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Becky Tuch has been doing some great working investigating what appears to be an enduring scam in the lit mag world - buying an existing magazine or site, collecting lots of submission fees, and then...doing nothing?
Down the Rabbit Hole: C&R Press, PANK Magazine, American Poetry Journal, and Others
She traces this to a couple of people running a number of fairly well-known publications. PANK is probably the best known: I remember hearing from a poet I know and trust that he'd submitted work there (and paid via submission fees), then never received a decision, his queries going unanswered. PANK's own site only features a few items posted in the last full year, but its Submittable page is open and shiny, taking your chapbook and book submissions for $20-25 a pop.
Lots of literary magazines seem to be having issues, and it's easy to want to generalize this to the community as a whole, that the practices with a certain smell, or the death of a number of institutions, mean that the literary community is in some kind of trouble.
Why Book Lovers Need to Fight for Literary Magazines - Fast
Ambit, that well-known English institution, is shutting down. So too is The Moth, across the Irish Sea. Bear Creek, home to the weird and dark for the last few years, abruptly decided to pause its operations, with authors learning about this only after its tweet on the subject.
But the article misses that death and birth of literary magazines is a regular part of the wider community. In previous years, we saw the closure of three giants in jubilat, Glimmer Train, Tin House, to say nothing of the many WordPress-based lit mags that seem to start up, publish a few issues, and fade away (L'Ephemere Review, 8 Poems, etc).
Money is a factor in some cases, but only for a certain segment of literary magazines, those with perfect-bound copies and actual staff and distribution concerns. Online lit mags generally have low costs: a domain and hosting, and that's it if you don't care about Submitabble. For those small presses who work with paper, like my own, it depends on how fancy you're getting: some lit mags have national arts funding and produce hundreds of copies per issue; some operate on a DIY aesthetic and print everything at home, or photocopy, and for these the costs are significantly lower. For me, I print using standard printer paper off a black and white printer, bind with staples - a print run of 50 costs me well under a dollar an issue.
Buy a long-arm stapler and get started
For a lot of literary magazines, and especially those run by one or two people, the overriding constraint is time, or perhaps energy. Putting together a physical publication takes effort, particularly if you're printing and stapling and folding everything yourself. Reading and deciding on submissions, too, if your submissions are always open and if you're known well enough. One hears about thousands of submissions a year for semi-obscure journals. Far more submissions than readers. Easy to see why interest might wane.
But in the face of this, new journals always seem to pop up. The latest in my Twitter circle is the Stone Circle Review, which publishes individual poems, rather than discrete issues. Someone decided they wanted to contribute, got a domain, set up WordPress, started soliciting submissions, and good for them. The community needs more people deciding to make something of their own.
Here Today, Here Tomorrow: On the Lifespan of the Literary Magazine
Daniel Nester, on Medium, reprints an article that first appeared on Bookslut in 2011. It discusses how lit mags associated with an academic institution last the longest, followed by independent mags, and then "little" magazines (local or underground, often stapled, mimeographed, etc).
The data for this article was mostly gathered from the print era. I wonder how it would hold up today. I expect roughly the same, but with a certain subset bringing down the the overall averages. My gut feeling is that the average lifespan of an online lit mag is maybe 2-3 years.
But even though magazines flame out or peter out or die in all kinds of ways, that crucially doesn't seem to be stopping people from starting new ones. WordPress is easy (that's the point) - print is harder, but there's lots of guides to get started at home. The actual equipment costs are pretty cheap, and I would absolutely encourage you to give it a try, if you can. Because as magazines shut down and restrict the space available for writers, there's an opportunity to make more space. Crucially, to provide more space than you yourself take. And I think that's part of being a good literary citizen: thinking not just of where your own pieces can be published, but how you can offer the same to others.