The Slow and Sad Death of the Literary Magazine

"How did we get here, and how do we get out?"

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

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Literary magazines today are foundering. Many have closed and more have moved exclusively online in order to eliminate printing costs. There is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that this is a relatively new phenomenon and a result of declining readership, that lit mags before the late 1990s and early 2000s were doing better, both from a financial and from a public acceptance perspective. Many novels that are now considered cultural staples were initially serialized and enjoyed by wide audiences within literary magazines, from Ulysses to No Longer Human and The Brothers Karazamov, and even science-fiction staples such as Dune and Foundation.

Additionally, the decades from 1950-1980 saw boosts of popularity for literary magazines all over the world, with the initial publications of Falsafa w Fann in the Middle East, to Granta and The Paris Review to the west, and even Soviet Literature and Poetry Kanto in the Soviet Union and Japan respectively. Some of the magazines of this era remain extant, but most have closed. The Paris Review remains a spectre of its former self, struggling to distribute less than 50,000 copies, while Granta had to be bailed out by the heiress of the Tetra-Pak fortune in 2005. Only the absolute peak of these magazines, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, remain household names.

Given that it is highly unlikely that everyone reading literary magazines during their decades in the limelight was a writer, academic, or member of the literari (as is often the case today), this suggests that at some point prior to the year 2000, mainstream audiences, i.e. non-creatives, non-writers, and non-academics, enjoyed literary magazines. This has not extended into the new millennium.

This shift coincides with the death of printed media as well, but the issue is that while many newspapers and magazines managed to retain readership online, if not funding, the same doesn’t appear to be the case for literary magazines. They have become uniquely forgotten.

Going from a relatively high degree of public acceptance into obscurity is not rare, but it is telling, especially when followed by chronic unpopularity over a long period of time. It suggests that lit mags today are publishing work which does not resonate with mainstream audiences. If they were, more people would probably read them.

This may seem like a big claim, but keep in mind that we are not discussing a single work of art, nor a single magazine searching for recognition, but an entire field of many magazines and many works of art, any of which have the opportunity bring new life to the field as a whole, and yet they do not. This shouldn’t be taken as a broad condemnation of every single thing published in a literary magazine over the past twenty years. Rather, I am pointing to a general trend where literary magazines don’t appear to publish work which resonates well with non-writers, indicated by their declining readership.

If acceptance from a general audience is considered a useful indicator that as writers we are doing our jobs well and creating art which echoes the human condition at large, then by failing to gain that acceptance either we are doing our jobs poorly, or the publications we submit to are doing their jobs poorly. I don’t think that we writers are doing our jobs poorly.

Books continue to be written and Booker Prizes continue to be won, and in any case there are more of us than ever before. It would be a hard sell to suggest that we are all doing it wrong. Thus it must be the case that the curation of the publications which we submit to leaves something to be desired.

Literary magazines’ primary purpose today seems to be showing writers which other writers they should respect, admire, and emulate. That is to say, they are avenues for clout above all else. In practice, it appears that most of what they publish tends to be focused on technique and experimentation, or alternatively on political messaging of one kind or another, rather than on stories themselves. In that sense, it should come as no surprise that they are falling in popularity and generally dismissed by the public. It would seem that most people don’t enjoy reading that kind of content. The question, though, is how did we get here, and how do we get out?

Today few literary magazines publish art which has broad appeal because of the way in which they operate and the audiences which they cultivate. The literary magazines of the past relied on a large reader base composed of average individuals who either had a subscription or would pick up the magazine at a newsstand, bookstore, or other source. This is no longer the case.

Most literary magazines today are kept afloat by grants from governments or NGOs, submission fees, out of pocket payments by editors, and subscription fees. Relatively few rely primarily on subscription fees. Regarding the latter, it is worth also considering who the subscribers are and why they subscribe.

The average literary magazine will pay anywhere from $0 to $1,500 for an accepted submission or contest winner and stress, quite firmly, that reading previously published editions will significantly improve your chances of being published. These editions are often behind a paywall which requires the hopeful writer to subscribe in a vain effort to get published. When an annual subscription costs anywhere from $10-25 and the minimum potential payout is an incalculable ego-boost, the route is clear: subscribe to the magazine.

Parallel to this are the hundreds of writers who pay small submission fees every submission cycle to these same magazines in hopes the editors will even glance at their work. In this way a parasitic relationship develops between writers and magazines where writers functionally pay magazines to keep other writers financially and emotionally afloat, hoping for their eventual turn.

It’s also important to mention that without readers, grants can dry up pretty rapidly on reapplication (which often has to be done annually and includes “impact” or “relevance” in the grant requirements) and these are the primary revenue streams for many magazines. Readers are expressed through subscriber numbers and, if a magazine does have a large subscription base, it often consists of hopeful writers.

When literary magazines publish for an audience of mostly writers, we may also ask how this changes the work itself. Writers are not necessarily good judges of art’s broad appeal. We attempt to publish and show our writing to others precisely because we are poor judges of what people find compelling. This is not because of any particular deficiency unique to writers, but because the best judge of art’s resonance with the greater public is, rather obviously, the greater public. Without them we do not reflect the human condition; we merely reflect our own conditions. The result is little more than a literary circlejerk.

This isn’t to say that writers should not write for other writers, experiment, or otherwise push the boundaries of good taste, or that editors should refrain from publishing this sort of work. On the contrary, there are undoubtedly specialist spaces which must be maintained. The question is, how did this become the case for all, or most, publications?

It is my view that if literary magazines hope to survive, they ought to be grounded in the practicalities of what makes art enjoyable and accessible for people at large, not the niche realities of creatives. If this is a concern to editors, how do they win back the general reading public? Is it possible?

I believe that having regular people (non-writers) as editors is critical. Writers should not, and cannot, be the only arbiters of good writing. We need to resonate with the public if we hope to produce anything truly meaningful.

Secondly, a return to some form of physical or digital media which can be acquired without a subscription and outside of realms usually occupied by creatives is exceedingly important. Outreach is critical. The idea of returning to a seller’s model is daunting, it could be what returns writers and literary magazines to a previous position vis-à-vis the public, i.e., one of mutual dependence.

The public depends on us to produce content which is both compelling and challenging, and we depend on them for our livelihoods. Instead of the current model of either no payment or bulk-sum, literary magazines could consider paying writers royalties for the issues within which they are published. This additionally has the benefit of incentivising work which is both immediately accessible and has some degree of lasting value, hopefully leading to more revenue for both magazines and writers. For online publications, analytics on websites will make the procedure even more direct, with writers whose works are visited more often acquiring a greater portion of the revenue, however scant.

Additionally, copies of unpretentious literary magazines should be sent to bookstores and links to new websites should be disseminated as stickers and QR codes in attempt to win back the readers we have lost. While the practicalities of these forms of marketing can be challenging, a hybrid model of grassroots engagement over the span of the entire field should be able to entice readers to trust, once again, in literary magazines. Besides, people at large should know that new, interesting things are being produced outside of the brain-rot “content” which currently dominates the online landscape. Writers and editors are uniquely suited to that task.

Lastly, and most importantly, we need to stop writing and publishing exclusively for other writers and editors. The general public may come to love literary magazines once again, if we just open the door.

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