Carolyn writes,

Consider this a quiet announcement of Hot Metal Bridge, the new literary magazine from the University of Pittsburgh MFA students in creative writing. Uh, yeah, that would include me. You can find me on the masthead if you squint.

But don’t go bothering with the masthead. Please check out our freshly-minted call for entries. We’re looking for new fiction and creative nonfiction and poetry. We’re not stuffy. But we are really excited to read your stuff.

Curious? Hot Metal Bridge is an actual bridge here in Pittsburgh that used to carry molten steel across the Monongahela River (that may be the coolest combination of words of I’ve typed — I would have called it “molten steel monongahela” if I could).

Check out the call for entries at Hot Metal Bridge.

Best of luck to the editors. Starting a literary publication, moreso when it’s under the auspices of an MFA program, can be a big pain in the butt—you want to be editing stories and poems, but you spend 90% of your time beating the bushes for your first quality submissions. And with high turnover in staff due to graduation and other new commitments, continuity can be hard to come by.

But it can be done. Emerson College’s Redivider has been strong for a few years now. Its quality and professionalism has been improving with every issue. No reason Hot Metal Bridge can’t do the same.

Others would make the same case, certainly. It’s like saying the New Yorker publishes good profiles or that bears crap in the woods. I had wanted to avoid, though, opening the door to pharisaism or self-serving praise of insiders to the detriment of new or different talent.

But now that I’ve been doing some fiction editing, I’ve started to take measurable editorial success more seriously. But then, what in the very small, very squishy literary field is measurable? To what should an editor or a literary magazine staff in general aspire, particularly in considering the health of the field as a whole?

Here are the measurable attributes, then, as I’ve come to see them. Note that they exclude traditional but misleading descriptors of magazine success, such as circulation or geographic base:

• Age (<5/>5/>15): The years a publication has been publishing regularly.
• Independence (no/partial/full): Is the publication independent? What percentage of its operating costs are paid directly by subscribers? By advertisers? By donors? By how many different donors? By a single patron, such as the university on whose campus the publication operates? This is the hardest to measure but can be done with some research skills.
• Compensation (yes/no): does the publication pay its authors and staff? Find out by reading submission guidelines and analyzing the masthead. Do staff members work elsewhere (almost always yes).
• Timeliness (yes/no): The flexibility or anticipatory talents of a publication’s editors, including the ability to solicit work appropriate to a particular event, anniversary, etc. Does each issue feature something related to the season or month in which it was published?
• Nurturing (yes/partial/no): The prioritizing and active promotion of the literary field through readings, festivals, workshops, scholarships, and outreach.

In finding measurable attributes, I’ve identified four levels of literary magazine success that can be fairly evenly applied across geography, genre, and even size. They should be useful to readers, writers, editors, and donors alike when deciding whom to support or evaluating the growing or waning influence of a publication.

The four levels, from least to most successful:

1. Vanity
2. Immature
3. Established
4. Institution

1. Vanity

A vanity publication may feature two kinds of vanity—and often features both: an editor who is the publication and/or, more commonly, a mission that in effect reads, “We started this magazine because we thought everything else sucked.”

• Age: <5 years old.
• Independence: No. Has 1-5 sponsors, who are often also editors, but no subscribers.
• Compensation: No. Does not compensate its writers.
• Timeliness: No. Irregular publishing schedule makes timeliness difficult.
• Nurturing: No. Does not have the ability to nurture their mission or field outside of their publication.

2. Immature

Immature publications are not necessarily bad publications. They print the bulk of literary writing, if not by totally circulation then by manuscript pages. They are college student literary magazines, most online-only magazines, a large number of niche publications, and even a handful of magazines published by well-respected personalities. A respected example would be the new magazine A Public Space. While edited by a former Paris Review editor and featuring very high-end writing, it still struggles with the business side of magazine publishing, such as when it ran into subscriber fulfillment problems with its second issue. In the immature category would also be a publication like N+1, which publishes excellent political and creative writing from established authors but which recently—and kudos to them for being able to laugh at themselves—lost $3,000 cash to a thief at a fundraiser.

• Age: <5 years old or still/regularly have fulfillment problems.
• Independence: No. Still depend greatly on single-copy sales, rather than subscriber sales. May have a few benefactors.
• Compensation: No. Do not compensate their writers but may hold fee-funded contests. Are volunteer run.
• Timeliness: No. Are usually inflexible, but better run publications can plan ahead well and solicit appropriate pieces.
• Nurturing: No. Consider it an important part of their mission to participate in literary field events but do not yet have the resources (especially time) to manage something themselves.

3. Established

Established publications, such as Tin House, the Missouri Review, the Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, and McSweeney’s, are where the average reader is most likely to find new, good writing; where the average writer is to find the most competition; and where the average editor and donor are to find the most gratification.

• Age: >5 years old.
• Independence: Partial. Large subscriber base, often a board of trustees, staff member dedicated to fundraising. Breakeven budgets and university sponsorship is common; both make for little peace of mind.
• Compensation: Yes. Compensates writers but may still be all-volunteer run.
• Timeliness: Yes. Tradition of regular publishing cycles allows for advance planning. Strong, long-term relationships with individual writers allows for timely solicitation of needed pieces.
• Nurturing: Partial. Can and does hold readings and release parties in home city and region. Staff runs workshops at parent institutions, with the editor-in-chief often holding a full-time faculty position. No money, however, for festivals or scholarships, unless, in the latter case, a donor provides specific funds.

4. Institution

Institutional publications are very few in the literary field. Granta, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review . . . are there many others? These are the kinds of publications that, were they to stop publishing tomorrow, would leave a distinct gap in the way the literary world understands itself. Were Ploughshares to move from Boston to Washington, Boston would feel a small twinge of pain; when the Atlantic announced just that, Boston felt punched in the gut, losing an institution with which it had shared so much history.

• Age: >15 years old.
• Independence: Full. Very large subscriber base; a board of active, devoted trustees; full-time professional staff; diverse pool of donors. Financially independent.
• Compensation: Yes. Compensates writers well. Staff compensation rates vary but exists.
• Timeliness: Yes. Planning happens months, sometimes a year or more, in advance. Highly professionalized staff means quick adjustments to events and fast turnaround of everything except fiction submissions, which number in the thousands.
• Nurturing: Yes. Is the beacon to which the literary world looks for worldwide sustenance. Especially with festivals, institutional sponsorship allows people from around the world to share in common literary values. Size sometimes gets in the way of more personal ventures, but institution-publication events are affirmations of the literary life and of the institution itself.

I call these “rankings,” but really they are steps, rather like how athletes play their sport in high school, in college, and professionally, with only a small percentage making it from one level to another. For the here-and-now, it’s useful to know which publication falls where. But let no one forget that there’s another George Plimpton out there somewhere, just waiting to turn his “vanity” publication into the next Paris Review.

On the heels of the new issue of the Paris Review comes the summer reading edition of the country’s best-designed (for reading) literary journal, Tin House.

This edition features fiction from Stephen King and Antonya Nelson, poetry by Ben Doyle and Grace Paley, interviews with Roddy Doyle and Will Self, and culinary-literary thoughts and advice from the likes of Iowa’s Lan Samantha Chang.

When I say best-designed for reading, I mean it. Journals like AGNI, as good as they are, feel good to be done with. Not Tin House. The last word brings disappointment. It’s the only journal I leaf back through like certain people re-view fashion magazines.

Meanwhile, don’t miss the June/July music issue of the Believer. Because if you do, you’ll never know the true history of the Numa Numa Song.

[Tin House]
[Paris Review]
[The Believer]

The results? On one hand, I’ve been impressed. The Rittenhouse Square Barnes and Noble in Philadelphia stocks a ton of lit mags, more even than my local Harvard Bookstore (often considered the country’s best independent). The Presse Internationale in Toronto’s Greektown not only sold a fantastic number of Canandian titles but also included many lesser known American ones, such as Atlanta’s Five Points.

On the other hand, the physical placement of literary magazines is dispiriting. Harvard Bookstore keeps them in a bizarre little shin-level shelf opposite their Christianity section. A Borders in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood keeps its (impressive number of out-of-date) lit mags in the oddest place—in an end-cap shelf, fifteen feet away from literary glossies like Publishers Weekly and Bookforum, faced away from the rest of the room, and adjacent to a freight elevator. I couldn’t even find the shelf until my girlfriend phoned and I searched for the most out-of-the-way spot in the store to take the call. In fact, the only store I’ve ever seen that makes a point of highlighting its lit mag offerings is Trident Bookseller in Boston’s Back Bay, which sports a shelf at the end of the aisle created by the magazine racks and the long cafe bar.

So to the question I opened with. Why aren’t lit mags placed more prominently? Yes, they’re not best-sellers and they don’t earn kind of margins that blank journals, hardbacks, and remainders do. But don’t literary magazines dovetail with the Barnes and Noble ethos of creating the “literary environment”? Sure, some people go in to Barnes and Noble, sit and read, and leave without buying anything—but by virtue of sitting and reading, doesn’t that make Barnes and Noble the place you think of when you do want to buy a book? So shouldn’t the most purely bookish, most book-community-driven product in the world—the literary magazine—get to take its place at the front of the store? Moreover, isn’t it good business sense to sacrifice the sale of a few remainders if it means creating another generation of obsessive readers? It certainly worked for Starbucks, which decided long ago to sacrifice customer turnover in favor of customer zeal, and now we have a nationwide cafe culture, where none had existed before. That’s very good business!

Altogether, it makes me think of my favorite pizza place, a family-run joint in my first neighborhood in Cambridge. The owner, Armando Paolo, was asked by a reporter if business had lagged since a gourmet pizza place had opened up around the corner. “No,” he said and laughed. “We’ve had more people here than ever.” When asked why that was, Armando said, “The fancy place got people thinking even more about pizza. And when people around here think pizza, they think Armando’s.”

Bookstores, take that tip from Armando. Promote literary magazines because they promote the best of reading and writing. Shelve them front and center. It gets people excited about books—so be in on it. People want to associate that book-zeal with a particular place, a particular store. So when people think of books, make sure they think of you.

Imagine, say, the R&D folks at an automaker tell their boss, “Market research shows our potential customers hate orange. We are therefore launching a new line of orange cars, and only orange cars, until our customers come around.” Insanity, yes? But this is an insanity shared by literary magazines: each lit mag is published precisely because no one wants to read it.

Sure, there’s also the ego of the founding editor, a moral sincerity, communal desperation, or sustained glee. But a motive all lit mags have in common is a belief that certain stories—and not others—should be pushed in front of the eyes of otherwise indifferent readers. It’s an industry dedicated to breaking entrepreneurship’s first rule: you can’t create your market. The market’s there, lit mag folks insist, people just don’t know it yet!

Year after year, though, magazines fail because they couldn’t convince people to care.

Yet, paradoxically, what an important part of the book-world literary magazines and journals have become.

What they lack in financial solvency (the majority of the reputable survive on university or individual philanthropy rather than subscriptions and advertising) literary magazines make up for in their power as gatekeeper. They weed out the untalented. Sven Birkerts, editor of AGNI, told me last year that each time he enters the magazine’s office, there is a fresh foot-high stack of unsolicited submissions waiting for him. “In each stack, I’ll probably find just one or two pieces I want to come back to.”

The rest he politely rejects.

This vetting process has turned lit mag editors into unofficial developmental editors for the book publishing industry. Agents, like Boston’s Esmond Harmsworth, describe this as a welcome necessity. “We simply don’t have the time to read everything, or at least everything as thoroughly, as we’d like,” Harmsworth told a class of Emerson College writing students in 2002. “My knowing that an established editor is willing to publish your work, that you therefore might have some name-recognition, is persuasive. I use this—have to use this—when deciding where to concentrate our efforts.”

This arrangement is asymmetrical, though. Publishers save money by not having to waste time on reading through poor writing. But what do literary magazines get in return? Not much, really. There’s the chance a writer published in the Southern Review will get a popular book published, with the requisite front-matter page reading, “Parts of this book first appeared in the Southern Review.” But the effect of that sort of marketing isn’t measurable, and there’s nothing besides the author’s name to position the magazine as a certain kind of literary magazine, as one different or better than others.

In short, lit mags are the suckers of the literary world. They’re obstinate. They bleed funding. They ignore the market. They do others’ work. And, despite high purposes, they go unread, or, at the very least, are read by a tight circle of people with little hope of expanding.

However, a small number of literary magazines are succeeding, by small steps, in changing the game, positioning themselves as a pure end-product instead of book publishing’s helper monkey. And they’re doing so by trying, in contrast to the stolid publications of the past, to be . . . well . . . savvy.

The most traditional and personalized of these would be AGNI, housed at Boston University. As an editor, Sven Birkerts is the beneficiary of two legacies: that of founding editor Askold Melnyczuk, who was responsible for setting the high standards of writing and visual art that now attract the best work of the world’s best writers and artists to AGNI, but as well, bittersweetly, that of the now-dead Partisan Review, also long-housed at B.U. Birkerts wrote in Bookforum last year that “Partisan Review failed in part because it couldn’t acknowledge that our intellectual and artistic needs—our cultural situation—had changed.” Align that statement with AGNI’s modus vivendi—”We see literature and the arts as part of a broad, on-going cultural conversation that every society needs to remain vibrant and alive.”—and the intellectual standard-bearing is perhaps precipitously clear.

But what places AGNI on steadier footing is its embrace, if sometimes awkward, of professional partnerships and a strategic online presence. AGNI persons get out into the public to promote each issue, and pieces not in the print edition go up with regularity on the AGNI website, helping create a cohesive readership, one likely to buy individual issues or a subscription after becoming comfortable with how consistently good the writing is. AGNI, still traditional in its dependence on big names and philanthropy to survive, nevertheless shows that old dogs learn new tricks.

Contrast AGNI’s guarded idealism with the bald brand promoted by newcomer N+1.

“If N+1 works, it should leave you insulted, riled up, and no longer in despair,” co-editor Mark Greif told me by e-mail last week. “Our only goal is to push the culture forward.”

Funny how that mission sounds like AGNI’s and Partisan’s. But N+1, whose third issue comes out this September, is a different animal altogether. In that it publishes deeply thoughtful pieces collapsing the usually distinct forms of “essay,” “review,” and, sometimes, “tract,” N+1 resembles the Partisan Review or a seasonal, book-length New York Review of Books. (NYRB, it should be said, is America’s most successful literary publication precisely because it was founded to meet a measurable need: in 1963, the year NYRB was created, a printers’ strike had effectively suspended the publishing of newspaper book reviews.)

But in its energy, N+1 stands apart. On the page and in person—as I learned at an N+1 party (in a New York Jewish Community Center gymnasium) this past spring—N+1 personalities resemble presidents of, say, college environmental clubs: N+1 may only have a handful of subscribers and teeny budget, but damnit if they aren’t convinced they change the world.

Except that N+1 actually has a realistic angle.

“We’re sick of book reviews,” Greif told me. “We founded it so that fiction couldn’t pretend to be a hermetic discipline sealed off from politics.” By gluing together the best bits of different forms without then sanding the edges, N+1 has survived its first year and in so doing won praise from the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and Houghton Mifflin, which, helper-monkeyily, will be publishing a N+1 piece in its next Best American Essays collection.

Although N+1 officially abandoned its own web-presence, it has enough professional creativity (including its clever and appropriate P.R. of treating lifetime subscribers like gods among mortals) to survive long-term as a book-sized product with a loyal audience.

A similar publication, though even savvier and with a longer track record, is Tin House, a Portland, Oregon, publisher of (usually) themed stories, poetry, and essays, always in an awfully hip package. Tin House has chosen a low-key web presence, a site that’s clean and delivers teasers on the current issue’s contents and basic information on submissions, history, and archives. But as the Spring 2005 issue shows, the messaging of Tin House simply commands attention. The issue’s theme is obsession; the blurb “Featuring Wasps, Bees, Mosquitoes, Tongs, Peter Pan, Absinthe, and Jasmine” finds the right balance between intrigue and playfulness and calls out the feeling of obsession; and the cover photo of a shadowy face, the left eye looking at the viewer through a jeweler’s loupe, is on-message: just plain freaky.

The cover should be enough to get readers to pull Tin House off the shelf for a flip-test. And what they’ll find, first, is a user-friendlily designed magazine. The columns are narrower than in most mags. The leading isn’t cramped. Certain pieces have line art, photographs, or graphics to break up the text. And the visual art spreads aren’t just artsy—they’re actually entertaining, engaging. The editors of Tin House, with their design, seem to understand that a book a) is something you can carry around and be seen reading, b) is in competition with other media, and c) is the holder of great, grand, fantastic ideas and is thus really hard to get through. The Tin House design keeps you from wanting to put it away.

The next thing readers will find is how seamlessly Tin House reads. Traditional literary magazines have a selection ethos that goes, “We will publish the best twenty pieces we receive between September and December.” While this guarantees that the best writing will be published, publishing them together often makes the magazine as a whole unreadable. The jump in tone, style, genre, etc. is too big to process. Tin House, though, and the handful of other magazines that publish on themes, address (if not completely overcome) this limitation of serial anthologies. Andrew Hulktrans’ essay on the insidious manifestations of writer’s block transitions easily into Pickney Benedict’s reimagining of the Golem legend, itself setting a welcome tone for an essay on J. M. Barrie. Some stories in Tin House do fall short with regard to stand-alone quality, but as part of a thread like obsession, they become readable, from beginning to end, and make the magazine a must-read every time it comes out.

And then there’s McSweeney’s. Reading McSweeney’s is like watching your first Marx Brothers movie. It’s utter mayhem. And you either enjoy it, or, in the words of one reader, you “want to kick [founder] Dave Eggers repeatedly in the shins.”

A battle rages between fans and detractors of McSweeney’s, primarily over its deliberate obfuscation of itself. McSweeney’s has managed to be purposefully difficult, creating an inside-joke-as-marketing-plan. Its staff is hard to identify. Their quarterly journals are hard to come by without a subscription. Their website ignores every convention of layout and navigation. And yet, because of this, McSweeney’s maintains a freakishly rabid readership (particularly of the website) because once you’ve expended the effort of learning how to find/enjoy the usually stellar writing, you feel initiated, somehow different and better.

Given that, McSweeney’s has grown, opened writing centers fronted as superhero/pirate supply stores, and helped jump-start the careers of young writers, the last because McSweeney’s can stomach the jagged-narratived, irony-laden, pop-referential pieces popular (popular!) with young readers but not with traditional lit mags’ editors.

So whether one likes McSweeney’s or not, one can’t ignore the model. Creating the feeling of an exclusive community, publishing writing supported on all written-word fronts (magazine, book, and Internet), and softening the snobbiness with humble charity may point towards the activities of tomorrow’s successful literary magazines.

AGNI, N+1, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. Each represents different ways and different levels of making literary magazines independent and relevant. Indeed, each represents a new economic morality. No longer is ars gratia artis enough. The art must point beyond itself, must be an invitation to readers rather than a demand of them, and must acknowledge both the limitations of the medium and the medium’s opportunities for ingenuity. It’s no longer about dumping time and money into ugly orange cars. It’s about the goal of all good writing: meaning something to your reader.

Andrew Whitacre is managing editor of Fungible Convictions.

Any thoughts?

Lit mags never get reviewed, and for obvious reasons. Why review a publication that itself includes reviews (and often (necessarily) minor-league writing) when time and space is limited and we all want to read reviews of the big-shot books anyway?

For certain people, especially young writers, knowing what literary magazines are doing, doing well, and doing poorly is valuable. And while no one buys lit mags–the best publications are almost always subsidized by a college or university–a surprising number of young adults do read them or, if not, would read them if someone told them so-and-so had just had a story placed and that it was good. (If our generation knows anything, it’s that artists’ names are cultural currency.)

The style of evaluating literary magazines in Fungible Convictions will be to compare a magazine’s own stated (or inferable) goals with what the magazine in fact publishes. Comparing one utterance to another, you could say. It would be too hard to account for a magazine’s popularity and influence. It would be almost as hard to judge the corpus of writing in the variegated genres magazines must publish in–it’s tricky enough reviewing a collection of short stories, but how does one review a collection of short stories, poems, essays, and artwork, all by different people with different styles and obsessions? Lit mag reviews in FC will take the same tack, then, as FC’s book reviews: concentrating on the following questions: who’s it meant for, what’s it akin to, and is it worth your time as an aging human being?

We’ll see what develops.