So I've been trolling the web checking out some literary journals. Our professor gave us this as an assignment and gave us a couple of specific questions to answer about each journal. One questions was, "Do they pay?"
I got a good laugh out of that one. No, no, and hell no. Prior to this assignment I'd spent plenty of time looking at journals and sending pieces of my writing out to them. During that time, I found exactly one online literary journal that paid writers for contributions. I know that you're all on the edge of your seat wondering the name of this journal, but I think I'll be best served by keeping that information to myself thus not exponentially increasing my competition by sending the throngs of people who read this here blog over to that that there journal where they will submit their own writing that is probably better than my writing. Find your own needle in a haystack.
Plenty of these journals want to pay, hope to pay some day, but for now they seem to have the same problem as newspapers--nobody wants to pay for their content, which means that they're not getting paid, which means that no one gets paid. The good news is that a great many journals hold at least one contest that pays winners and sometimes the prize money is significant. The bad news is that these contests tend to cost money to enter, which means that unless you are one of the lucky winners, you will have paid to not be published. Math isn't my strong suit, but something seems awry there.
But enough blathering. Here is my take on some of the journals I scoped:
Anomalous Press:
Simple, clean looking website
10 editors
All stories are available in audio form! Super cool.
Archived issues are available for a small fee: Pay with a tweet. This is pure genius.
Released quarterly
They seem really quirky/fun and looking to push a few boundaries.
Connotation Press: These guys do a little bit of everything, reviews, drama, fiction, poetry, wine info, video poetry, spoken word. They have 12 editors and it seems like they actually pay 'em. Despite their aesthetically unappealing web site (just too much going on and well, it just looks, what's the opposite of sleek?), they actually have some good content, which is the most important aspect of any site, in my opinion. Pretty interesting that they do so many things and their ambition is kind of admirable, but I wonder how this works out for them in terms of web traffic: does it yield more, because there's something for everyone or less, because people don't think of going there for one specific thing?
The Good Men Project: Although the name makes this site sound like something that might be
included on a church website, this is actually a really great online magazine-y type of thing.
Kind of reminded me of Baltimore Fishbowl (which I shall shamelessly remind you, is a place
you can find some of my work). I think the content on this site is really great, which surprised
me because it's geared toward men, but the writing is good and interesting, and it made me feel
like I was getting the inside scoop about men by reading stuff on this site. Apparently, I'm not
the only one. This essay, Raising Boys, Advice for Moms, has over 9000 likes on Facebook.
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