorites. Each issue is part of a growing archive. And what if, for whatever reason, the ezine ever does go belly-up? Well, I still have all the files and I could just as easily do print collections/anthologies or can restore the publication in some other e-format if I’m of the mind to do so and have the money. The point is that I have options available to me that a traditional print publisher may not be open-minded enough to take advantage of.

I am also deeply offended by the notion that the poetry published in ezines is inherently inferior to the poetry published in print zines. This a sweeping generalization based on a prejudice and nothing more. Literary publications, whether they be in print or online, are only as good as the editors who publish them. To suggest that editors of print publications are automatically more discerning critics of poetry — Ughh! Talk about a “fallacy”? Good Christ, man! I’m thinking that Ron Offen doesn’t read too many ezines since, by his own admission, reading poems online makes him “cranky.” I think there are plenty of online editors who’d take issue with the accusation that we don’t care about quality. And speaking only for myself, I doubt very much that any of my own contributors would argue that they send work to me “because it’s easier to get published.” I’ve published a number of the same people Mr. Offen has and yet, by contrast, he’s published a number of people who certainly haven’t gotten a free lunch when it came to submitting to me.

Finally, I would take issue with the accusation that ezine editors are somehow cheerleading the death of the print medium simply because we promote digital publishing. While I have ecountered a few people online who are overly enthusiastic when it comes to e-publishing and stand in direct opposition to print, these individuals are rare. Most of us who engage in online publishing are book lovers.

I love print. I cut my teeth in print. I was an editor of print publication long before I discovered the Internet. What I’m selling isn’t the ephemeralization of art (and btw, Mr. Offen, you didn’t “coin” the word, an architect and futurist the name of R. Buckminster Fuller did), but the ephemeralization of publishing — and there is a big difference. What does ephemeralization mean, anyway? Doing more with less, right? It doesn’t mean choosing quantity over quality — it’s a means for producing more of the same quality with fewer physical resources. And how can that be a bad thing for the always cash-strapped small press?

The art of writing doesn’t somehow become less artful just because it is presented through a different medium. The reason more books are being published nowadays isn’t in spite of new media, but because of it (examples of Harry Potter books and Billy Collins notwithstanding — both are a phenomena that have little to do with the efficacy of either print or digital media and, thus poor examples and, fyi, when he was U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins created 180 Poems, a very popular poetry site so I doubt he has a major problem with poetry on the Internet). Can Mr. Offen truly be that obtuse as to fail to see this? Digital technologies such as on-demand printing, e-paper, improved reader devices like Kindle and the Sony reader are opening up a whole new world of art and information for us. The Internet isn’t killing the print-based media; it may well be the only thing that will save it.

So what if it changes us and how we perceive the world? The medium has always been the message from the time Socrates lamented that the birth of the written word might destroy the oral tradition up through the invention of the printing press and the telegraph machine, the telephone, the television and, yes, the personal computer and, now, the Internet. And, guess what? The world has not ended due to any of these innovations. We are still here regardless of the fact that everything changes. We evolve. We must continue to do so. That’s part of our job as human beings and as creative artists. Creative artists who stand in the way of that are not all that creative and I have my doubts as to whether or not they are true artists. So deal with that or do us all a favor and get the hell out of the way.

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.