(Annals of an Editor, #75)
This weekend I was at a reading for a group of plein air poets whose work had been gathered together for yet another chapbook by editor Susan Richmond. The poets had been invited to visit the orchards and sculpture gardens of Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Mass., where each of them selected a spot to stand or sit, and in that moment take in the landscape, as a painter does when capturing a scene in the moment. The poems produced in response were each in accordance with this year’s theme: “memoir.”
(At the reading, many people said it was a perfect day for poetry, commenting on the bright sunshine, on the late summer gold in the air. I rather felt that this was a terrible day for poetry… A day suitable for a picnic, or sitting beside the beach, is not a good day for a poem. Snowy days, foggy days, thunderstorm days—any day you have to stay inside, that’s a good day for poetry reading.)
After the reading, we two dozen poets and sixty-something guests mingled on the grass beside the mill pond and ate canapés and drank lemonade while we chatted. More than once, I was asked about our new publication, Hawk & Whippoorwill. Or rather, not a new publication, but one renewed, for H&W was first published in the 60s, edited by August Derleth of Arkham House; and then again in a “new series”, edited by a group of Boston-based writers, about a decade ago. This latest revival is therefore the third life for the magazine.
Given that the order of the day at Old Frog Pond Farm was plein air poetry, it was natural enough that people wanted to talk about the new Hawk & Whippoorwill, the focus of which is poems “of humanity and nature.” It turns out that my call for submissions had been circulating among this crowd, and more than one person there had already submitted. And here is where I get to the point of today’s post.
More than one poet expressed concern that they had committed a faux pas by submitting material that has previously appeared somewhere, be it a blog, chapbook, or even, in one case, as a spoken word performance on the radio.
Here’s what I told them: They should not have patience, as I do not have patience, with publications that give a damn about prior appearances.
It is the job of a little magazine to connect a readership to a body of work. It is not the job of such a publication to deliver exclusive first-time appearances. Publications that insist upon exclusivity are either serving an editor’s vanity, or are working with an obsolete model of production parameters.
Back in the day, things were more expensive. Layout and design were more labor-intensive and required more specialized expertise. Printing meant the scheduling of press time on an offset machine. The expense involved in production and printing meant that you had to take special care with marketing, in order to recoup those costs, and then, as now, you have to spend money to make money, so marketing itself became a necessary expense. Put together, these aspects of the workload meant that in order to attract a paying readership of sufficient size to recoup all of your overhead and potentially turn a profit, you had to be sure of offering some kind of premium valance in your content. Where literary quality is hard to come by, truth be told, exclusive publication rights are easy to insist upon.
Fast forward to the present. We have desktop publishing software, we have an endless variety of typographic and illustrative assets to draw upon, marketing via the long-tail effect in social media networks online is an incremental cost, and print on demand technology means the cost of an issue run is drastically reduced. There is no longer any need to insist in penurious fashion upon exclusive publication rights.
I told the anxious poets at the after-reading cocktail house today to expect that smart editors will understand that the more appearances the better. Our magazines at Pen & Anvil are intent upon delivering a coherent and stimulating literary experience. The pieces within each issue are meant to speak directly to the reader, and across the pages with one another, so that the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. If a poem has appeared elsewhere, the editors of that publication have skin now in our game, and we will take advantage of that by letting them know of this secondary appearance so that they can mention it through their social media and email outreach channels. There is little risk of redundancy, given how removed our respective pockets of the literary market are; and there is considerable gain to be obtained via this kind of collaborative promotion.
To end this reflection, let me give advice to poets and to publishers.
To poets I say: don’t sweat this small stuff. Simultaneous submissions are fine, revising after acceptance is (usually) fine, and submission of works that have appeared elsewhere should be fine as well.
And to my fellow publishers, I will observe that the currency we most often have to reward our writers is attention. We’re leaving money on the barrel if we don’t take make use of the reciprocal self-interest other publications have in promoting appearances of our shared writers in our respective magazines. Our job is to connect writers with more readers. If anything, prior publication makes that an easy job.
We are many of us somewhat in love with the idea of being the first to discover a hitherto unacknowledged literary talent. We can only do that, however, if our publications have sufficient attention to attract such writers. Get the writers into your magazines, get your magazines to your readers, and the rest will come.
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