Why do some literary magazines decide to produce issues in print, and why do some publish online? What goes into the decision to do one over the other, or do both? How do readers and writers react to one medium over another?
These were questions that we, editors from Tahoma Literary Review and from Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, considered deeply last year. In both cases, we decided to move away from printing hard copy issues to publishing more online. When we recently compared notes about our decisions, we identified some common experiences and reasoning. To discuss things further, we met on Zoom, exchanged additional questions by email, and then collaborated to produce the summary below.
Speaking for Solstice here is Editor-in-Chief Lorena Hernandéz Leonard. From TLR we are publishers and editors Ann Beman and Jim Gearhart. Solstice is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that started in 2009 and produces three issues a year. Tahoma Literary Review started in 2014 and publishes two issues a year.
Questions from Tahoma Literary Review
At the moment we are planning to create some offerings to submitters, like manuscript critiques and short-form writing workshops; which we have not previously done. As we get ready to launch these offerings, we will be announcing widely to our network, so stay tuned for more on this in the near future!
As for contributors, we are dedicated to promoting their work as much as we can. On a monthly basis we invite them to inform us about news of their new book launches, readings, etc. which we then share widely on our social media channels and our newsletter. We also nominate for Pushcart and have nominated and been published in The Best American Essays, and the Best of the Net anthologies because we believe the work of our contributors is phenomenal and worth high recognition in this very competitive and challenging industry.
Questions from Solstice:
The initial reaction to our online issue showed us one path for this, I think. It suggested that active social media engagement can help build community.
In the first days after the issue went online we saw enthusiastic sharing of the issue’s selections on social media, with writers and readers sharing links. The activity has dwindled since that first burst, which we see as a message that we the publishers need to keep that interest going.
Revenues vs. expenses were a significant part of the decision to change, and as you said, the challenges there won’t completely go away. Printing and shipping costs have come off of the ledger, as have revenues from sales and subscriptions, so those two sides of the balance sheet were pretty much a wash. But sustaining the magazine overall is an ongoing challenge. We still would like to find other sources of revenue as we share the writing we find. An Initial impression from the switch is that interest in a physical product remains. We’d like to remain open to offering some kind of tangible, physical product. Anthologies and broadsides are things we’ve looked at.
One concern is whether interest in submitting will continue. From what we’ve heard, some writers and poets clearly prefer to appear in physical print, and we may lose those submissions. But we also have met many who are either neutral about the medium or even prefer online. Time will tell whether our initial worries about a drop off in submissions were justified. In any case, we plan to continue paying our writers and touting their accomplishments as Solstice does. That has not changed from switching to online.
Expanding to new audiences is a key aspiration for our online presence. We want to reach more people, to find additional readers. Our print distribution was never wide; we mainly had sales through our website, a few through Amazon, and then at in-person events such as AWP and readings. Now with an online presence we can move past that, in theory, but we’re figuring the specifics out.
We’ve been most active on Instagram, Facebook, and X/Twitter, but for those last two the experience and effectiveness has dwindled noticeably. It’s clear that online is the best place to promote our online publication, and we want to bolster what we’re doing there.
Speaking of opportunities, moving online has definitely improved our production process. We don’t have the time lags related to printing and shipping orders; our copy editing and galley reviews went much smoother; and we streamlined—even automated—processes that were really time-consuming before.
This was an early discussion point among the editors, and we agreed not to introduce a paywall. A paywall felt incompatible with our goals of expanding our reach and improving access to our selections. Our main sources of income now are submission fees and our feedback/critique services. We have a number of ideas for additional services or products, but pursuing them is a matter of reconciling our available time, the possible benefits, and how the different ideas fit our mission & values.
We were lucky that we already had pdf versions of all our issues. Our web designer crafted an area to house our back issues and managed an import from our existing site, so setting up that archive online was relatively straightforward. Of course, it probably would have been much more complicated if we had more than twenty-five issues to deal with.
Lorena Hernández Leonard is a Latina writer born in Colombia whose work has been recognized in The Best American Essays Notable list, was a finalist for the PEN America Emerging Writer Fellowship and the CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award. Her writing has appeared in KHÔRA, Tasteful Rude, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Pathfinders Collective, Solstice, and elsewhere. Lorena has received support for her memoir, “Salsipuedes: Leave if You Can,” about growing up during the Colombian drug war and her forced immigration to the U.S. (for which she is seeking publication) as a Pauline Scheer fellow at GrubStreet Creative Writing Center, and by the Juniper Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Tin House, Vermont Studio Center, and Anaphora Arts. Her storytelling was featured on WORLD Channel and PBS’s program “Stories from the Stage,” and she is co-producer of the award-winning animated short film, “Demi’s Panic,” which was longlisted for the 94th OSCARS.
