Au revoir, Revue Blanche
It happens like this: the editors of Indie Magazine X announce it’s over, and almost immediately the timelines start overflowing with the tears of auteurs lamenting the magazine’s demise (whilst plugging the pieces they published with said magazine).
This week it was the turn of the White Review to announce they are going on a hiatus — a recurrent euphemism, very useful when it comes to pulling any plug. And of course, the rituals of mourning and self-promotion followed like night follows day, or “the seagull follows the trawler”, to quote one of the most exciting French philosophers of all time1. Since this announcement I’ve lost count of the many who’ve praised the quality of the magazine, or have expressed sadness for its demise, or have emphasised the need to support venues such as the White Review, lest we end up with none (and we aren’t far). Touching, yes. But I’d personally like to see these people’s bank statements in order to find out how many of them have actually bought an issue of the magazine in recent times. If they ever bought one.
I can’t help feeling that most of these expressions of mourning are laments born of self-interest, useless performative wails. It shouldn’t bother me, since life is full of such public liturgies. But it does bother me — because self-interest is one of the factors that contribute to killing indie literary magazines. Or at least, authorial self-interest contributes to slowly isolating and putting editors off from investing the time needed to keep magazines running, which is more or less the same as a death sentence, given enough time.
See, editing an indie magazine is often a thankless endeavour. I’ll resort to a personal anecdote to explain what I mean.
Christmas fuckery at Minor Literature[s]
The pandemic has messed up my understanding of time and I swear I can’t remember if this happened in 2018, or 2019, or 2020. But I’m sure it was in December, when unexpectedly I had to take Minor Literature[s]2 offline.
The TLDR: we had a massive media gallery mishap and all posts lost their accompanying image. Because of this, and since trying to link to the original image would have been near impossible, I had to pull all the pieces, in order to then upload them manually, with new images designed by my friend (and co-editor of the mag) Yanina Spizzirri. When this fuckery took place we had around 800 posts. So I spent the whole of Christmas of that year, and January and February of the following year, manually tidying up and re-uploading each one of them in my spare time, at five to seven minutes a pop.
During these two to three months, several auteurs took to Twitter to lament the potential demise of the magazine. Most did it to express sadness; others to express frustration about the alleged loss of their work3. I guess this frustration was made worse by the impossibility of plugging their pieces while lamenting the mag’s demise, as is customary, since the site was down while I was involved in my tedious chore. Then, when I partially re-uploaded the site, a couple of maniacs took offence, publicly, at their work remaining offline, even if we had informed what was going on from day one, and explained that the posts had to be re-uploaded chronologically, so that we could preserve them in the order in which they had originally been published. Very significantly, during these three months not a single author we’d published asked if we needed help — not even the ones who got in touch to enquire why the magazine was down. Had they asked, I would have said “no, we don’t need your help, but thanks for asking !” You may say “well, but that’s not an author’s job!”, and you are right to some extent. To some extent, because being Minor Literature[s] a voluntary-run project, in which editors and writers come together to make something out of nothing, a project in which no one makes any money4, you’d expect it’d be different. Sadly, it isn't.
This is because most writers see literary magazines solely as places that will contribute to their career, distant places that are someone else’s concern, not spaces that are carved cooperatively. Until the magazine dies, of course, at which point the feeling of loss kicks in, as does the realisation that we are losing the places where we can do something together out of nothing, places that are willing to publish things other — major — venues won’t. Until an indie magazine dies, in other words, the magazine is seen as a service by many if not most writers, much like indie publishers are seen by so many authors as just a first step in a career — an initial step in their path to “serious” publication.
In most authorial minds there is a clear journey that starts from indie magazines and ends in the New Yorker, that begins with Dostoyevsky Wannabe — to name any indie press — and ends with Penguin Random House. You can’t blame these auteurs. If writing is indeed their career, one in which CVs carry as much weight as books, then it’s important to waste no time at all, and the “we are all in this alone” mindset becomes unavoidable, as in any rat race.
And as the MFAfication of literature accelerates, and as more and more people enter the scene5 armed with purchased delusions, an overpriced degree, and a huge debt, it’ll only get worse.
Money makes the world go round (around the need to make money)
OK, maybe I’m projecting here.
Maybe the editors of the White Review weren't alone; maybe they didn’t feel they were carrying too much weight on their shoulders; maybe they had successfully built a community around the magazine, and they were all pulling the weight together. Maybe. I doubt it. But let’s leave this possibility open.
In any case, here comes the second killer of indie lit magazines: money. Once a magazine embraces the logic of the market slash industry, once a magazine prioritises the payment of symbolic fees (and symbolic stipends for their editors) over the spirit of non-pecuniary collaboration, a whole new set of problems arise.
By their own admission it was losing the ACE’s support that did it for the White Review:
The White Review is a registered charity and relied on Arts Council England funding for a substantial portion of its annual budget between 2011-2021. The organization has not been granted funding in three successive applications in the years since. Despite our best efforts, the associated effects of the cost of living crisis and the increase in production costs, in tandem with reduced funding, has meant that The White Review has not been able to publish a print issue since No. 33 in June 2022.
It sounds like an unfortunate event in unfortunate (Tory) times, no doubt, but I’d argue that when you take the route above you are doomed from the start. Looking for funding is a full-time job in itself6, just like running a business is a full-time job. And these full-time jobs always end up taking time away from actually running your indie magazine.
I wrote symbolic fees above, because most indie magazines are only able to pay a symbolic and not a living fee to their writers. Some of the best and longer-running independent magazines in the UK and the USA pay pitiful fees between £50 and £150, max £200, a piece. Of course I won’t say “no” when someone wants to pay for my writing, but if I make a very simple calculation of how much I’m actually getting paid per hour for these pieces, then it becomes very clear that I’m working for well below the UK minimum wage, and that this is not a way to sustain any career. This is the same reason why I always criticise so much talks about “professionalism” among indie writers. Who the hell can realistically call writing a profession? How many indie authors can genuinely say “this is my career”? I’m not talking about delusional fools, or those whose career is paid for by family money, or a wealthy partner... Because how can you have a career in an industry in which there is no money or money depends on state handouts? What sort of industry is that?
As a former magazine editor, I always felt that embracing the logic of the market slash industry, just so that some people can continue to cuddle the illusion of a career is a distraction. Indie magazines should focus on the writing, on pushing groundbreaking literature, and should find ways to do this with as little money as possible. And if that means not paying a symbolic fee, then be it, and sod whoever doesn’t like it. The only thing that can preserve a healthy indie lit ecosystem is the spirit of collaboration, not the logic of the market slash industry.
3:AM Magazine has been publishing since 2000. I have no doubts its longevity is linked to the fact that it’s a collective project in which no one makes a penny. May they stay like that. May they keep losing money for twenty years more.
Paper atavism
Paper magazines look lovely7, but they cost an eye and a half to produce. Which bears the question: in an age in which most of our writing and reading takes place online, do we still need hard copies in order to distribute culture?
There’s this strange prestige attached to print publications, a prestige that isn’t coherent with one simple but important fact: a piece published online will always be read by more people than a piece published in print, especially over time — the internet never forgets, as the saying goes. Look, I’m not dissing the White Review project here, or painting myself as some indie publishing sage; I’m just trying to influence any of you, dear minions, reading this piece: if you ever launch a magazine, stick to digital, at least until you bump into a rich patron or you secure CIA funding. And bear in mind all favours come at a price: the patron will want your body, and the CIA will want your soul.
Running an online magazine will set you back maximum £500 a year8, that’s including a professional Wordpress plan, and a submissions management system like Submittable. There are now better and cheaper (or free) alternatives — like Substack to replace the former, and Oleada, among others, to replace the latter. And if you are gagging to see your name in print as editor, then consider publishing an anthology one day. It’s more likely than not that you’ll still shove the copies where the sun don’t shine, but it’s easier to send two hundred copies of an anthology to pulp than several thousand copies of several unsold issues.
One thing you can be sure: don’t count on auteurs buying any copies of your anthology — they’ll be too busy self-promoting and mourning the latest indie magazine to shuffle off this mortal coil.
One should always quote a French philosopher when writing about the White Review.
I launched the mag in July 2013 and edited until July 2023 because I like round numbers. The magazine is in good health and in great editorial hands. Long live Minor Literature[s].
Some people haven’t heard of the groundbreaking concept of a “backup”.
The editors actually lose money since they pay for the site. Therapy is more expensive, I guess.
Aș ridiculous as the term “the scene” is, I still prefer the term to “the industry”, for reasons that should become clear below.
Not to mention running a charity, with its trustees, meetings, annual accounts, and so on.
When they are well-designed. Most aren’t and look like shit.
One day I will write about the editor of an online magazine, a venue that didn’t pay. This didn’t stop him from raising +£100k over five or six years, to pay for “the costs of running the magazine”. For each person doing things altruistically there’s always someone else taking the piss — this is a fact of life. My advice: if you submit to mags that don’t pay — and by all means do — make sure of two things: 1) you aren’t getting charged a reading fee (don’t ever pay for these); 2) no one is making any money from the publication.
1. Once upon a time I was a baby writer living in the center of the universe known as old/my NYC; some would say, I was in the heart of all the scenes, but this was unbeknownst to me since I had no connections to any literary or publishing world: I was a “grown-up” teacher with room mates who loved reading and collecting my observations in notebooks.
Then we all became writers because of blogging and through the now famous bookstore McNally Jackson, I discovered self-publishing. Then I learned of journals. And rejections. And prestige. And awards. And the ladder. So, it all happened very backwards for me. And thank Zeus for it! I have never forgotten, especially in the U.S., that if the only people who are reading your work are in said literary journals, then let me break your heart: no one is reading your work. (This may not be the case in Ireland and Ireland is a separate case study). Esteemed writers who used to write for Playboy had a bigger readership in that regard. Ray Bradbury, Chekhov etc. had many readers than literary accolades, the equivalent of our “blogs” I suppose? Not sure of that equivalency to be honest.
2. I don’t know if I agree with this: “a piece published online will always be read by more people than a piece published in print, especially over time.” I have seen sites close and things disappear. People’s obsession with substack...am I the only one who remembers Posterous?! It was awesome (and made plagiarism very easy by reposting, similarly to Tumblr lol) and Jack’s Twitter bought it and then poof- took it all down. There goes your content. Not to mention most people wouldn’t have made the effort as you did with Minor Literatures.
3. I once submitted fiction to 3AM -never heard back. I am not cool enough.
4. I once told an editor about my book idea who wasn’t really listening to me until I mentioned that the essay I wanted to expand had been part of an anthology which was reviewed in 3AM. They jotted my name down. I was over it by the time they asked to spell my last name.
5. Any literary journal that continues to thrive (primarily in Ireland but even there it’s getting saturated but they may not be impacted because for every writer they have two readers and every writer is a reader) is because they recognize that obsessive READERS are the lifeblood.
its a reasonable definition of the lifecycle of literary magazines... if you remove the anecdotes you end up with a nice life cycle flow chart!