I've talked to several writers who would like to send stories out to online literary journals but they are hesitant to do it because they're not sure where to send them. Writers want to place stories in journals that literary agents and writing program directors read and would recognize, but there are so many journals and none of them have been around all that long (compared to print journals) so it's sort of difficult to navigate the online journal landscape. There isn't a great way for writers to know whether or not they're placing a story in an online journal that's going to earn them an impressive publication credit on their query letters. So before they offer those First North American or First World rights to a story, they could use a way to access the online literary journal culture in a way that parallels the culture that's grown up out of print journals.
For example, if a writer places a story in
The Paris Review or
The New Yorker, he knows he's knocked it out of the park. He knows that he's got the most impressive publication credit on his query letter that he could have. How does he know that? He knows because there is an accumulated shared value system among writers, readers, and publishers that has built up a sort of meta-knowledge of the hierarchy of print literary journals over the course of the last fifty years or so. The hierarchy can be debated, of course, but there does exist among writers and teachers of writing enough of a shared sense of which journals to shoot for that it is relatively easy for a student of writing to tap into that value system and get a sense of where one print journal stands with respect to another in terms of the respect afforded to it by the literary community.
An analogous sense of the hierarchy of online literary journals does not seem to exist yet. One reason is that they are relatively new compared to their print counterparts. Another is that there are so many more of them in operation than there are print journals. That stems ultimately from the fact that online journals are much cheaper to produce and distribute than print journals are. Anybody with enough web expertise to start a blog on Blogger could publish his or her own literary journal. So that leaves us with a landscape that is peppered with a tremendous number of online journals, some of them impressive, some of them not, and most of whose names go unrecognized in wider literary circles.
The huge number of online journals reflects the fact that people are, in fact interested in them. They are interested in reading them, publishing them, and writing for them. This isn't a trivial statement to make because online journals publish short fiction, and short fiction as a popular art form has seen a dramatic and steady drop off in readership starting with the arrival of television in people's homes. But in recent years, short fiction has sort of finally found its niche in the post-television era, and its new home is in online literary journals. They are serving up good-quality bite-sized chunks of entertainment perfect for a little unsanctioned break from the cube-farm or studying in the library.
People are reading online journals. I wouldn't be surprised if a decent journal gets more hits in a day than the total readership of any one of about 90% of the print journals that exist. So what's happening today is that readers want to read online journals, publishers want to publish online journals, but a lot of writers are nervous about online journals so they'll send their stories to print journals instead. And they do this because they want to know that they are publishing their work in the "best" journal that will take them. They understand culturally what it means to be published in a particular print journal, but they have no way to differentiate between one online journal and the next. Since it's so cheap to publish stories online, for all a writer really knows, the journal he's submitting to might publish every story they receive, which lowers the status of the online journal to little more than self-publishing or vanity publishing.
What writers need, and readers too, is a starting point. They need to know where to focus their efforts so that they can submit to competitive online journals that will set their work up side by side with the best work being published online. Writers need to know where to send their work if the publication credit they are going to get out of it is going to mean anything on a query letter. If a writer feels that the publication credit is going to be meaningless, he'll send his work a print journal that he knows is a safer bet. Readers need to know, too, where to find the highest quality fiction that the web has to offer.
This is where a guy named Jason Sanford at the online journal storySouth comes in. For the last several years, Jason has been organizing a project called the Million Writers Award. You can read the details about the award yourself at storySouth, but the basic end product of Jason's work is a list of about one hundred notable stories published online each year and the name of the journal that published each one. From this list of notables, the Million Writers Award designates a Top 10 list and each year selects one single winner from that Top 10. What Jason Sanford and storySouth have done is to provide us with a huge dataset that can be used to actually quantify in some way (as far as it is possible using an award system that judges art) the track record of individual online journals as far as their ability to attract, select, and publish short fiction of the highest quality. Again, I refer you to the storySouth website if you are interested in the enormous, labor-intensive process of selecting the Million Writers Award notable list each year. But what I have done is to conduct a sort of meta-analysis of all of the data generated by the Million Writers Award project in order to create a ranked list of which online journals have been historically successful in publishing high-quality fiction.
If you are a writer looking to send work out to an online journal, if you're a literary agent looking for where to find the most respected writers in the online community, or if you're a reader looking for a short list of sites to visit to read the best online fiction, then I present to you, the Thinksimian Top 15 Online Literary Journals:
Thinksimian Top 15 Online Literary Journals as of 2007
- Pindeldyboz
- Eclectica Magazine
- Narrative Magazine
- Agni
- Identity Theory
- Word Riot
- FRiGG
- Fiction Warehouse
- Strange Horizons
- The Barcelona Review
- Clarkesworld Magazine
- Fail Better
- Stickman Review
- Mississippi Review
- HOBART
I'm going to detail my analysis in a different post, which I will link here eventually. For now, you can look through all of my raw data in a Google
spreadsheet or in a
pdf. In the raw data you'll see the exact score that each journal received and you'll also see the complete dataset for every single online journal that has ever published a Million Writers Award notable story.
Labels: literary journals, serious, text, unsolicited opinions