Fungible Convictions

Printed stories hold an advantage over electronic: physically, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

Readers choose which books to read often by which literature is likely to be permanent. They’ll choose to read something by a well-known author or by a highly respected magazine with a long tradition and wide readership. They do this to avoid reading crap.

A single story can take half an hour to read. Reading a lit magazine can take up parts of days. So why take the time to read online if the words you’re reading won’t be good, findable, and sharable in six months’ time?

Always give the reader the sense that stories and poems you post online will be available for all time—even if your site is brand new. Give each piece a halo of permanence, the feeling that it is special among all other stories. Don’t post twelve poems on a single page. Give the reader the option to print a page without navigation or ads, perhaps even as a PDF. And animate your archives by reposting older work if an author has published something new.

A literature site isn’t a news site, full of articles waiting to be overtaken by other concerns. A literature site must either make each piece precious, or it must change what the value of literature is, like McSweeney’s does by posting daily, short, entertaining pieces.

The Internet really seems to baffle literary journals. Those with high standards for print design often have inelegant web designs, the Paris Review for example. But moreso, very few journals have figured out how to use the Internet to financially supplement their respective missions. The brief overview and suggestions below are based on one assumption: for a journal to survive financially, it should worry less about protecting its content and more about becoming viewed as indispensable.

money for nothing

The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses funds and maintains an incredible resource for its paying members called the Literary Journal Institute Toolkit. It is an in-depth look at what journals do to survive and thrive, from picking a distributor to crafting an effective direct mail campaign.

One poorly understood area the Toolkit explores is how a journal really makes its money—it’s not by selling more individual copies necessarily; it’s by methodically moving a reader up the chain from “Single-copy buyer” to “Subscriber” to “Renewing subscriber” to “Donor” to “Board member.” Each step means more income generated on lower expenses. A particular passage illustrates this progression:

Renewals are by far the single most important marketing effort you have. They generate the bulk of almost any literary magazine’s revenue. Without too much effort, they produce the highest return of any other promotion. (How else can you get over a 50% response rate?)

Once you have succeeded in renewing a subscriber, that subscriber becomes increasingly loyal and valuable. They respond better than other subs to any other items you are trying to sell (books, tote bags, readings, events). They are also the most likely to give gift subscriptions and to give money (if you solicit donations). To lose a subscriber who has renewed already is more costly than not getting a new subscription in the door.

The Literary Journal Institute Toolkit: “A Quick & Dirty Look at Newsstand Sales”

In short, it costs a lot to sell one copy. Production, manufacturing, distribution, author compensation. It costs far less less to receive a donation: perhaps a direct mail campaign, perhaps a dinner event, perhaps a friendly phone call. The goal is get money in with no money out—money for nothing.

and your chapbooks for free

When I was grad school and working in a large tutoring office, a coworker/poetry student went around the office and offered to sell everyone a small collection of his poems (a chapbook) for $7. I bought one; I had read his poems before, liked them, and was happy to oblige. But no one bought a copy who hadn’t already read his poems, even though they had worked alongside him. They weren’t prepared to spend money on something when they didn’t know what they’d get in return.

There’s much to be said about inflating the cost of a product, even (or especially) art, in order to give it a fraudulant sheen of value. It works everywhere from convenience stores to consultancies and works particularly well in contexts where consumers have little objective information to base their own pricing upon—I’m scared to think what I would have paid for my first digital camera had there not been online user reviews to give me a proper sense of each camera’s true value.

But charging a premium on writing is a direct impediment to its distribution. When journals hoard their writing, so must their readers. When journals only make a small portion of their stories and poems available online, readers who visit journal websites encounter very little of value that they can associate with the journal. There’s less to get excited about. There’s nothing to share.

Remember: the writing itself is not a journal’s only source of value. There’s the experience, there’s the chance to create community—a community with such mutual affection that it wants to contribute money to prolong its own existence. And there’s the value of the different media, web and print. On the web, writing is easy to share. In print, writing is easy to love. Readers know this. They want to get excited. They want to convert themselves from tryers to buyers to full-on benefactors.

Journals simply need to keep the paths open.

unincorporated thoughts

Example of vibrant online journal with all-free writing: McSweeney’s

Reference I wanted to make but couldn’t because the content wasn’t available online: The Paris Review has a great interview in the Fall/Winter issue with poet Jack Gilbert, who talks about his non-concern for contests and cash prizes—and other poets’ obsession with them. Perhaps true, but I think it’s more important to point out that very few writers publish with any hope for meaningful compensation—most would simply like to know that they are being read by as many people as possible, another vote for free and easy online access.

Parting shot: While the same can’t be said for magazines and newspapers, there is no evidence that posting all of a journal’s content online cannibalizes sales. Moreover, no one pirates journals. There’s simply too much value in the touchable, subway-able, coffee-table-displayable print edition of a journal, and as long as that’s the case, there will always be a low, neighborly fence between how someone uses, say, Ploughshares and how someone uses www.pshares.org.

Good job, Amy, getting your Letter to the President posted on McSweeney’s. What’s great about McSweeney’s soliciting and publishing such things is you can say things like “In my sex fantasy, while [the President] and I are naked, my mouth covering [his] left nipple” without men in black coming atcha.

At least…not this time.

You know, rereading this stuff, Dave Eggers and Neal Pollack are actually quite genteel, given that Pollack made up a quote attributed to Eggers.

Here’s the exchange as published on McSweeney’s.net.

And here’s the Pollack essay, as brought to us by FC reader Jordon.

(If you don’t have a Times registration . . . well, what do you do at work?)

I hope folks realize how often non-reporters make up quotes. 95% of the time, though, the made-up quote captures what the speaker said generally, meant, intended, etc. But I suppose people—I do—think quotations in the New York Times go through some sort of fact-checking scrim. (Don’t you remember the scene from Almost Famous when the Rolling Stone fact-checker phones up the band to confirm the whole story? You mean that isn’t true?!) To the Times, the Eggers quote probably looked harmless. But in the context of the McSweeney’s goals, it’s anti-snarking campaign along with the Believer, and its apparently less-ironic-than-at-first-blush taste, it really is an incredible quotation to assign to Eggers.

by Andrew Whitacre

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. Continue reading