At Bookish Us Jessi asked last fall, Why Don’t Aspiring Writers read more literary magazines?” and her answer was: price and size,
You can subscribe to Harper’s for around $17, which includes 12 issues; a subscription to Crazyhorse, one of my favorite lit mags, is $16 and includes two issues. […] I just can’t personally afford to buy very many of these magazines, and neither can most of my friends. This is why I pick up Poetry magazine fairly often even though I’m not a poet. At under $5, it’s high quality, and it fits really well into my purse.
Opportunity cost of what you can get otherwise may not be pertinent. If you go to buy a bicycle and compare prices of unicycles, how does that help the purchase at hand?
But size does matter. I like Magma poetry but I can’t take it anywhere. Anything bound square or larger than usual is just awkward to carry. I don’t want to fold or bend what I’m reading. Faber and Faber books get taken with me because they fit in a pocket and are light. Likewise Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior is bound small.
It sounds minor, but practical concerns matter. I’ve wanted to bring books with me but know they will tire my wrist while reading and tire my shoulder (and limit my outting’s well-being duration) while schlepping them about. [I have issues with joints.]
Part of newspaper decline is free news online. Isn’t a contributing part of it made of similar practical concerns? People reading their daily newspaper while they commute instead of before means Metro displaces some of the large page format newspapers that don’t fit public transit. We still have to deal with icky feeling of high acid paper on fingers and ink tracking on hands and clothes but at least there’s space to look at the page with a smaller page. The smallest bother can put a person off a purchase.
In place of Metro, it could be a book. Or magazine. Guerilla Magazine I’d hesitated to pick up because I’d have to mangle it to take it anywhere and even with a table to unfold it all on, it was unwieldy. It seems to me that the last time I saw one, they broad their format into a smaller size. Dandelion magazine also redeisgned theirs so it isn’t that awkward square that fits neither hand nor average bag.
It may seem like a superficial concern but reading material, is material. Who hasn’t, at least once, bought a book because it was just too pretty not to leave in the store? It’s like the rubberneck effect of seeing a beautiful person. For a minute or so there, you don’t care about immaterial contents, just the packaging.
Literary magazines at least avoid getting perfume makers as advertizers. There have been magazines I’d wished to read but can’t go near the scent. It’s the little things that can be deal breakers. Ugly computer font, unbalanced crammed layout, body fonts used for headers. Title fonts for contents. There’s making a strike against unnecessary conventions and then there’s convention that exist because they facilitate transparency to get to message.
But on her point of budget-breaker literary magazines…how to competitively price against multinational, high volume, high distribution with those costs already amortized?
The large companies have the advantage of distribution networks in place. They have a wide reach of cooperation. There is Magazines Canada to help marketing as a collective.
There’s still a matter of access. Smaller magazines are advantaged with subscription but I’d like to buy 4 or 5 magazines that will give a consistent cluster of things of interest to me before I invest in a subscription. That means I need to encounter the magazine face to cover. Because literary is niche, I’m not going to find it with the impulse rack of bubble gum.
I have to go out of my way to find a place that stocks issues, and go at the right time so that the 2 or 3 issues that will be stocked are still available.
Logistically it’s a wonder I ever get magazines.
There’s the budget for clerical that is different between Big Magazines and little lit. It took me at least 10 years to get free of Reader’s Digest once they had my home address. Whereas some literary magazines that only publish 2 or 3 times a year don’t send a renewal notice and after the last issue, they never contact you again. Sure, it’s my job to stay on top of this and I shouldn’t need to be courted to stay subscribed but it would be handy to be sent reminders should I not renew immediately. Instead I have had to send 2 or 3 emails to get my subscription actually started due to clerical typo of misentering my address. I’ve felt like I’ve hounded magazines to get copies when I already paid for them and clearly showed interest.
I know, literary magazines are often small operations of rotating volunteers and things get lost in the shuffle, like subscriptions but it’s easier to bypass magazines sometimes. I don’t want to but there’s only so much work I’m willing to go to just on spec and out of a position of ideological support for an organization or information conduit.
One last possible reason for my lack of commitment to these magazines is that I garner much more satisfaction from reading an entire collection by one author than a bunch of different stories by various writers. I like to let a writer’s voice and prose style really soak in; moving from one writer to the next in the course of a half-hour is jarring.
That’s the nature of the beast. Magazines are a survey of voices. A buffet, or sampler pack. Books are for the sit down slow meal. And if you want to fast track without reading the issues, you can sample the samplers thru The Best Canadian Poetry 2009.
I suppose once one has in the head hundreds of writers you follow longitidinally for decades, it’ll mean more when you see one piece by one writer on random occasion, but for now so much is people I don’t know. That isn’t an issue.
In her post, Jessi says of magazines.
They are the only way for a new writer to have her work seen, if only by a few hundred eyes. They nurture a community of passionate writers like myself who are in it for the right reasons.
They are a convenient amount of information to absorb, keeps one up to date on what’s not supernew and not long-old. the intervals are decent. They can be short enough for a quick read and not too long to invest the time in.
I’d add that experienced writers also publish in magazines. And that even if one has a chapbook or book it may get only a few hundred eyes, if lucky. But yes, magazines are snacks to tide one over between meals.
I seem to be back to the food idea again. Lunch time…