Today’s Guest Poster is Dave Bonta. You can learn more about Dave at the end of this post.

Two years ago, when some friends and I started a new blog called qarrtsiluni, we weren’t really
thinking of publishing an online literary magazine. The idea was simply to
create a place to share our best work, more selective than a typical group
blog or an aggregator for a blog network — two other ideas on the table
at the time.

As valuable as the discipline of blogging can be, the
never-revise, never-look-back mentality sometimes prevents us from writing
as well as we should. We thought it would be fun if we invited a bunch of
writers and artists to contribute work on a single topic or in a single
style for a couple months at a time, and found volunteers to act as
temporary editors, make all the hard decisions, and help with revisions if
necessary.

It turned out, of course, that some of the conventions of literary
magazine publishing were worth adopting. After some ten months of
confusion occasionally bordering on chaos, two of us stepped forward to
act as managing editors and began to formulate a more coherent vision and
set of procedures. (You can read the results on our About and How to Contribute
pages.)

We began to talk about "issues" rather than "theme-periods." We
built an email notification list, began to solicit submissions from
writers we knew, and got qarrtsiluni listed on Duotrope’s Digest. And at
some point during a site re-design in spring 2006, my co-editor Beth Adams slipped in a new
tagline: online literary magazine.

At first, I was a little taken aback. Aren’t blogs and magazines two
different things? But then a well-known editor of an established literary
magazine took us to task on her personal blog for that very thing,
accusing us of claiming to be something we weren’t, and it got me thinking
a bit more critically about the lit mag genre.

Why do most online
literary magazines continue to publish issues all at once, just like their
print counterparts? Does anyone ever sit down and read those massive
content dumps from cover to virtual cover? Reading text online can be a
real strain on the eyes after more than a couple of pages. And online
journals in most other disciplines publish new material whenever it’s
ready for publication, so why don’t literary magazines?

I noticed a couple other odd things about the genre. For one, online
literary magazines almost never have an RSS feed. Don’t they want readers?
For another, they rarely seem to link to their authors’ websites or blogs,
let alone to the books and magazines referenced in author bios. From a
blogger’s perspective, this seems like a serious dereliction of duty.
Their link pages, if they exist, are often surprisingly provincial,
ignoring the reality that online material is equally accessible everywhere
there’s fast and unfettered internet service.

Again, the shape and style
of online magazines seems to be hampered by the editors’ slavish imitation
of print models with a postal delivery system.
And what about those virtual covers I mentioned? They’re often very well
designed, but let’s face it: online attention spans are short. Why should
I have to click through two, three, or even four pages of front-matter and
hunt around for navigation cues just to sample a magazine’s latest
content?

It’s wonderful to commission photos or artwork in response to
literary texts — we do that all the time at qarrtsiluni — but
they don’t have to play a merely decorative role as cover illustrations.
One of the best arguments for publishing on the web, in fact, is the ease
with which expensive-to-print color images can be shared (not to mention
audio and video, which print publications can’t do at all). And if you
want to get people to really focus on potentially difficult text, it never
hurts to break it up with pictures.

Like most literary magazine publishers, we have very little money. We’re
not associated with any academic institution. The ready availability of
blog platforms has enabled us to do something we probably never would’ve
considered otherwise. And in the process of adapting a blog to our
purposes, we’ve decided that our approach has several important advantages
for online literary publishing, some of which I’ve already alluded to:

1. Ease of publication. Blogs were designed to make periodical publication
fast and intuitive, and remove the necessity of FTPing every little change
to the server. Why wouldn’t a new online literary magazine want
to take advantage of weblog software?

2. Built-in RSS subscription options. One could argue that using a feed
reader is still a little geeky, and a lot of folks online don’t do it. But
everyone uses email, and Feedblitz
and Feedburner both provide free,
customizable subscribe-by-email options.

3. Interactivity. Writing is a lonely business, and we have yet to hear
from an author who doesn’t appreciate reading comments on his or her work.
I think the presence of comments also makes literary works seem a little
more approachable, and that’s important for qarrtsiluni because
we are really trying to reach beyond the traditional lit-mag audience. But
for magazines with reviews, the comments function of a blog platform
should be especially attractive.

I’m sure if we ever start a cultural
commentary section at qarrtsiluni, exchanges between readers and
reviewers will take center stage. And there are blog templates and
plug-ins specifically designed for an active user community that would be
ideal for such a venture.

4. Familiarity. Like it or not, people who spend any amount of time online
have grown accustomed to dynamic websites with content regularly updated
from the top — i.e., blogs. Pages with background on the magazine and on
the current issue can easily be linked to from a top navigation bar or
sidebar. Having content front and center snags readers, and whether or not
they subscribe, knowing that a site will be regularly updated gives them a
reason to come back.

5. Freshness. Because of the ease of publication mentioned above, we’re
sometimes able to publish pieces as soon as a week after they were
submitted. We never make contributors wait months simply for a reply, and
our continuous publication pattern allows them to create works in response
to other works that already appeared earlier in the issue, if they want
to, and still get them in before the deadline. First at Typepad and then
at WordPress, we’ve found that the "categories" feature — analogous to
"topics" in Blogger — works quite well for organizing content into
periodic issues.

There are a few other advantages I could mention, but these are the major
ones. I don’t mean to suggest that qarrtsiluni does everything
right, or that there aren’t other valid ways of publishing literature
online. For more encyclopedic types of literary anthologies, wikis might
be more appropriate, while social network platforms such as Ning or Elgg could be ideal for highly collaborative
or experimental projects.

I strongly encourage anyone thinking of
starting a regular online literary magazine not to dismiss the weblog
option out-of-hand. Though blogs, like television, seem to have become
associated with shallowness and ephemerality in the public mind, they’re
still a great medium with enormous potential for literary and artistic
expression.

About the guest blogger, Dave Bonta:

Dave Bonta is a 41-year-old writer and amateur photographer living in Plummer’s Hollow, Pennsylvania, USA. He blogs at Via Negativa. His other projects on the web include the literary blogzine qarrtsiluni, which he helps edit, and the Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival he co-founded. Dave has two collections of poetry online, Shadow Cabinet and Spoil.