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]

So I called the the Paris Review’s circulation manager, the dedicated Caitlin Roper.

The end result? Contact magazines if you think you’re not getting your publication fast enough!

Roper described for me the process by which the Paris Review (and the Believer, for that matter) gets from printer to stores and subscribers.

The Review is printed in Winnipeg. From there, two batches go one of two places—to bookstores via distributors, and to subscribers via a U.S. Mail hub. Until [the most recent] issue 176, that mail hub was in North Dakota—a good location because it’s just over the border from Canada and because mail starting in the middle of the country crosses the fewest mail zones, so it’s cheaper. But the North Dakota hub turned out to be incredibly slow in getting our copies out. Copies addressed internationally took over a month to ship. For issue 176, though, I’ve switched to a U.S. Mail hub in New Jersey . . .

. . . which isn’t as cheap, but results in better fulfillment.

Roper and I talked also about how she wants to stagger deliveries. For a non-time-sensitive publication like the Paris Review (but unlike the Economist or the New Yorker), publishers can hold distributors’ batches to time them to arrive at the same time as subscribers’. It gives you the value you paid for as a subscriber—priviledged access to the publication.

This is what Roper is trying to do with her distributor, subscriber, and international clients. But for it to work, you have to provide feedback. Roper made it clear that, at least in her case, you wouldn’t be a nag if you told her that you experienced a delay. It’s how she weeds out bad distributors, balances costs, and better serves her readers. I’m sure tons of publications—from Wired to Vogue to Tin House—would value that kind of information.

The problem that remains, though, is whether nagging would help weekly publications make better decisions. Weeklies can’t stagger their deliveries, but they suffer from the same problems. For example, the April 3rd issue of the New Yorker was on the newstand at my office building last Tuesday—but I only received my copy today. I get letters from my friend in Niger faster than I get my New Yorker.

So for weeklies, what would you say is the best way to (selfishly) get your copy at the same time it shows on the newsstands?

I’ve noticed the same thing with the New Yorker. The newsstand at work has the week’s issue usually two days before it shows up at my door. Don’t issues get mailed from the printer to distributors to be distributed to newstands in the same way that issues get mailed from the printer to subscribers? Where occurs the two-day lag?

Regarding the Paris Review, I’d like to see them update their website more quickly. If I can hold a copy in my hands (which I did at Porter Square Books earlier today), I should be able to see it promoted as the current issue on the Paris Review website. As of now, issue 175 is still described as something coming in the future.

I know that sounds like a small thing. But as I’ve learned from my textbook customers, a publisher’s professionalism—its efficiency, its care for its readers, and its authority—is reinforced by consistency in its public messages. Consistency is reassuring. It contributes to a publication’s permanence. And, ultimately, it sells. More than one customer has written me to say they are hesitant to use one of our books because information in the examination copy didn’t precisely match information in the online catalog. With the book in their hands, obviously they can see what information is correct, but invariably they tell me something like, “If this is the care you take with your website, how can I be sure my ordering information will be processed in time for the start of the semester?” That’s both irrational and understandable.

And if I have to wait past Monday for my copy of the Paris Review, I’ll be much less inclined to renew.

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.