Okay, it’s time. Let’s rip it up and challenge some assumptions and piss off a few defenders of the faith…
Literary journals have traditionally been considered a proving ground. You get some stories published, establish a track record and develop a following. Agents and editors want you to have a platform as much as possible to push the sell-through. The wisdom was that lit journals gave you cred when as you developed your skills for longer works. Lit journals were where you paid your dues before you could hope to write the great American, Canadian, Jamaican or Serbian novel.
Well, goodbye to all that! Here’s why:
1. You can get pretty beat up in a long process where they take forever to get back to you, or never get back to you. No simultaneous or e-mail submissions and you take a year to say no with a snotty note? And all this for a journal with a tiny readership that pays in contributor’s copies? There are far less frustrating ways to find something to line the bottom of your birdcage. Lit journals, your time is up!
2. Some journals may have some weight with agents and editors. Many won’t. Many are still really zines that nobody’s ever heard of. You could make up a title and it would have as much credibility as many of these rags.
3. It’s arguable that short story writing and novel writing are different skill sets. (I’ll make that argument another time, but as a for instance, even now I prefer Hemingway’s short stories to his novels.) One thing won’t necessarily translate to the other thing. Everyone starts with short stories, but if you intend to be a novelist, start writing long soon. (Also, your sensitive little meditation/poem/short story on the return of the whippoorwills to Dead Grampa’s lake probably won’t help you sell your Masons-plot-to-destroy-universal-health-care conspiracy thriller.)
4. Who needs literary journals when you can build your brand on your own website? Write short stories and build your platform through instant self-publishing. Give out samples and teasers of your work. Keep people coming back and/or offering suggestions, praise, money, fame. Serialize. Monetize.
5. Lit journals publish a few stories here and there, mostly solicited (read: not you.) They don’t take their slush pile applicants near as seriously as they take themselves. (I also notice a trend in the journals where they’ll do a theme issue, or several. That puts slush entries even farther out of the loop, like amongst Saturn’s rings.)
BONUS:
If you were an agent, editor, sales rep or publicist, which author’s bio would you consider more helpful to your goals?
A: I was published in Northeastern Prairie Review* in 2005. Circulation 1200 people (most of whom are frustrated writers themselves who subscribe in the hope that it will help them get published. In fact, they hate most of what they read, they don’t read much of it anyway, hate the published, and the editor only publishes his four best friends and the rich cousin who funds their tiny enterprise.
or
B: I’ve built 40,000 regular readers of my blog and x number of unique hits on my author website. Look at my fan base! They loved the first chapters…blah, blah de blah I’m twelve kinds of sexy awesome etc.,…
If you answered B, congratulations. You’re sane.
You heard it here first, I say this internet thing?
It’s going to be big.
DOUBLE BONUS:
However…if you plan to start a lit journal and become a bitchy arbiter of good taste, aha! Now I think you may still have something in a dying industry. Publishing yourself and dressing it up in respectable clothes connotes more respect than being the schlub sending out your stories to an indifferent world. When you submit your novel, you’re an editor.
Save paper. Publish on-line. Be cool, and you too, could finally have enough cred to get your work actually read by an uncaring know-nothing no-everything MFA refugee summer intern.
TRIPLE BONUS:
The rule with lit journals is, the stranger the name (Three Monkeys and a Paperclip, Fish Stink of the Golden Future) the smaller the readership. In a world where even the “big” lit journals are really small, that’s rather snobby and irrelevant, however. (For some sense of scale, every couple of months 75,000+ people read my column and my features in a trade magazine you’ve never read.)
Filed under: publishing, writing tips, literary journals, publishing, queries
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