The CLMP listserve recently hosted a lengthy and sometimes heated debate between the editors of various literary journals over the question of charging a fee for submissions [note: Canteen Magazine removed their transcript of this debate due to complaints by the editors]. The discussion ranges from ethical quandries to business model failures to the internet economy and the providing a valuable service theory. I'm not at all sure how I feel about this. Let's think it through a bit.
Probably there are more journals being published in America than its literary readership can really support. The internet has put downward pressure on the value of content. It has thrown standards of quality and practices of filtering into question. There is an aftertaste of postmodern skepticism there as well. Literary activity—particularly poetry, I think—seems to have become more participatory than spectatorial over the past few decades, meaning that there are way more people writing, and those writers are also the primary audience for these literary journals. So there has been a growth in the number of writers, but not in audience; it's just that a larger percentage of that audience is writing. Which means that the number of journals has increased because of greater supply*, but they've each reduced the market share of the others.
* Notice I'm ignoring quality. Assume that's a fixed rate within the submission quantity: more submissions, more publishable work. Editors out there are laughing at this, I'm sure. The thought makes me glad I am not a literary editor.
Economic investment as one filter in a time of content overabundance and economic scarcity? Makes a vicious kind of sense, I suppose. I don't believe, as one editor claimed in the thread, in the “vanity publishing” charge—many important writers funded their early publications, or had them funded. It's foolish to believe that the fat-and-happy mid-Twentieth Century was the standard for an artistic existence. Artists have traditionally required patrons (or an inheritance—or, before the 1950s, a non-academic job) to survive. Art is the noblest form of vanity, anyhow.
I guess my thought is: if there is a desire to have a gateway of this sort, why not become a membership organization? Only members can submit their work. In return they get a subscription to the journal, an email newsletter, members only area of the web site, a large annual symposium? (Dare I say: Members Only jackets?) This is basically the Nineteenth Century subscription system, but it could definitely work. Several like-minded journals in a region could even get together under one membership organization—New York City alone could probably have a dozen of them. Each journal increases their market share, if marginally, by combining theirs with some others.
This at least breaks the mean, poor, degenerative Hobbesian equilibrium currently in place, in which all-against-all translates to Epic Fail.
2 comments:
have been wondering about this now that 1913 started charging $2/ms.
feeds into my objection to workshops: a willingness to pay to be read. here, though, there's next-to-no willing audience. i literally feel guilty for subjecting editors and/or writers i know to my own poems. they get so much shit thrown at them, endlessly and thanklessly. the only benefit to them is an inflated sense of importance, which is offset by resentment and condescension.
and friends whose work i would gladly read, but are reluctant to share it (dan, george...)
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