Caldarone mentions that Glimmer Train gets 40,000 submission a year, 750 per week. That is a huge amount of reading. They are successful, but it is daunting.
She provides a fantastic list to consider for marketing a new Journal
- Develop a clean, sophisticated design for your site – this will announce the value of your enterprise more than anything else
- The best marketing technique is simply to publish excellence from a variety of writers, new and emerging; for journals, less can be more – publish only the stories, essays, and poetry that blow you away
- Create an opt-in e-mail listserv and/or e-newsletter for your journal
- Exchange links with other magazines
- Network; as your community of writers and readers grow, correspond with friends around the world on a daily basis
- Send out press releases when something new & exciting is going on (first issue, first big-name author, new web redesign, new columns/features, etc.)
- Attend the Annual AWP Conference Book Fair
- Participate in various writing conferences across the county, including the Sewanee Writers Conference & the Bread Loaf Writers Conference
- Sponsor or co-sponsor readings and presentations at the AWP conference
- Hold readings of selected work from the latest issue of your journal in your local community
- Post new features on your website every 1-2 weeks
- Archive the online journal permanently in libraries worldwide through the LOCKSS program initiated by Stanford University
- Register and keep your profile up-to-date in Duotrope’s Digest – best registry of online journals available
- For online journals, it’s important to have some print marketing materials to hand out, such as postcards w/ photos from the latest issue
- Seek out “Best of the Net” – every literary journal can nominate poetry there
- Nominate your best work for the Pushcart Prize
- Use your blog to weigh in on the discussion surrounding today’s literature; be brief & don’t be afraid to say something confrontational if you believe in it
- Post 1-2 new posts per week on your blog; content can include quick interviews with writers in magazine, promotion of events, special events of interest to writers in regional area
- Send especially exciting issue links to popular blogs
- Announce your “birth” at newpages.com
- When first starting out, solicit many of the MFA departments in the country; it’s a quick way to get submissions
- Purchase an ad in a magazine that most suits your journal’s style to announce your presence
- Use Twitter – a most important marketing tool because a lot of book lovers, authors, and literary journal folks are on it. Use Twitter to announce links to new blog posts, interviews with a best-selling author, most recent issues, etc. Retweet anything from any of your authors
- Take adequate time to help your publication find its audience; be careful not to cross the line into blind, belligerent promotion…!
And if that weren't enough she has more in Part Two
Community Building
- Build community around the journal by creating personal, ongoing relationships with contributors
- Send one e-mail a month to your e-list – no more or it gets too much, no less or they forget about you. Weekly is too much; monthly is appropriate.
- Build your audience organically by having some patience and letting people come to you; don’t overdue it with email blasts and online publicity
- Encourage editors to respond to emails in personal ways, including signing their own name when rejecting submissions
- Build a sense of trust among other literary journals, and focus on cross-promotion not just of your journals, but of the artists and writers for whom you share a mutual appreciation
- Blogs are flickering fireflies of promotion; make connections with both new & established ones
- Tap into the blogosphere with a niche genre
- Use your blog for in-depth content – book reviews, interviews, spotlights on contributors
- Create a Facebook page for the journal & encourage your editorial board & contributors to use their personal FB pages to announce new issues
- For online journals, use social networking & interactivity tools to find a way for readers to be able to discuss what they’ve just read
- Mail your call for submissions to all department heads you can get email addresses for
- Make sure your faculty who have connections talk up the latest issue among their writer friends, colleagues, and in their classrooms
- Some of your better known contributors will bring a lot of people to each issue, with their mailing lists, students, and colleagues, plus in Google searches of their name
- Pitch to Poets & Writers & try to get special issues reviewed in other popular literary outlets
- Give the journal some sense of presence in the world by holding readings and events in the community
- Attend conferences and book fairs, most especially AWP’s book fair, where you have a captive audience actively looking for new journals to read and submit to.
- Put up posters around campus
- Hold poetry slams and other student readings at the local bookstore, library, or other literary outlet
- When your literary journal is established and has built a solid reputation, pitch it as a learning tool for English courses in high schools and undergraduate programs
- Sponsor live events open to the public, inviting artists in multiple genres together; these will help you connect to your readership and create a lot of energy around each issue.
- Provide your contributors with announcement cards that they can spread around
- Make a hand-made version of your first online issue, which you can pass out at local readings and at the local book fair. Make about 500 of these mini-mags (2 in x 2 in). People enjoy the novelty of these hand-made items, which will drive traffic to your site & they can keep as a momento
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