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
- Until last year, Solstice printed one of its three annual issues. Now you plan to publish all three of your issues online (at least for the next year or two). Why the change?As you know, the literary magazine publishing landscape is changing as a consequence of rising costs. Developing, printing, publishing, and shipping an issue has become a financial strain on many nonprofit and/or independent magazines like Solstice. We are simply not seeing a return on that investment. Readership hasn’t changed, thankfully. However, the high costs for printing, even one issue per year, was having a definite impact on our overall spending, which meant that we had to sacrifice some important programs.
Sadly, we know that Solstice isn’t alone in this predicament. For instance, the literary community was shocked when The Gettysburg Review shut down as the college took away funding. I was actually very surprised to read about the amount of financial support this publication was receiving from Gettysburg College––$200,000 annually, according to some sources, plus an additional annual grant of $26,000 from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. Solstice is a small, independent, nonprofit literary magazine. Our funding and operating costs are not in that range, of course. And I’m guessing the majority of literary magazines also do not count on this kind of funding. But for us, it was important to move forward, so we had to adapt to the changing environment by deciding to go temporarily online. We believe this decision allows us to better navigate the rising costs of running our literary magazine. Also, as many writers know, online publications often reach considerably more readers. - TLR: Have your internal processes changed much? There may be two parts to that question: how has production changed, and how, if at all, have your selection criteria changed?Since we have always published two out of three issues per year online, the process of moving all three issues online has not changed. At least we don’t yet see a need to make any changes at this point. It is still early for us. Our print issue has historically been published in the winter, meaning this year’s Solstice Winter 2024 Issue won’t come out until December. I suspect that our readers and editors will have more time to read through and consider submissions for this Winter issue, since we won’t have the pressure of having all content ready months ahead of the design and printing process.
- TLR: How do you expect stopping the print version will affect Solstice’s revenues and operating costs?I expect this decision to have a positive impact on our overall operating costs. I don’t foresee us having additional money to spend on other things, per se, without receiving grants, but because of the print issue suspension as well as our loyal donors’ generous contributions, much of the financial burden associated with running a nonprofit literary magazine will be alleviated.
- TLR: What services do you offer to writers who send their work? What do you offer those contributors whom you publish? Have these offerings changed since the online transition?
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:
- Anecdotally I’ve heard many readers say they value the physical experience of reading a print magazine. I’ve also seen many writers express a preference for having their work appear in print format. With the shift to online publishing, how will TLR look to cultivate a sense of community and engagement (from both readers and contributing writers) in the online space?
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.
- What are the biggest challenges you are currently facing now that you have transitioned from print to a fully online publication?
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.
- Big changes also bring about big opportunities. I’m assuming that for TLR some of these opportunities might include expanding your reach and attracting new audiences. As such, how will you tailor your online content to appeal to them?
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.
- Do you foresee any subscription options or paywalls associated with the online content? If so, how will this impact readership? If not, why did you make this decision and do you foresee this impacting the magazine’s revenue?
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.
- Your new website now hosts a digital archive of past content that was published in print. I think this is brilliant, but I also can’t imagine the amount of work that went into this. Do you have any advice for other literary magazines that are going through a similar shift to online only? What were some lessons learned and is there anything you would do differently?
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.
