"Successful literary publications know that obscurity is the shortest path to failure."
Over at the Identity Theory Editor’s Blog, I just posted a long piece lamenting the short-sightedness, incompetence, or both of small literary print journals that insist on posting little or no content online.
The necessities of print submission and distribution created, over decades, an entrenched sense of hierarchy, that good stories logically move from writer up to editor and back down to reader. But readers, with new online practices introduced by other media and applied to everyday life, expect a conversation with the people whose work they read. They expect a feedback loop. They expect access to literature.
These publications, then, are in trouble, because they don’t communicate with their readers when they easily could. They don’t seem to care that a generation is coming of age that loves books, loves talking about books, but which does it all with electronic mediation: ordering books on Amazon, posting a review on their blog, recommending a poem on Facebook, forwarding a bookstore’s email saying a favorite writer is coming to town, finding like-minded readers on Meetup.com to get drinks with.
This should be a golden age of literary journals. And it is, for some larger forward-looking publications. McSweeney’s, the New Yorker, Tin House, and others have found compatibility between financial sustainability and what my old boss Henry Jenkins calls “spreadability”, removing barriers to sharing content so that fans can build communities around that content.
Successful literary publications know that obscurity is the shortest path to failure.
“The end of the small print journal. Please.” — Identity Theory Editors Blog
