Publishing Field Report 3 – Online Publishing (Part 1)

Considering the early days of internet publishing and how it transfigured the literary landscape w/r/t approach, process, access, and attention

Still from JODI’s ‘My%Desktop’ 2002.

Having found entry to the print world all but impenetrable for a beginner, I began looking for literature online. I can’t remember how I stumbled onto my first web mag—probably just googling ‘short fiction online magazine’—though I do know which one it was: eyeshot.net, a venue independently owned and operated by one person, Lee Klein, whose editorial style immediately seemed mysterious and singular compared anything else I’d ever seen. Unlike the swank and high walled styles of most all glossy mags, Eyeshot clearly had made room to do whatever it might want, including now infamously unhinged submissions guidelines and personal commentary from the editor, as well as a wide array of unique texts from all sorts of indie authors I’d never heard of. Clicking around its archives, I realized there was a whole world of people publishing their work without disabling designs on the ivory tower scene, sharing their work because they wanted to, without an inherent sense of careerism or even necessarily massive audience.

This made a lot of immediate sense to me, both from a freedom of expression standpoint, but also the fluidity of being able to send out work through email rather than with stamps. Response times online were a fraction of anywhere else, obviously—and therefore potential acceptance rates, especially considering the decreased volume of competition—though this didn’t seem to have affected the quality of work. If anything, publishing online deemed to allow space for experimentation and improvisation, trying things out to see what stuck instead of following a recipe to fit the tastes of editors whose interests could only be made manifest through testing bait. I was instantly obsessed, and spent endless hours thereafter combing through the archives, feeling both inspired by the ingenuity of the work and compelled to understand what was going on here. Despite having come up in a zine scene, where friends would print chapbooks and sell them solo or through distros and having run a personal website of my own where I self-published poems and reviews all just for fun, I’d never thought about the possibility of simply launching one’s own web mag just like that, and I certainly hadn’t any idea that the medium itself could affect the way one made the message, or to what end, or for whom.

The general temperature among my peers from MFA had established the idea that publishing online wasn’t as good as print—less ‘literary’ people would see it, being the theory, though more so due to bias than anything else, but also how could something be called good if it wasn’t thoroughly vetted in advance? Essentially, gatekeeping itself had formed the substance of most people’s idea of why publication was even worthwhile in the first place, outside just being seen by the few who actually touched most print mags; it meant that you’d survived the odds, risen to the top by the sheer power of your work, never mind the fact that most print venues were often run by dozens of people, requiring consensus rather than singularity of vision to break through. Therefore, online publishing was basically a waste, most seemed to conclude—too flighty, perhaps too free, and at the very least lacking the weight required to parlay one’s momentum from one good moonshot into gaining traction in the industry by catching the eye of an agent or other editors. Looking back on my motivation in finding print publication, I’d often directed my best work to spots I knew could be a launching pad in that way, targeting places that showed up often in Best American, or found in lists from published books that listed the magazines where they’d run excerpts, probably directly contributing to their continued success, or so it seemed.

But clearly there was something going on here, I discovered, as quickly Eyeshot became a gateway to other similarly motivated mags—Pindeldyboz, Word Riot, Elimae, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Diagram, Opium, to name a few—and spread among them, the crop of authors who regularly appeared on them, many of whom also had personal blogs or websites where you could actually see what they were thinking and doing with their work, rather than just being a name and bio from a table of contents. Suddenly, being a writer looked much different than it had through the slits in the conceit of MFA world and the newsstands, no longer merely haves and have nots, but a whole range of people building a body of work without the necessary blessing of the establishment at large.

From this point forward, my entire sense of potential for scope of ambition changed. Though I definitely kept sending work out to bigger venues as I had been, I no longer felt as much like I was holding my breath, waiting to be discovered before I’d accomplished mostly anything discoverable outside of the experience of seeking. Publishing online allowed not only easier access to a window, but also changed the landscape of what kind of work could be made, requiring not a budget-limited consensus but a single person to see something in what you were doing—a particularly key element, I’d discover, to gaining license, in that you no longer needed to follow the rules to show your worth. Style, taste, and even ingenuity appeared to matter more here than the traditional criteria, with the only real roadblock being one’s own understanding of what fit where. I’ll never forget the insane buzz I felt getting replied to in a few days’ time from Eyeshot, accepting a very short story I’d written specifically to send after studying the sorts of work they liked, which felt much different than writing to find an agent, or even trying to write another novel without a whiff of purpose but to have done so. Finally, I’d made a mark in the sand, and from there I felt an unbound energy in the pursuit of making another.

I turned myself into a machine. With all my free time, I started writing with a different sort of abandon than before, like I was no longer totally lost in wilderness, but rather let loose into a labyrinth of unmarked doors. Gone was the feeling of never quite knowing what sort of effort might get me where I wanted to go; instead, I knew I wanted to follow my own nose, making strange little stories and texts that both satisfied my knack for the uncanny and had at least some individual potential for a frame of reference that might prove what I could do, both to myself and to the world. The more I wrote, the more I sent out, and the more opportunity I had to keep with stacking my momentum toward larger and larger goals. Quickly I found that rather than being less meaningful for being online, I’d gained access to a loose community of people who strove similarly, estranged in their own way from aping Coover, sure, but also actually alive in a way that the high walls of commercial publishing could never be.

The idea that in-print publishing was somehow higher than online, too, seemed obviously like the relic of an outdated mentality, driven more so by tradition than utility, and often upheld through fear of obsolescence among those who need you to know that they’ve already earned their stripes. Actual recognition, however, though still quite fleeting, shouldn’t have to be simply something one should someday hope to become knighted with, the way so many seemed to wish, but rather a byproduct of a sustained pursuit and passion, of creation as exploration over commodity-making, the likes of which, no matter how long-standing the archive, or how decorated the proctors, cannot and should not be quantified into a How To. Few things could prove so dunce-defining as believing you’ve got the game all figured out, and yet ‘finding your voice’ remains one of the first things we’re told to do, as if all that stands between us and the limelight is studying trends, setting hard boundaries, and putting up numbers.

It might seem moot, from here, to regale the early values of online publishing as an alternative to print, given how ubiquitous the web has become since. At the same time, through corporate consolidation and monetization alongside the rise of the gig economy and social media cache, we’ve seen a huge about face in the direction of the nature of the web media and capability for recognizing ingenuity, much less veracity. Gradually then suddenly, the web has become a place where the only loudest, sturdiest voices get to hold the ball, as if we’ve all forgotten what made being online so exciting in the first place—its path to freedom through the democratization of the tools one needs to build and share. As monocorporate media continues to narrow the playing field through rising costs of living and branded content, many have begun turning back to the old model, where those who make it only do so because they’ve mastered how to play the game, as if what gets made matters far less than who made it and how many people paid. Already, too, as the gap widens, we’re seeing artists who might have once stood for their own work against all else tuck tail and turn to chase the new normal, perhaps assuming that all they need is one good rubber stamp to be made famous forever, and therefore granted license to be and do exactly as they want; or lower still, that all they want is the fame, by any measure, and really all the work had ever been was a costume, easily shrugged off in exchange for being defined as all natural icon, too big to fail.

For the ‘art is sacred’ sort, it'd be easy to let such stench of crass commercialism and ego-bleating negate all other public values as by dint. Of course it stings to see the values of an enterprise you’d once dreamily wished to be part of someday become torn apart by vultures while you sit helplessly at home, feeling outdated and at a loss for how to stem the tide of fakes and grifters as they attempt to twist the larger story to fit their own. I’ve certainly lost endless hours ranting and raving in my mind (and on the internet) about how sick the system, how lame the sycophants, etc. I’d imagine it’s enough to make a beginning author—or, hell, a mid-career one—want to give up the tack for good, dissuaded as much by the endless deficits and gluts as the overall possibility of ever finding success on one’s own terms. We’ve certainly seen a lessening of non-commercial-centric venues, narrowing the playing field at large as it appears to become harder and harder to find a network, or to imagine how it might be or ever have been another way.

And yet, for as different as it all might seem, the inward turning of publishing at large shouldn’t need to be seen as the closing of the gates for good. Quite the opposite, in fact, in that has ever been clearer that the model where we all look to New York as the gold standard, the city where dreams are bought and sold, is not the look. As wonderful and sustaining as it might seem to break through and cut a deal with a major house, these days it's almost no one who does so sustainably, as at the beginning of a path of a career. In fact, one could argue that signing up to trust your fate to conglomerates whose bottom line is dollars and cents is more like cutting off your nose to spite your face—it might make you feel invincible in the short term, reeling in the joy of having hit a lick that few can manage, but what comes after the adrenaline recedes? Gone are the days when delayed satisfaction in the imagination of a money counter cum arts patron allowed carte blanche to any artist for long enough to prove the merit of the work itself short of becoming called a household name. It’s shit and get off the pot, kid, no longer or—for there can never be enough profit, and every opportunity to do so, especially once co-signed by the would-be famous author, at any cost, serves likewise to drive nails into the coffin of the integrity of the whole, and therefore, in time, the visible range of the possibilities at large.

I see that I’ve fallen into ranting, which might seem funny to readers who can see that despite my ire, I’ve clearly benefitted from playing ball at least to some degree, having eventually worked my way in and taken part with corporate publishing multiple times over. Today, I see this more as a lark than a defining product of my approach, ethics, or aesthetic, which turns out to be part of the point. The deeper I got into establishing myself through writing, the more I realized that publishing by and large is less a fulfilling or even fully necessary part of the process, despite the natural desire for most any author to want to find the biggest audience possible, and to feel seen. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, rather than simply waiting around for the first gesture from someone with the authority to make you known, which can’t be forced, most authentic opportunity comes as a result of aggregation, not explosion—finding one’s self in the right place at the right time as a matter of course, through trial and error in the production and gestation of the work, rather than having one’s name pulled out of a hat to be the frontman of a boy band, created by suits advised by algorithms for the entertainment of the norm.

Likewise, the proof is always in the pudding, not the package, no matter which shelf you’re displayed on. As will-killing as it can be to feel that what you do isn’t getting its due, I can’t imagine having had the will to do such slow and lonely work as writing mostly is, on every level, without first accepting that without a passion for the work itself, there’s very little merit, much less lasting satisfaction, to be found among the rubble of the marketplace, where without question literature is playing at a deficit compared to Netflix, politics, and sports. You even might find yourself someday, instead, feeling like a badass wearing a ballgown and tiara, having gladly traded your own hide for a prom ticket you could have earned far more effectively by doing just about anything else—and thereby having forgotten what you might have had to say if you’d never realized there was ever a prom to go to. As far as any practice might deem to lead us to our ideal or desired selves, no matter what we worship in the meantime, there’s little to be said for those who willingly do the work of the oppressor in the seat of their own desk chair, building themselves a little cage in which to be seen for as long as there are people who enjoy peering into cages.

I’d intended to get a little deeper into how my discovery of online lit opened the floodgates of what I thought possible with writing overall, but I’ll stop here. In my next post, I’ll look at how I continued to find community online, including starting my own web mag and making friends with likeminded artists through sharing work. I’ll also go into how I landed my first agent, what my first taste of shopping (and failing to sell) a novel felt like, and how it once again changed my desires and approach to seeking publication, eventually leading to my first taste of success, if a quite different kind than I might have ever expected.

Following that, I’ll begin posting more explicitly about the fine details of my experience with individual publishers, and some of these will be paywalled for privacy. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed recently; your support is greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading.