Nothing Compares 2 Lit Mags!
AI forgotten in books!; AI art in lit mags; viral poetry; death of the poetry critic; publishing poetry reviews; history of O'Henry stories; poet pet peeves; advice; interviews; Buellers; and more
Welcome to our bi-weekly news roundup!
Greetings Lit Mageprechauns,
Here at Lit Mag News, I try to stay focused on news exclusively relevant to lit mag publishing. However, now and again a story from over in Novel Land catches my eye and I just can’t resist sharing it here.
Earlier this month USA Today reported that two authors were found to have used AI to write portions of their novels. How was this determined? The authors accidentally left the AI responses in the published versions.
Oh, my friends, if only you could see my face as I am writing these words. I’m just cringing from head to toe.
One author had prompted the bot to make her writing sound more like another author! The accidentally-left-in prompt read, “I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements.”
The other AI response, apparently left by mistake in the middle of a suspenseful scene, read “Certainly! Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humor while providing a brief, sexy description of Grigori. Changes are highlighted in bold for clarity."
My goodness. Can you imagine the horror felt by these authors (both self-published), upon discovering they accidentally left the AI text in their books?
This is truly the stuff nightmares are made of.
The good news is you can safely avoid such a catastrophe by not having AI write your stories for you. At the very least, whatever you are writing, please remember to have a second pair of eyes on anything you send out for publication! Human eyes, preferably.
But I digress. Sort of.
Today I also learned of some AI-related disturbances in the sci-fi realm. As
reports, last week Interzone Press took to Bluesky to call for a boycott of renowned sci-fi magazine Asimov’s. Why? Interzone claimed a recent issue of Asimov’s had used AI cover art. Interzone’s position is that “A magazine may not injure a human creator or…allow a human creator to [lose income].”
In this case, however, it seems the artwork was indeed made by an artist, simply one who works with AI. “The creator on Shutterstock has been uploading similar science fiction landscapes since 2017...”
Fandom Pulse goes on,
Not content to stop there, Interzone decided to name names that if an author sells a work to the magazines, they will likely be getting blacklisted, saying, “That includes, but is not limited to, Tartarus Press, Asimov’s, Android, Metastellar, Cybersalon Press, and whoever else can’t figure out how to publish mags and books without shafting human creators.”
While some writers on Bluesky applauded the press for fighting against the use of AI artwork, many said penalizing writers based on where their work has appeared is going too far. Says Fandom Pulse, “Expecting an author to know in advance of a sale is beyond absurd…”
As of today, Interzone Press has removed its Bluesky account.
Moving along, several poetry-related stories caught my eye.
At her Substack,
has written about her experience after a poem she published in Rust + Moth went viral. So many writers long for their work to attain massive attention, but is the experience always positive?In My poetry was torn apart on Reddit, Mei-Lei writs,
A few weeks ago, my poem “The world has not been cruel to him yet” went a bit viral.
…Many comments were kind and lovely and touching. But one person completely tore this poem to shreds, lit it on fire, and threw it in the garbage disposal. Their comment sparked a spin-off conversation, where people further picked my poem apart, agreeing and disagreeing with various points like they were at a roundtable college workshop.
Reading this all felt very surreal, like I was a fly on the wall at my own funeral.
At her Substack,
, poet and Executive Editor of Trio House Press, breaks down Submisson Fees, Response Times & Other Poet Pet Peeves. Says Bigalk,Reading fees are necessary because, in the end, it costs a lot to produce a book of poetry. We need money to pay the judges; to pay the award amount; to pay the editors; to pay the typesetter; to pay the cover designer; to pay for marketing and advertising. Most poetry books don’t sell more than 200 copies, but in order to break even, a book needs to sell more than 300 copies — sometimes 500, depending on the production costs….
It’s understandable if you hate reading fees and wait times, but feeling helpless isn’t a great state of mind to inhabit. If you love writing and reading poetry and want to make sure small presses thrive and survive so they can continue to publish poetry books, do what I did: find a few small presses who publish work you love and find a way to contribute money or time — your own or someone else’s. If you can’t afford more than a few reading fees, choose the contests that charge reading fees carefully, and enter the open reading periods…
If you’ve been lamenting the dearth of serious poetry criticism these days, you’re not alone. In Winners and Losers: The Death of the Poetry Critic Ben Wilkinson writes at
,A reader today will find it a rarity to land on poetry reviews of the kind described above. Don’t get me wrong…there remain today a handful of venues and poet-critics still seriously committed to the craft: I could mention journals like Poetry Birmingham and The Dark Horse, an online initiative like The Friday Poem, or Tristram Fane Saunders’s promising new magazine The Little Review…But the overall balance sadly continues to tip the other way. Detailed, honest, discerning reviews are fewer and fewer, especially in the non-specialist media.
If you would like to try your hand at publishing some poetry book reviews, One Art Editor
has posted a list of Where To Publish Poetry Book Reviews. The list includes lit mags and news outlets. Danowsky writes,Poet and critic, Ernest Hilbert, notes: “In my experience, any literary magazine that runs book reviews (many if not most do) is happy to see them. Well written reviews are scarcer than poetry in terms of what comes over the transom. A newly launched magazine in London will only consider poetry submissions from an author who also submits a review of another poet's work at the same time.”
In other news, did you know that New York Times columnist David Brooks was once an “an extremely junior editor” at the Chicago Review? He touched on his not-so-great experience in a recent column, When Novels Mattered. Says Brooks,
When I got out of college, I dreamed of being a novelist or playwright. I volunteered to be an extremely junior editor at a literary journal called Chicago Review. But after a few meetings, I thought, “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life gossiping about six obscure novelists at the Iowa writing program?” It seemed like a small and judgmental world.
At
also takes a look into the past, this time into the pleasures and challenges of O’Henry stories, as well as the fascinating history of magazines and story publishing generally. In Back when short stories were popular, they were also bad...but in a good way, Kanakia writes,In learning about O. Henry, my main question was, "Wait a second, why were there short stories in the 1905 equivalent of New York Times Magazine?"
Well, the short answer is that people wanted to read them. O. Henry usually got paid between $250 and $500 per story. That was a lot of money: somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 in modern terms. If they could've paid him less, they would've. They paid him this money because their perception was that an O. Henry story could drive circulation numbers and sell some copies of their magazine.
But why did people have this taste for short stories? Why was this something people wanted to read at all?
Well, to learn the answer to that, we have to go back to a hundred years before O. Henry, to the early 1800's, when the print periodical first arose in America.
If what you seek is some insight into the editorial side of things, I found this post on Reddit, I've worked as a Fiction and Nonfiction Editor for a top literary journal, and have read slush for years...The post is over a decade old but still stands up. For instance, to the question “What drives you nuts the most?…”, the editor (who has stayed anonymous) advises,
Ridiculous cover letters. Not everyone reads them, but I kind of do as a guilty pleasure. A good cover letter is invisible -- it delivers the necessary information (word count, title, list of notable publications), and that's it. A bad cover letter will call attention to itself and make the reader question the writer himself/herself. Which is something you never want to do. Don't puff up your qualifications. Don't talk about how you studied under so-and-so. Don't talk about your day job or what you like to do in your free time or the names of your pet cats. While amusing, which is the reason why I'll ever read the cover letter, it can only serve to highlight you as a character, when it should be story that should be doing the heavy lifting.
Over at
, has interviewed Liz Harms, the Editor of Ninth Letter. Says Harms,My favorite thing about Ninth Letter, first as a reader, then an assistant editor, and now as editor, is that the vision for the magazine hasn’t changed much since its inception. Assistant Editor Chris Maier wrote in the first issue, “Ninth Letter … rejects the notion that literature is an isolated mode of expression… We recognize and seek the intersection of literature with various fields of creative and intellectual life… We view the magazine as an organic work of art: the overall interaction among the components is as important as the discreet projects within the content.”
And finally, it’s been announced that Prairie Schooner has a new Editor. According to Nebraska Today,
Timothy Schaffert has been named Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, the storied literary journal of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln…
Schaffert joins a list of celebrated editors, most recently Kwame Dawes. Prairie Schooner is the oldest literary magazine to remain in publication in the Midwest and maintains an international reputation for publishing high quality and diverse work.
As Glenna Luschei Editor, Schaffert will guide a team of staff and graduate student editors in their selection of works to be published from the more than 3,000 submissions received during the annual submission window, Sept. 1 to May 1. The Schooner is published quarterly.
And now, dear ones, we’ve got some Buellers to investigate! These are those journals where the lights are on but no one seems to be home. They could be open for submissions but haven’t published an issue in years. They don’t post on social media and they don’t respond to queries, leaving us all to wonder…
Sometimes, much to my dismay, a reputable magazine slips into scammy territory. This happens when a journal has published no new issues yet is STILL OPEN AND CHARGING READING FEES.
In this category we find Storm Cellar. They have not published since 2023. Duotrope lists them as “Does Not Qualify” for a listing. Yet they are still open for “tip jar” submissions of $5. In fairness, the fee is optional. But is this magazine even considering submissions? Doesn’t seem so.
Verdad is another Bueller, though they are not charging fees. Their last issue was 2023. Duotrope says “Do not submit here!” as it is “believed to be defunct.” Strangely, though there is a Note from the Editor on the homepage, there is no mention of this magazine’s status. Submissions are invited via email.
Do you have information about either of these magazines?
As for us, we’ve got some fun events happening in the days ahead! On July 21st we will have our monthly Lit Mag Chat. On July 23rd we will meet to discuss this month’s Lit Mag Reading Club pick, Clarkesworld. And on July 30th we will chat with that magazine’s Editor, Neil Clarke.
You can learn all about these events and register here:
And that you mid-summer melters and drifters through the hot humid heat in a haze of hard-to-bear hanging-in-there, you with cravings for the ice cool cave of a freezing popcorned theater, you with ten fans blowing at once, you with sweat dripping like candle wax, you longing for salt, you plunging into water, you and you, everywhere in air so thick you could eat it with a spoon (but would you want to?), you in soggy afternoons, you in smoggy city crossings, you perhaps in none of this at all, winter maybe, or something cool and delicious, you in lakes that pull you into plunging shadows, you on adventures, a bit of sparkle here and a whole lot of spelunking there, you and you, in every location, in all degrees, always acclimating, attuning your own internal thermometer, cooking your life, baking your dreams, grilling your own vision until it’s crisp to utter perfection and ready to serve, or devour, you and you, everywhere, always marinating in magic, is the news in literary magazines.
Have a most wonderful week, pals.
Fondly,
Becky
I submitted a story somewhere recently. It was via Submittable and there was NO field for a cover letter.
I thought: How great is that! Beautiful. THANK YOU! I wanted to hug whoever set that up.
Why have one? Read the work and if you like it, and want to accept it, you can get more info later.
The piece you reference was, in my opinion, an excuse for Brooks to poke at "the left" again. Also, this piece is rife with nostalgia for white male writers, while also centering novels as the only form literary fiction could possibly take. "Audacious" writing is all around, even if David Brooks doesn't think so 🙄COLSON WHITEHEAD; MIRANDA JULY; JAMES MCBRIDE; ANN LAMOTT; JILL CIMENT; ANA MENENDEZ; SUSAN ORLEAN; ZZ PACKER; ELENA FERRANTE, ETC. ETC. ETC.