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How to Start a Literary Magazine

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How to Start a Literary Magazine

Do you want to know how to start a literary magazine? Many people have a passion for writing. One of the best ways to connect yourself to writers and meet artists is to become an editor of a literary magazine. There are many ways to do this. Some methods are better than others. So here are some things to consider when you are beginning a magazine. I have been the editor of 2 magazines and, of course, this site EWR. My first online literary venture was Drunk Duck in 1999. The magazine ran for two years and was very successful. When it closed, it was receiving about 15,000 unique visits a month. I was getting about 1000 submissions a month, and its success is one of the reasons I had to close the magazine. It was so labor-intensive that I got overwhelmed and gave up. This article is meant as a step-by-step on how to start a literary magazine. It is also meant to give you some things to think about, tell you about my mistakes, and advise you on new developments that will help you.

This is the first article in a series of articles: called “How to Build a Successful Money-Making Literary Magazine.” All the articles will be online, but you can only get the complete series by signing up for our mailing list. It’s 100% free. Just sign up, and you’ll get all these steps and more explained. For instance, should you go with a blog or a website? What technical skills and tricks will help you? It’s not answered here, but you can find out all you need by signing up.

Step 1

Brainstorm a domain name, magazine name, and mission of your magazine. It is imperative to get this right when you start. The name Drunk Duck, believe it or not, was very offensive to some people. I used to get emails, a few a week, telling me that if it weren’t for the name, people would submit their work. Honestly, I didn’t give the name much thought when I started. It was an inside joke between a friend and me, and I thought, what the heck? Because of the name, I attracted a particular type of writer. Some writers were out there looking for the “New England Journal of Something Something” or “The Very Serious Review” and didn’t want to have Drunk Duck among their publication credits, and that’s understandable. Many writers won’t care, but some will. It’s just something to think about. If you publish high-quality work, it won’t matter in the long run, but when you are starting, your name says a lot about what you think of writing.

One other thing to think about is that your magazine’s name will have a great deal of impact on search engine placement. I know it seems unimportant to some, but when you are sitting there checking your email day after day, and no one is submitting their work or visiting your site, it will eventually occur to you that maybe the name has something to do with it. This isn’t a gimmick. Pick a name you like and represents your feelings about writing, but remember two things. I search engine placement saves you on promotion (I’ll talk about that later), and two, if you ever plan for someone to read your magazine on their cell phone, you might not want the URL to be 100 characters long.

Step 2

Pick a domain host. This is one of the most important things you will do during this process. If you don’t work on the web right now, you won’t have any clue about domain hosting, and you most likely won’t care. When I ran Drunk Duck, I started on a free site and quickly found that very few people took me seriously. I then switched to a paid host. Switching was painful again. That host started cheap and then blew up their prices. I then had to change again. I have been on domain hosts that have closed before too. It’s not fun. EWR started as the free site everylitmag. It was a tripod site, and I had so much trouble with them. They are expensive, and their features are horrible. I looked at three things when I changed the last time to Host Monster. (Disclosure: we are compensated for our review of Hostmonster). 1. Stability 2. Price 3. Options. Stability: You don’t want a constantly changing company or one about to close down. 2. You want one that is affordable, of course, 3. You want one that works for you and gives you options.

  1. Put some money into your site. You will save many headaches if you do it right the first time. Don’t go with a free site. If you ever plan on making money from the site, keep it running. Buy a domain. In the long run, it will save you a lot more.
  2. Do some research and find what will work best for you.
  3. My recommendation is that you go with Host Monster. (Disclosure: we are compensated for our review of Hostmonster). Do your research, and you will find they are consistently listed among the top. I love them. They have a ton of free scripts you can use, and it is straightforward to use. You can sign up for about five or 6$ a month, and their customer support is outstanding. You can live chat with them any time or call them if you have a problem. They will give you the domain name and emails when your site is up.

Step 3

Represent yourself like a business. I’m bad at this sometimes, but the best way to be taken seriously and start getting traffic and submissions is to be professional. Use a domain name email, set up a newsletter, and develop a mission statement on how you deal with the works you will publish. Most literary magazines take first-time rights, but with everyone posting their work on their sites like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, you have to decide if you will accept previously published works, works published on personal sites, and so on. It takes much thought, but you’ll get these questions. You’ll find that authors will be much more likely to publish their work with you if they don’t know how it will be treated.

Step 4

Design and design. You want to design a logo, at the very least, to start. You may have some idea at this point about what you want your site to look like. For design, you can use a slew of programs. Photoshop is the best.

In the old day, we would have used programs like Dreamweaver or even the ancient Microsoft FrontPage. Now, however, a good amount of the work we do on the web is through software. Much of the time, it’s the platform we are creating in. So you may use html5 or drupal, but most of the time, people use WordPress for their sites. It’s another reason I like Hostmonster. They have a one-click WordPress install. So if you want to use the platform everyone else is using, it’s quick and easy.

Step 5 Start building

There is a lot to think about here. If this is the first time you have considered starting a literary magazine or website, sit back and think about what you want before you get into it. If you have already been thinking about it and have decided to start, I’ve given you the basics for getting started. Get an idea, get a domain, contact the program, and get started! Good luck.

Or Step 6

Or start a blog. It’s different and the same, but there is a lot you need to know. You can either check out how to build a successful writer’s blog OR, For more info on starting a literary magazine, read our follow-up article on how to develop your literary magazine for success.

Get everything you need to know about starting a literary magazine by signing up for our mailing list. Get the details with our newsletter.

10 Ways for Writers to Make Money Online

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These are simply suggestions. Please research all you can before you commit to any contract or deal made online. Make sure you do your research! There are many, many scams out there. These 10 items are in no particular order.

 

10. PLR: Private label rights! In other words, sell your writing straight out on the web.

PLR is you writing articles on particular topics and then selling those articles to blogs or websites. Some people sell single articles. Some people sell bundled articles. Sites like Associated Content

9. Start your blog or email newsletter.

A blog or newsletter takes more time but can pay off big in the end. The idea here is to start a topic site that focuses on 1 topic. So auto repair (if you are good at that thing). You would begin writing the site about cars and get people to sign up. As you grow the site, you can use Pay per click ads, affiliate marketing, and selling ads directly to make money. See our article on How to Start a Literary Magazine for more info!

 8. Freelance online

Online some sites will help you find freelancing jobs like http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com. These sites will help you find “gigs” where you can make money.

7. Freelance real world

Yes, there are still authentic newspapers and magazines in the world. Newspapers and magazines are still buying articles from writers! Believe it or not, they still pay writers to write. So check out your local markets and then inquire about more prominent magazines. Just give them a call or go to their websites and email them. Many already have programs set up for paying freelancers.

6. Start a blog for someone else.

Sites like http://www.textbroker.com/, http://hubpages.com/, and http://www.infobarrel.com/ pay you to blog for them. They take care of the website and the writing, and then you split the profit.

 5. Jobs.

Yes, I know this isn’t easy to believe, but some writers have jobs that make money. You tend to have to look for a larger city for this kind of thing, and you are, of course, going to need a degree (most of the time) in writing, tech writing, PR, or journalism, but check out Career boards, Monster, Snag a Job and or Poets & Writers jobs to see who they are hiring for real life in technicolor jobs.

 4. Publish your ebook

Many writers have an abundance of writing just sitting around. They tend to write a lot and publish little. If you have some extra work, like poetry, vignettes, or even how-to articles, you should package them up, put them in an ebook and sell them! Check out http://www.smashwords.com/ or http://www.web-e-books.com/ for publishing your ebook. If your book is 2500-5000+, you can sell it on Amazon. Friends I know who do this recommend the work be 5000 words or over. 

3. Teach

There are universities online looking for people with a degree who can teach. You can teach these online courses and still keep your day job. Some sites teach English in other countries online. They have odd hours, but many of these sites pay well. 

2. Contests

Yes, writers do win contests from time to time. If they are minimal fees, and you can win, go for it! Entering a contest is significant in a couple of ways. It supports the publication or organization (which usually doesn’tdoesn’t have very much cash in the first place), and it gives you a massive boost to your confidence if you win. A lot of times, this type of thing will help you know you are on the right track. 

1. Merch

Yes, you can make money by selling things with words on them! You can come up with catchy phrases, even if you’re not an artist, and then sell them. http://www.cafepress.com/

If you have any thoughts about this article, we would like to hear them. Please leave them in the comments below.

Should literary magazines pay?

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Should literary magazines pay?

backgcoolWarning! This is a rant, walk away now if you are going to be offended or upset about strong opinions being thrown at you in a not so easy to take way.

I keep getting emails, about one per week, from different writers, and the email reads something like: “Why don’t these stupid literary magazines you keep sending me pay! Don’t they know I’m trying to make a living. My writing is worth a lot and I should get paid for it! They are so selfish, keeping all that money and driving BMWs. Why don’t think of me, the little guy!” I agree that writing is worth a lot, but the world doesn’t see it that way.

Let’s get this out of the way: Should literary magazines pay? They can’t. They don’t make any money. I don’t mean that literary magazines are run on a shoestring budget and each editor only makes enough to drive his Dodge Dart, and that’s it. I mean that they don’t make money. For 100 years literary magazines have tried to make money, and many have folded in the process. I’ll give you an example that I know first hand. This would be considered one of the best literary magazines in the country and one of the richest. The literary magazine that was published through the University where I did my writing program got enough money from the university to do a a 500 issue print run (about $1000). It got another $1000 grant which it paid to a writer as an award. That was it. The editor was paid a $1000 per year stipend from the university and all of the other editors (poetry, fiction, and layout) were NOT paid. The editor did drive a Dodge Dart, but that is another issue. Keep in mind that this was a very good and rare magazine that’s why they had any money at all.

Literary magazine editors on the web do even better than making money, they pay money. They don’t get paid AND they pay for the magazine to be on the web. Most literary magazines on the web do not even cover their publishing cost. The editor of Glimmer Train magazine (a national magazine) said point blank, we don’t make very much money by doing this at all. We hardly cover our costs.

In the old days there were large publishing companies like Advance Star and Knight Ridder that made money by publishing in the margins. They could hire 1 person to run a magazine, and then pay their authors a little bit. Knight Ridder went out of business and Advance Star is only publishing a handful of magazines. Their literary magazine does pay, it is the New Yorker. People see a magazine in print or on the web, and they think, well they have to be making money. “Greedy lit mag editors.” This is just NOT the case.

Most self-published books do better than literary magazines. I haven’t ever asked, but before you wonder why these magazines don’t pay, ask yourself, as a writer who is trying to publish in one of these magazines, how many subscriptions do you have to literary magazines? Are you willing to put up money so they can pay you and other writers? Most writers are not.

The thing that is the most frustrating about these emails is that the person who asks, “Why don’t these stupid magazines pay,” wouldn’t even read an issue of the magazine before they send in their work. They would just see it as a way to make a couple of bucks and blindly send off their science fiction story to the literary magazine dedicated to North cost writers.

So, literary magazines can’t pay because they don’t get paid. Why would you ever want to publish your work for free? I’ve talked about this before. Put simply publishing credits help you publish MORE works. Publishing credits help you sell books, and publishing credits help you get exposure to sell a book or to bring people to your website. That’s the best, most magazines can do. It works out to be worth a lot if you can establish yourself as a good writer and then have a book for sale. Some people have ended up on the bestsellers (with self-published books) by doing this, so I would say it is worth it. If you are looking for $10000 per story, get an agent, publish a book, once you don’t need the money anymore because you’ve sold so many books, magazines will pay you a lot of money to publish your stories, ironic eh? If you were looking for 1 cent per word, many literary magazines stopped doing this because they couldn’t afford it!

Make Money with your Literary Magazine

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Ways to Make Money with Your Literary Magazine?

There are 4 ways most sites are make money on the internet. They are the same for every site. The only variation on these 4 sources of revenue is audience. I will be right to the point about these revenue streams. We at EWR have used all of them, and I’ll give you my experience with each.

Quick to the point:

Pay per click

Pay per click is just like it sounds, you get paid for people clicking ads on your site. There are two types of ads, usually, intext (those little blue double lines) from sites like Infolinks, and side banner ads like what you get from Google Adsense. Pay per click is a great way to start making money. It’s fast and easy, but it is usually a low earner.

 

Affiliate

Affiliate marketing is where you promote products on your site, and if your readers click the ad and BUY something from the affiliate, you make a percentage. This is the way many blog owners are making so much money. It can be a high earner.

 

Sell s

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It takes a lot to get this up and running. You can sell a t-shirt through services like Cafepress or your magazine. To be upfront, this will not make you a lot of money. It is hard to put together and a low earner for most sites.omething

 

Contests

Contests are a great way to promote your site, and a bad way to make money.

 

The Explanation 

Pay per click.

Some advertising systems on the internet use this type of model to buy and sell users. Basically the way it works is that advertisers pay so much per click, and you put ads up on your site and take part of the profit for clicks. Yes, this means that every time someone clicks on your ads you get money. There are different types of ad services, Google adsense is at the top. With Google you sign up for an account and begin dropping ads on your site. Most of the time you can not do this with a free site, so make sure you have your own domain name.

This is the beginners way to make money on the internet, and it should bring in enough revenue to pay for minor costs like domain hosting and domain purchase over time. It is very easy.

There are also intext link services that you can advertise with. These are those little double underlines you see all over the web. They pop up when you hang your mouse over them, and they do pay per time they are clicked. You can sign up with Infolinks or Kontera.

Apply to these services, if you are accepted, you can easily implement them. They are very easy to use, and even with low traffic they will bring in some revenue.

 

Affiliate Marketing 

An affiliate marketing program is a program that gives you money if someone clicks on their site from yours and buys something. It is harder to do, but it will bring in more revenue. It can be a much bigger money earner. The way it works is that you put a link on your site and then sell their product by promoting it. At EWR we only pick affiliates that 1. have something to do with our target audience, and 2. services that we think are fair and worthwhile. The only affiliate programs we use, are of affiliates we think will help our readers and are useful. There are affiliate warehouses out there like LinkShare that have done a lot of the work for you. If you sign up with the, you will have a store of different marketers to choose from. They might have 100s of markets for you to pick from.

 

Selling things


Yes, this is the time honored way of making money for many literary magazines. For instance selling an issue or a T-Shirt or something to do with your magazine. This is a more advanced method of making money. You’ll have to have a way to buy and sell products on the web. Pay pal is the easiest way to take purchases over the web from consumers, but remember you’ll have to ship and do everything else in the real world with a real product. You can use a company like Cafépress but you might find that they take so much of the revenue, you will be left with little money after all is said and done. If you have high traffic on your site this might work for you, but speaking in general terms, it is not a way to make good revenue. Most literary sites would have a great deal of trouble sustaining themselves this way.

Many of the best literary magazines in print do not make money. They are not profitable, so it is better to look at the money making side of your site as a website that can make money. Selling copies of your literary magazine will never do it. Selling ads yourself isn’t going to cut it either (in most cases).

The services I talked about above are the method by which sites are making a profit. The best way to look at this is that you are going to bring services and products to your readers that are valuable for them. They may come to read a poem, but if they leave through a link that is about publishing their book, it may help them. If bloggers talking about their kids can do it, a literary magazines, with interested readers, people submitting their work can do it.

 

Contests

Most of the time contests are used to bring in traffic, but they can be used to make a little money. It is not a great method. Even with high traffic some sites out there are loosing money when they give away cash prizes. If you have a reading or entry fee you might collect enough to break even, but most of these contests, like I said, are promotional, not money makers.

 

Summary

In the end pay per click and affiliate marketing is your best bet. If you are just starting, or if you are just starting out making money with your site, start with pay per click programs. See what you can bring in. Then you have to increase your site traffic. I’ll address promotion of your literary site in a later article.

It is true that some sites bring in a great deal of money on the internet. Your literary magazine probably won’t bring in millions of dollars. The market for them is small, but it can make enough to take some of the burden off you for running it. If you have started a literary magazine you most-likely love writing and writers and the like, so why not make it worth your while and begin to make a little money to sustain the publication. Many literary magazines come and go everyday. I see them start, and I see them fold. That doesn’t do anyone any good. Treat it like a website that can make money. Be patient. Give it time, and with pay per click or affiliate marketing you should be able to start to see a little profit, maybe even enough to pay some other bills besides the cost of your site.

There are bloggers making lots of money, I’m not going to promise that, but with the internet, anything is possible.

Editors note: This is an older article from our site. It has been moved to this page from one of our older html pages. 

Sites That Pay Writers to Write

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 Sites That Pay Writers to Write

 

Ok, here is a simple list of sites that we know are paying writers to write. If you know of others, post them in the comments. If you have had experiences with these sites tell our other readers!

Unfortunately, we can’t know it all (we’ve looked into it and it’s expensive and all your friends think you’re smug), so we need you to share. These sites pay writers to write or for writing.

We have a couple other articles about how writers can make money online. Those sites tend to be about writing something artistic. These sites are about using your writing skills in a different way.

 

Hubpages http://hubpages.com/
Pays you “royalties” on your writing.

Elance https://www.elance.com/
Sells writing projects for bids.

Odesk https://www.odesk.com/
Another project based site.

Texbroker http://www.textbroker.com/
Pays per word.

Warrior Forums http://www.warriorforum.com/
A place with useful money making information, and forums where you can sell your writing.

Info Barrel http://www.infobarrel.com/
Make money through advertising, split the profits.

Snipsly http://snipsly.com/
They do the website. You earn money through ads. You both split the money.

Demand Studios http://www.demandstudios.com/
Large popular companies request content, you bid on the jobs…

Constant-Content http://www.constant-content.com/
Sell your writing.

Helium http://www.helium.com/
Sell your writing….

Ehow http://www.ehow.com/
Get paid for writing how to articles

Triond http://www.triond.com/
Get paid for writing.

Craigslist http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites/
Yes, it is true you can sell your work on Craigslist….be careful, people can be mean and….stinky.

If you have more to add post them below. If you have a WARNING for people, post IT!