My Experience of Running a Lit Mag and What it Taught me

"Overall, the experience helped me as a writer and reader."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

---

I’ve been a writer since 2014 – long enough to submit hundreds of pieces of work to lit mags. In one year alone, I averaged one submission a day to get myself used to the feeling of rejection. It’s not as difficult as it sounds, because after a few years, I found I had loads of poems and stories that had either never been accepted or I hadn’t sent anywhere.

Anyway, I’ve read a lot of guidelines, submitted a lot of work, tweaked a lot of work, then submitted to other lit mags and repeated the process more times than I can count. It was only in 2019 that I saw things from the other side of the submission process. I had considered producing my own lit mag, but dismissed it because I felt underqualified. Then, I realized that although I’m not an expert, I had learned a great deal and knew some of the places to share my submission calls. So, I dove in and found out how it feels to be the editor dealing with submissions and everything else involved in producing a lit mag. I learned even more from this experience.

One thing that annoyed me as a writer was getting standard form rejections saying, “It’s not quite right,” or something similar. The first thing I decided to do was to provide feedback for anyone we rejected, even if it was just a few lines. If we could point them in the right direction to make their work fit somewhere else, I was happy to help. I’ll admit that it helped that we never had more than 100 submissions per issue.

Most people appreciated the feedback. It wasn’t just based on my own knowledge, preferences or opinions. The reading team consisted of myself, my partner and one or two volunteers. I would compile the feedback in a short constructive paragraph. I would never directly pass on anything negative without turning it into helpful advice. For example, if a submission reader said they liked a particular line in a poem but hated another part of the poem, I would tell the writer we liked the line but point out that the other part was less effective and provide a suggestion to improve it. I just rephrased the feedback to make it more positive and constructive.

Not everyone was happy though. I had one person comment that they hadn’t expected such detailed feedback, and although you might think this was a compliment, the tone of the email suggested it wasn’t welcome.

Another writer lashed out and insulted us personally. The piece he’d sent in resembled a badly written script, and the guidelines stated we were looking for non-fiction/reviews, fiction and poetry. Scripts were not mentioned. Our marking system was out of ten. For example, if we had three readers, a total mark of 21 (an average of 7 out of 10 per reader) would guarantee acceptance. His submission was the only one I can recall getting zero marks from everyone. Usually, someone would like a piece of work or at least find something nice to say about it, even if one or more of us didn’t.

Since no one found redeeming qualities in his work, feedback was difficult to rephrase positively. I settled for telling him we weren’t accepting scripts, then recommended a few books that might help him improve his scriptwriting skills. It would have been too cruel to tell him we all marked his work as 0 out of 10.

It threw me when he responded with accusations and insults, and claimed his work was a story, not a script, and insisted we rejected him for personal reasons. I was not expecting such vitriol, certainly not for simply passing on a piece of writing.

From this experience, I learned to restrain myself. I already knew it wasn’t good practice to get into a debate or to let the communication get personal, but actually holding back and being polite when faced with such hostility is much harder when you have to put it into practice.

This helped me to understand, as a writer, why many editors don’t engage more or get too personal in their rejections. Good intentions can easily be misunderstood in a way they weren’t intended to be.

As he was one of several people who hadn’t responded well to feedback, I also learned that not everyone sees the same value in it that I do. So, I gave people the option to not receive feedback. Most people said they were happy to receive it. But I wanted to be sure that the feedback was desired to avoid more negative feelings.

Another thing I learned is some people either don’t read the guidelines or assume these don’t apply to them. One writer who I had published previously kindly shared the submission call on his social media, but didn’t submit his own work until close to the deadline. Despite the guidelines saying we might close early if full, he was not happy when we did.

He complained about how he had shared on social media and that it was unacceptable, even after I pointed this out in the guidelines. It’s not an uncommon thing to happen and I’ve seen lots of lit mags close calls early. It’s impossible to know how many submissions you’ll receive and how many of those you will want to publish. I understood from experience that waiting a long time for a response is frustrating, so I didn’t want to keep writers waiting. Still, his failure to read the guidelines carefully (or his assumption that they wouldn’t apply to him) led to bad feeling all around.

Before I tried on the editor’s hat, another of my pet peeves was complicated guidelines. I tried to keep mine as simple as possible, but it wasn’t easy. Without enough detail, I received submissions that weren’t suitable, but if I provided too much, it might restrict creativity and put people off, and I worried I might miss out on something I hadn’t thought to ask for.

I still hate complicated guidelines, but now I appreciate that most editors do have a rationale behind them. What’s more, they can help me to tailor my submission and give it a better chance of getting accepted.

At my magazine, I had to reject several pieces of work just because they didn’t fit the theme at the time. One writer sent in a story that would have been suitable for an anthology I put together the year before, but not for the theme I was currently working on. I made sure I told him I enjoyed the story, which I did, but it was just the wrong theme. Hopefully, he managed to send it somewhere it would fit better. That made me realize that when editors say something isn’t a good fit, they might very well mean it, rather than translating that (as a writer) to, It’s awful, please stop writing and just crawl under a rock and die.

I also saw that some writers are set in their ways over how their work in published. I had a few requests from accepted writers to print their work exactly as it was sent, with no edits whatsoever. As the editor, I was putting my name behind the publication and anything that looked like it was missed in the edits could reflect badly on me. I can’t say what other editors do in that situation. Maybe some retract the offer of publication, but the idea of my mag was to share writers’ work as widely as possible. So, I decided the best thing to do was to include a short sentence next to the work stating it was unedited at the writer’s request.

I never earned enough to pay writers, but I did offer a cash prize to one contributor from each issue. In the interest of fairness, the winner was picked by someone outside of the reading team and they received a copy with all names removed. We also accepted previously published work, because readers don’t purchase and read every single book or lit mag out there. Just because something is already published, that doesn’t mean the readers of another mag will have seen it before. It made sense to me that if we weren’t paying all writers, we shouldn’t demand brand-new unpublished writing or take any kind of rights. I remember having a discussion with two local writers about how so many guidelines insisted on new unpublished poems and didn’t want writers to submit work anywhere else until they had a reply. Some of these took months to reply, if they ever did at all.

The last, and most important thing I learned is how much work goes into creating a lit mag. I only published quarterly, but it took up all my spare time. If I wasn’t sharing submission guidelines, I was reading the work that was sent in, gently coaxing the other readers to send in the scores and feedback without being too demanding, editing out any typos, creating graphics and formatting the publication, then sharing the links for people to buy or read the issue for free. I didn’t want to put up barriers for anyone who wanted to read it but didn’t have much money. So, while it was nice when people paid and provided money toward the cash prize, it was important to me to provide a free option. The main goal was to get writers’ work seen by more people. So, when I got the chance to take the local writers to a festival to perform their work, I took it. International writers didn’t miss out either. With their permission, those who attended read out one poem they liked for a poet outside of the UK, in addition to their own work.

Eventually, other things took up more time in my life and I could no longer run the lit mag. Overall, the experience helped me as a writer and reader. I learned some of the things writers do that annoy editors, and also how to appreciate well-written poetry and prose, even when it’s not my particular taste. I think some of the writers benefited from being published or the submission process too. Some responded positively to the feedback, and I had regular contributors who submitted work to most issues, even if I didn’t always accept their work.

Although I wouldn’t recommend every writer creates their own lit mag, I would suggest responding to some of the existing ones when they put out requests for volunteer editors. This gives writers the chance to gain editing experience from a few hours work a week, without the time-consuming task of running their own lit mag. It looks good on your CV too.

---