Forum / Print litmags vs. Online :Guess who won?
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David AckleyJul 08, 08:23pm -
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Mathew PaustJul 08, 08:38pmWithout reading the piece, based on intuition and the title, I'll go with print. If for no other reason than they're a welcome break from a digital screen.
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David AckleyJul 08, 09:53pm
Actually, Matthew, the author, Stephen Burt, gives the victory to online magazines, and it's no longer even close.
How about that?
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Mathew PaustJul 09, 03:39pm
Surprised. A cost thing, maybe?
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Chris OkumJul 09, 05:36pmPublishing online means nothing and pays nothing. All you're doing is providing free content for people. I'd rather publish stories here than anywhere else because at least people read the stories published here. Maybe one day it will have cache, but today is not that day.
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David AckleyJul 09, 07:42pm
You're entitled to your heard-earned opinion, Chris, though maybe reading the article would cheer you up a tad. Whether publishing online means something is entirely a subjective matter; obviously it means something to me, the others who do it, and the ones who create and work on the magazines that publish us, and to the people, surprisingly substantial numbers in some instances, who read them. Whether it pays nothing, is factually disputable, however. I've done both, and gotten paid more( not a hell of a lot, but still) by online magazines than I ever did by their print counterparts--which has been zippo, by the way. Whether it has cache' depends on what people think of the magazines--there too subjective--though a some of them seem to have heft in the literary world and in some instances, according to the article, a surprisingly large readership.
I have known a goodly number of writers, including one National Book Award winner, some of them widely published, with dozens of books to their names. Among them all only two make a living from their writing, and the NBA winner was not one of the two. T.S. Eliot sold 100 copies of his poems, including The Waste Land in the first year of publication. Walt Whitman self-published the first several versions of Leaves of Grass, unrenumerated and unacclaimed. etc. Writing, when you're talking money, and for the most part acclaim is a losing game and always has been. I agree with you about Fictionaut, though, it's as good a place as any to publish and in some ways better than many if not most.
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Chris OkumJul 09, 07:57pm
The only thing I've gleaned from online publishing is that there are thousands and wannabe William Shawn's out there. The attitude is no different than the large publishing companies and corps of old. Everyone wants to sit behind a velvet rope and play Nero. And if you don't make a living from your writing then you're not a writer, you're just someone who writes. Posthumous acclaim is neither here nor there, it is amorphous and holds no import for the lucky few who get it, most of the time by a stroke of luck. Success is success. Success is not a lack of success. The reason no one can make a living as a writer anymore is BECAUSE of online publishing, and, to make matters worse, online publishing creates the illusion of being published when you're not. All you are is posted, dumped, plopped, forgotten five seconds later. Nothing more. The size of the toilet has increased to meet the demand of the waste being produced.
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Mathew PaustJul 09, 08:12pm
Another good thing about Fictionaut is its lack of a gatekeeper. Picking up the baton from Chris, I find it hard enough to swallow getting form rejections for submissions to publications that pay. The thought of subjecting my work to such brush offs with no prospect of money in the game strikes me as masochistic (my choice of verb here is coincidental). And yet, as David notes, some of these freebie mags do command respect among the literati (a word, incidentally, which frightens me even more than the name of my ex's divorce lawyer).
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Mathew PaustJul 09, 08:14pm
For the record, I'm not quite as cynical as Chris, but then I don't have his talent either.
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