5 Most Difficult Things for Literary Magazine Editors

5 Most Difficult Things for Literary Magazine Editors

It’s late. You’ve been working for 9 hours straight getting all the coding just right to launch your issue. You have to be up at 6:30 for work, and it’s 1:15am. If you could just finish these last few tweaks, you could publish everything. It would be up on the web and ready so that you could look at it while you’re at work. This is the date you set. You didn’t know the server would crash. You didn’t know that the template would have that funny bit of html and java, just the right mix, to send you into a panic when you pasted the text of the first story into the template and every 5th letter was the wrong font. You didn’t know. It’ll only take you about another hour maybe an hour and ½ if you don’t run into any more problems.

In the end you won’t make a dime off this publication. It’ll even be difficult to find people who care that you’ve put so much time and energy into something. You’ll get 5 nice emails from some of the authors (at least one complaint) and the others will just go on to higher ground. Hours, and hours, and hours of work, 2 ½ hours of sleep a little praise and a little complaining, and the only thing you can think about is what’s going into the next issue…..

Literary magazines editors are nuts. If they run their own magazine online or otherwise. They are nuts. You have to be. You have to be nuts to put so much work into something that you’ll get so little credit for. You have to be nuts to work so hard at something that isn’t going to pay you, in the end, any  amount of money, or even get enough attention to get you a job. It’s nuts!

It’s also too much fun. It’s hypnotizing how much fun it can be to create something like that in world. It can be an obsessions (has to be for many of us).

After that’s all said, the love the hate, the sleepless nights, here are 5 things that are the hardest/ most difficult things to deal with as a operator/owner/editor of a literary publication. If you are thinking of trying it, think of this first:

5. Unforeseen hang-ups
These are the unexpected little gems that come up at the 13th hour just in time to make you miss your deadline. They are the worst. You freak out! Now you are in a mad rush to find the problem and fix it. It’s always something. If you just published your latest issue and it came up without a hitch, blink 3 times, because you are dreaming.

4. Quality Submissions
It’s your first issue. You have 890 submissions in your inbox. You’ve waited for them to build up so you could curly in a chair with a glass of whiskey over the weekend and read what you think is going to be Carver or Tolstoy. More correctly you get about 500 of those 800 submissions and they begin, no kidding, with a cliché “it was a dark and stormy night…” or “My heart cannot  carry this heavy soul….” Your first weekend reading the next great thing turns into scrapping for something that will work in your issue, and it makes you kick your dog.

3. Not getting paid
After all you can’t expect to turn out a million copies or get a 100,000 views a day. You can’t expect to get paid. You publish everything to the web, check the web counter after a few days and realize that 27 people have dropped by to read your issue. Twenty seven people in 4 days. You realize right away promotions are going to be a big part of this thing….and you’re not going to make a single red cent off it. You’re not even going to be able to buy yourself a drink and cry in it.

2. The time
Time is difficult. When you first start you spend every waking hour obsessing about the thing. You work, work, work, read, read, read, write, write, design, promote…. The problem becomes you don’t have enough time in the a day to do the job you would like. So you start giving up sleep. You love this thing! You have to work and make money, and you have to get this right! You are doing the job of 4 or 5 people, even if you have help, and you don’t really have a choice.

1. The lack of interest
Many times, you’ll have a small group of people who think it’s “cool.” The rest simply won’t care. You’ll say, “stop by and check it out.” Later you’ll find out they never did. Once in awhile you find a fan, but until you start drawing in traffic from the web and finding niches of people that like what you like, no one, and it really feels like NO ONE cares except you.