The Creation of A Stone Boat: An Interview with Signe Jorgenson, Part 2
The following is a continuation of the previous week’s interview with Signe Jorgenson, which can be found here.
What are some of the challenges present in running a literary journal, and what, from your perspective, makes it worthwhile?
There are a million challenges, but they all come down to money at their roots. There is no money in literary magazines. The people who read them are generally writers, and writers tend not to have a lot of money. They subscribe to one or two literary journals at most (and many don’t subscribe at all!), and with literally hundreds of journals being published, that means that competition for subscribers is pretty fierce. Subscribers are also hard to retain—a lot of people want to experience variety, so when their subscription to one journal lapses, they subscribe to another. (Most of our editors do this, too.) We break even, but we don’t make any money—and this means that none of us are paid to do what we do. The phrase “labor of love” is such a cliché, but it’s true.
If we had more money, for instance, we could select a better printer. We go through Amazon’s CreateSpace because the costs are half of what they are through other printers, but we’d prefer not to; a lot of literary folks see Amazon as the enemy, and rightfully so—Amazon is putting bookstores and small publishers out of business, and its practices aren’t always author-friendly. But, without CreateSpace’s low prices, we simply can’t afford to operate.
If we had more money, we could hire a web designer to make our site look more professional; we could advertise in outlets like Poets & Writers to attract both readers and writers; we could buy our layout and design editor the equipment and software he needs in order to do his job rather than having him bear the cost himself.
Most importantly, if we had money, we could get paid for what we do. We currently squeeze Stoneboat in at night and on the weekends, around our full-time jobs and our family obligations. If we were able to give paid, even for just 5 or 10 hours a week, we’d be able to give so much more time and energy to the journal, and it would be a higher priority for all of us. That would undoubtedly help the journal to grow.
We continue to publish Stoneboat because we believe in what we do. We are writers ourselves, so we understand how important literary magazines are to writers—without them, writers don’t have a place to start their careers. We feel strongly about providing a high-quality outlet for writers to publish their work, and our mission is to connect readers with writers.
We know we aren’t doing as good of a job as we should be, particularly about connecting writers and readers, simply because we don’t have the time or the funding to generate wider distribution.
Have you had many interactions with libraries that order your journals, and what is your perspective on the nature of that relationship? Are there any unique challenges presented by ensuring that libraries get the items they request?
Unfortunately, only two libraries that subscribe to Stoneboat. This is, in part, a distribution issue. Our understanding is that the majority of libraries purchase materials through distributors, but we don’t have one that distributes to libraries. Because we print through CreateSpace, Amazon is our distributor, and from what we understand, libraries and academic institutions don’t deal directly with Amazon in most cases.
Amazon does have a variety of expanded distribution channels for its CreateSpace publications, but we aren’t eligible for many of them, including library distribution. This is because we purchase our own ISBN numbers, rather than using a free CreateSpace ISBN, so that we can be listed as the publisher of record (rather than having CreateSpace listed as the publisher). The two libraries that do subscribe go through us directly, but most aren’t willing to seek us out and go that route, and we haven’t proactively approached libraries to market ourselves.
Again, this is a time issue. We are barely able to find the time just to put the issue together twice a year; if we were able to get paid so that Stoneboat could become our work rather than something we squeeze in at night and on the weekends, we’d be able to solve our distribution issues; we’ve been talking about looking into Small Press Distribution (SPD) for years but have never actually followed through because it requires completing an extensive application, compiling a catalog, and a variety of other tasks. If we had more time to devote to Stoneboat, we’d also be able to come up with a marketing plan to get the word out to libraries and bookstores.
As someone who is not only an editor and administer for a literary journal, but also an author and artist, what are your opinions on the relationship between authors and those responsible for management? What are some challenges that you’ve found that both groups need to deal with?
As an editor, my role is to select high-quality work that fits my journal’s aesthetic, and then to publish it. My fellow editors and I don’t choose work that needs significant editing, in part because we don’t have the time to work with authors through that process, and in part because we receive enough print-ready work that we don’t need to select work that needs a bit of adjustment.
For this reason, I don’t do a lot of “managing” when it comes to the writers we publish. (And from the writer’s perspective, I haven’t had any literary journal editors who have tried to manage me, either.) During the copyediting process, I sometimes need to make minor changes at the sentence level in order to increase clarity, correct errors, or improve flow, but never anything that is controversial or that the authors object to. When I’m not correcting a blatant error, I always tell the writer what I’m going to do, and why. Writers rarely object; when they do, they explain the rationale behind their choices, and so far, I’ve always deferred to them. There hasn’t yet been a good enough reason not to.
I personally haven’t seen any writer vs. management challenges, either at Stoneboat or at any of the journals in which my work has appeared. I’m sure that challenges exist, but I’m not able to speak to them.
With all the talk about trying to keep Little Magazines in the black, or at least from folding, what has happened with Stoneboat to keep it going, and where had the idea for merchandising come from?
Stoneboat isn’t in the red, but we’re just barely in the black. Our bank account always has a few hundred dollars in it, but we also always know exactly what those dollars will be spent for.
We’ve gotten a bit creative with how we generate funds. For instance, we started an imprint press, Pebblebrook Press, to raise money. Yes, it also helps us to further our goal of providing a publishing outlet and connecting readers with writers, but at its core, it was a way to earn money. We were approached by a group of poets, many of whom had appeared in our journal, about publishing an anthology. They had no idea how to design a book, so they approached us and offered to pay us. We worked out a pricing model that allowed us to earn some money on the project but that also allowed them to publish a professional-quality anthology of their work. We initially intended it as a one-off project, but once that book was released, a number of other poets approached us with manuscripts.
We don’t publish everyone that comes to us; we only publish strong work that we believe in. We’ve had a steady stream of book projects for the last few years. They’re a lot more work than the journal, but they also bring in a lot more money and we have a bit more of a buffer in the bank account because of it.
For the last three years, we’ve also done a Polar Bear Plunge fundraiser where people donate and, if we reach a target amount, The Co-Editors in Chief jump into Lake Michigan on New Year’s Day. We’ve increased our goal each year and have generated what is, for us, a large chunk of our operating budget. We both got really sick after last year’s plunge, though, so we’re hesitant to do it again—and also, we’re concerned that our donor base is growing tired of that particular fundraiser. We’re not sure what we’ll do this year because we’ve come to rely on that money. If we don’t plunge, we’ll need to figure out an alternate source of funding.
We do sell T-shirts, which we hand-make in Rob’s basement, but that is another revenue stream that has dried up a bit. We made a sizeable chunk of cash at first, but it didn’t take long before everyone in our general fan base had a shirt. So, we’ve got a tub of T-shirts in storage and nobody to buy them. We’ve thought about branching out into hoodies and long-sleeved T-shirts, but again, it comes down to time and money. It costs more to invest in the shirts up front, and we don’t know whether people will buy them since they already have T-shirts. Also, hand-printing shirts takes a ton of time. We can spend a whole day and only make a few dozen. As Pebblebrook Press has grown and we’ve turned our attention to that, we’ve got less time left over to make shirts.
I’d like to thank Signe Jorgenson for taking the time to answer our questions, and I’d encourage readers to check out Stoneboat’s website, which can be found here: http://www.stoneboatwi.com/index.html
