The name promises much. The name inspires obstreperous agreement. Yeah, to hell with publishing, anyway! This is 2009. We're all about downloads, and Kindle, and Twittered novels, and free information, and Google books, and plots we can download via wires straight into our arteries, and plugging into authors via Friendfeed, and instant updates, and modules! To hell with publishing, to hell with journals, to hell with prizes, to hell with first novels. Yeah! Fist-pump!

From a group of projects so provocatively named, I now expect mind-blowing innovation. I expect earthshaking progress. I expect, at the very least, heaps of scorn for the old way of doing things, and arms flung wide open to the new, digital world. Please, make sense of fiction on Twitter for me. Please, package blogged novels. Please, help me to understand new media. I beg you! Unfortunately, what I'm finding here is same old, same old. Instead of revolution, "To Hell with Publishing" is pushing cardstock, ink, and contracts. Readings at a library under a dropped ceiling. Submission guidelines -- click here! And please include a cover letter.

"To Hell with Publishing" is just another small press. Like every other small press in the history of earth, they desire to "return vital writing, and in particularly, the best in contemporary fiction, to the main literary stage." Well bra-thumping-vo. They publish... books. Books made of paper and glue. And they publish journals. They have a prize for... unpublished manuscripts, but unagented manuscripts are not considered. Please submit paper copies in triplicate, because at "To Hell with Publishing" they are all about the snail mail.

That name followed by that business model is like the sound of a trumpet fanfare followed by the sound of a drunk falling downstairs. Where's the innovation? Where's the middle finger raised to the literary establishment? Listen: Here are the two ways that "To Hell with Publishing" bites its thumb at the mainstream presses.

1. They will only publish first novels. No second novels! Oh my god! Their plan is that other publishers will swoop in and take over their authors' careers after novel #1. Because yeah, mainstream publishers are so interested in picking up seconds after the author has been deflowered of his first novel. Do I really have to pursue that analogy?

2. Their journal (To Hell with Journals) will only have 26 issues. They have decided this... in advance. Only 26 and no more, even if thousands of screaming fans are lined up outside the bookshop, demanding just one more issue, tearing up their organs in despair that only 26 issues can possibly be produced. They will stand innovatively firm on this principle: THEY WILL FOLD AFTER TWO YEARS.

These two policies manage to be simultaneously defeatist and overly ambitious. Yeah, we MEANT that journal to go under, and we MEANT that author to never produce another book, because that's all part of the rakish, devil-may-care plan we have here at "To Hell with Publishing." Look, there are already small presses out there doing exactly what THWP desires to do, but without these weird stipulations that seem to undercut any kind of longevity or long term relationship between press, author, and reader. Obviously a few more domain names are needed: tohellwithlegitimacy.com, tohellwithauthorloyalty.com, and tohellwithrelevance.com. "To Hell with Publishing" is a profound disappointment, leaving this reader still looking for the next great thing. When it comes along, I have a feeling that "To Hell with Publishing" would be a really cool name for it. Unfortunately, that domain name is already taken.

Labels: book culture, publishing, small presses

Since no one in their right mind is sitting eagerly at their desks, waiting for emails to come over the wire, urgently scrambling to answer them, hoping for one more proposal to read over the weekend, or one more query to analyze before knocking down to the corner market for weekend pie, I went ahead and sent out my proposal to the two agents who expressed interest, and then queried nine more agents.

In this way, I can be sure that my email will be one of 4830 sitting in those 11 inboxes on Monday morning. Not so bright. But then, on the other hand, anyone out there who is biding their time, waiting for me to do work, can also know that I will be starting on it this weekend, rather than fiddling around with this or that sentence all weekend and then starting on your job on Monday, after I send out my emails at 9:36.

Long sentences. I used up all my succcintitude.

Labels: publishing

This is the shelf where my non-fiction book will be sold in the future.

Labels: nonfiction, publishing

Today I did something I haven't done in ten years. I cold-queried agents. Bolstered by the support and advice of my friends and husband, energized by a new idea for a non-fiction project, I googled and spreadsheeted and perused, and then I sent off my seven little queries.



Just doing that made me feel pretty happy. Every time I clicked "Send" I got a little sicker and a little more interested. I had this idea for the book two weeks ago, and I wrote the chapter list this weekend. Today I worked on the query letter, incorporating significant wisdom and womance from Susannah, and sent it off. So far I've had two positive responses. The next step is to write the book proposal and send that.

This afternoon when I went upstairs, the light coming in the window in the bedroom looked kind of different. We are having a weird kind of indian summer here in Virginia. Or it's because I put my foot on a different kind of pedal than I have put my foot on before. This is not the strange, amorphous pedal of clove smoke and brain waves that is literary fiction. Sometimes pressing on that pedal gives you a sore throat, or a poodle, or a trip to Paraguay. This is a firmer, brighter, more substantial pedal that you can actually see and feel, and if you exert pressure on it, it actually moves according to the Newtonian laws of motion.

At least, that's the impression I have today.

Labels: publishing

Literary magazines, the time has come that we all knew was coming. It’s over. It’s done. The lady in the Viking corset has belted out the final high C sharp. Please exit quietly at the rear door, but leave your plastic 3D glasses in the bins provided. You will no longer be hosting the revolutionary planning sessions. The revolution already happened, and at someone else’s house.

You had a good run. Well, not really, but for the sake of politeness, we’ll say that you did. I have no ill will. I have no desire to wound you in these, your final hours. You once served a purpose, but the purpose is extinct, and so are you. No more glossy coverstock. No more precious author bios. No more black and white photography opposite poems about rain on the window pane and how it’s like roads. No more “This page purposefully left blank.”


I’m with you, and we can go through this together, but let’s face the facts. Literary magazines used to exist for two reasons. The first was immediacy. Rather than waiting for the long, grinding, seasonal cycle of big traditional publishers to get new books on the shelves, readers could find fresher fare in literary magazines, published quarterly, or even monthly. The second reason was for content, as literary magazines reached farther out of the mainstream, farther into the margin, to pull new writers, strange writers, uncommercial writers, into the world of print and out to the world of readers.

Now we have the internet. Do I need to explain, or would it be too painful?

With web sites enjoying daily updates, the old publishing schedule of even an ambitious quarterly magazine now seems yawning and slow. My attention span stretches approximately to the update cycle of The Onion, and then shatters into a thousand pieces. Are you publishing your literary magazine twice a year? Are you kidding?

Then there’s the content and readership. Any brilliant, strange, new, marginalized writer with a Blogger account and a willingness to network can gain far more readers than any literary magazine was able to reach in the history of time. In fact, any jackass with a LiveJournal can reach more of an audience than most literary magazines have ever boasted, even the big ones. I’ve been published in respectable, established literary magazines that I bet fewer than a hundred people actually read. And that is true. Hold me. It is true.

Then there’s the subject of money. The internet is, mostly, free. And well, you know the rest.

So, really, do we need another literary magazine? Just one last really special one? Do we need to hear about how this publication is different, this one is going to be a “really beautiful object,” this one is going to change publishing forever? Do we need to hear from another self-congratulatory editor-in-chief, lovingly stroking his in-jokes, musing fondly on how many subscribers he’ll need to break even, figuring out how to woo in another bored midlist author to showcase in the autumn issue? How about one more magazine named “BRICK” or “PHYLACTIC TUNA”?

Let’s admit it, we were all there at one time. Graduate school can make you feel like that. I freely admit that I, with milk-white hope in my shiny heart, at one time published a collection of short stories written by a friend of mine, and got it placed in local bookstores. I think I was twenty-two. It was fun to play pretend that way. But for the love of Kinko’s, as grim as it may sound, you have to grow up.

Enough is enough. You cannot change the world with really expensive paper, you cannot revolutionize literature by being “more ironic than McSweeneys” (is that even possible?), and you cannot sell a literary magazine. Literary magazines are not books, no matter how you try to fetishize them, they will never be on the shelf with the novels. They never have and they never will. Literary magazines are the cousins of newspapers. Novels are the cousins of history.

What can we do? I would call for a boycott, I guess, but boycotting literary magazines would be like boycotting sandpaper pants. Nobody’s rushing out to the stores to grab them up anyway. The sad fact is that nature will take its course, and these beautiful, exotic creatures will be eaten by literary evolution. But will anyone survive?

The lumbering giants will survive: The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Triquarterly, etc. These are the litmags you have to get in because they put a big gold star on your resume, and they will survive because of their prestige and tradition. People still want to break their heads open on the editorial boards that published Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, Samuel Beckett. We’ll eventually be using The Paris Review to line the fork drawer, but not yet.


Which brings us to blogs. Remember zines? Blogs are the new zines. People used to staple together mimeographed pieces of crap in their grandmother’s basement and distribute it via copy machine, coffee shop counter, and word of mouth. They were subversive, populist, and updated instantly on the whim of the publisher. Blogs are the zines of the new millennium – now instantaneous, with open access for all. With all of this magic at the other end of a short wire, is it really worth our time to go around trying to sell paper and glue for ten dollars a glob?

It’s time to stop the presses. I know it’s not easy to pull that plug. Litmags are icons of intellectual privilege. You have to fight against a lifetime of programming that’s telling you literary magazines are good, therefore more literary magazines must be better. You respond out of habit, and assume it’s good news, like when a baby is born. It’s not. Magazines aren’t babies. In the world we live in, we need literary contraceptives. So stop. Put down the telephone. Put down the really nice pen. We don’t need another literary magazine. Literary magazines are dead.

Labels: books, literary magazines, literature, publishing