The Argument for Online Literary Journals

There have been many times when I sit back and think about the shape my industry is in and just scratch my head. How did it get this bad? My answer is always the same: the industry is getting old and tired and the corporations that run it have no idea who readers are and don't seem to care to know. It is all just product to them. Therefore, it's dying.

I also always come up with the same answer to solving this crisis: the Internet and small presses. The Internet has saved us from so much disaster already. The online communities that have been built on it has saved the US politically. It has produced jobs, not enough to save everyone, but a number have been created. It has also saved a lot of people from the loneliness and isolation we've all felt during these rough emotional Bush years.

So how can the Internet save the book industry? Online literary Journals: we need lots of them. Journals akin to The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast and io9. Journals with book reviews, short stories from new and upcoming authors, commentary, op-ed pieces, columns/blogs/cross-posts by authors and editors, even insider rumors about the industry, and blogs, lots and lots of lit blogs. I tried to turn Indigocafe.com into this. Maybe I will try again. Some -- most -- don't see my vision. I'm getting used to this. Sometimes I see into the future too far for others to understand what I'm saying and it comes out sounding like crazy talk. But I know this is the future. A future where new authors are discovered by tons and tons of small online lit magazines. Maybe they will be the frontend of small presses that produce the books of these new writers -- and make a profit.

Someone will start this. That someone will make a little money, not a lot, just a little. And it will catch on. They will discover, just as the SciFi world already knows, that the way to survive in the book industry is to have a constant flow of fresh new authors. To find them you must have open submissions. The new authors are out there just waiting to be discovered.

This will bring excitement and new energy into the book industry that is now tired. The authors in the mainstream are getting old. Yes, Toni Morrison will sell books, so will John Updike, and Cormac McCarthy, but let's be serious these greats can't live forever. The whole industry can't rest on the works of people who are getting on in years. As for younger authors there is Jhumpa Lahiri and Colson Whitehead and the "Johnathan's." But does it make sense that you can count on your hand the number of young authors who can excite people into buying new books?

The corporations that currently own the publishing industry have long given up on cultivating new writers. They think of this as an expense that can be cut in lieu of producing (actually over-producing) books with a "proven market." Mistake, mistake, mistake! Those who love books should follow the lead of people like Wildside Press who produce books for the fantasy industry. Their model is an exceptional one and is forward thinking. They have online magazines that thus give them the authors who write their books and the audience who will read them. It is a smart, good business model. It is a smart good book business model.

This is my advice to the industry for the next year. I wonder if anyone will listen.