Literary magazines are most often labors of love, not a lucrative financial endeavors, so you will want to begin with some easy tasks to ease yourself into the journey. Choosing the content you wish to publish and giving your magazine a name are great places to start.
What types of literature do you like?
First, decide what type of literature you want to include in your magazine. Do you want to publish poetry, short stories, creative non-fiction, or all of the above?
It would be nice if people were interested in what you publish. So, you could check your local library, book store, and coffee house to investigate what literature people are reading. However, remember this endeavor is about the love. If you don’t love what you are doing you won’t do it for very long. So, my suggestion in the end is to just choose what interests you, and then try to find those who like what you publish. If you love poetry about Jedi mind control then publish that. If you love short stories about talking parrots with women troubles, then publish that. If you love a little of everything, do that. It really is up to you so have fun with it.
It is important, however, that you spell out what your magazine will contain ahead of time. In that light, it might be good to write out a mission statement. State what the goal of your journal will be. For instance, this was the mission of my magazine:
…to create a magazine that publishes poetry, short stories, and creative non-fiction. We publish work by new and emerging writers whose sensibilities are original and slightly off-center. It can be humorous or sad, but it must be odd.
In writing this down, I told myself exactly what I wanted to publish, and I eventually focused my readers’ and contributors’ attention on what I would be publishing. You’ll find later on that this will save you a lot of time.
Once you establish what type of literature you want to publish do not make quick, wholesale changes. If you establish yourself in a genre and then change on a whim, you will lose many of your readers. That does not mean you cannot add things to draw in new readers, but you have to maintain your focus. Keeping your focus has the added benefit of discouraging writers from sending you work that clearly does not fit your niche. Inevitably you will receive work that does not fit and keeping your focus will keep you from wasting too much time reading such pieces. Trust me, once you get going you will have more than enough to read.
Naming Your Magazine
Giving your magazine a name is one of my favorite parts of the process. Naming your journal is like naming your child. It is a very joyful experience. You’ll sift through so many words and ideas trying to find the one that feels just right; the one that says, “This is my brain child.”
Some people, though, have trouble coming up with titles. They can be very creative artists and writers, but when it comes to naming their work they go blank. So, I’m going to give you a little help. There are a couple of directions to choose when naming a literary journal, here are two of them: (1) give it a geographical name, or (2) come up with something original.
Geographical titles are great to use when the material you are looking for will be by people living in that region, or if the writing is to be inspired by or about that region.
Geographical titles can be as easy or as hard as you want to make them. For instance, you can use the name of your town, city, or county in the title, for instance: the Hoboken Review, the Somerset Literary Journal, The Franklin: a Poetry Magazine. Those were pretty easy, so why don’t you try it and see how they sound by inserting your area here:
The ____________________ Review
The ____________________ Literature Journal
The ____________________: A Poetry Magazine
The ____________________ Short Story Review
Sticking with geographical names, you could also use regional designations that refer to a broader area, which therefore might appeal to a larger audience – For example: The Sand Hills, The Laurel Highlands, The Green Mountains, Cascadia, the Low Country, and the list can go on and on. Why don’t you fill in the spaces below with some of your regional names?
The ____________________ Review
The ____________________ Literature Journal
The ____________________: A Poetry Magazine
The ____________________ Short Story Review
Original names are where I think most people have trouble. Everyone wants to be original. They want that “WOW!” factor. They want people to say, “Cool Name!” hoping that will cause people to pick it up. However, they put so much pressure on themselves to come up with the greatest name ever that they just can’t think straight. For those of you who have this trouble I am going to introduce a couple of questions to help you. Write your answers on the lines below.
What will your magazine publish?
_____________________________________
What will its theme be?
_____________________________________
Is it serious or fun?
_____________________________________
Who is your favorite author?
_____________________________________
Why do you like him or her?
_____________________________________
What are your favorite poems and stories?
_____________________________________
Why do you like them?
_____________________________________
What are your favorite lines?
_____________________________________
Why do you like them?
_____________________________________
What themes in literature suck you in?
_____________________________________
What are your favorite metaphors/similes?
_____________________________________
What is your favorite animal?
_____________________________________
What is your favorite plant?
_____________________________________
What is your favorite color?
_____________________________________
What place or thing are you dying to see?
_____________________________________
Now take all of your answers and just meditate on them for awhile. Don’t force any titles. Just think about how these things are connected. Close your eyes while you’re thinking and just visualize. Eventually one thought or image will become clearer than any other. If you don’t have a title by this point I would be willing to bet that you at least have a good idea of what direction it should take. It is merely a matter of piecing together words and ideas.
I performed roughly the same exercise when trying to come up with a name for my first literary magazine. I had already completed the previous step – I knew that I wanted to publish poetry, short stories, and creative non-fiction. I also knew that I wanted to publish pieces that were a little off-center. Not juvenile or disgusting, just off. From this I decided that while I wanted to be taken seriously, my title needed to be just a little playful. From there I thought about stories and poems that I really enjoyed. I also pondered what it was about certain pieces of literature that intrigued me. I kept coming back to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.” Poe was the epitome of different/off-center, especially for his time. I let my mind wander and I thought about the use of birds in recent books that I had read. It was then that I decided that my title must include a bird, but which one? I ran through a list of birds in my head, and some terms that I might associate with them. When I thought of crows I immediately associated it with its flock name “a murder of crows.” Yes, this was a great name! Unfortunately, after a few seconds of Internet research, I found that the name was already taken. I had a place to start though, and I wasn’t going to give up.
The Internet had hurt me, but now I was going to use it to help me. I searched for a list of birds and their flock names, and there it was: the perfect name for me. The bird and its flock name was playful and just a bit odd – “a circus of Puffins” – I turned it around and called my journal “Puffin Circus: a Literature & Arts Magazine.”
Before you finalize your magazine’s title ask yourself how it will age. Is it something you will love today and will probably hate tomorrow? Wear the name for a couple of days or a week. Try it out on a couple of random people. Why? Naming your journal is like naming your child, it can be agonizing, because once you make that decision official it can’t be changed easily or without consequences.
With all of the preceding in mind be sure to do a good Internet search to see if anyone is already using the name you’ve chosen. It will save you the surprise and hassle of having to change your name later on. It will also keep you from being confused with another company, book, or band.
How will you know if you have created a great name? Unfortunately only time and reader feedback can tell you that. But using the aforementioned process should help put you in the ballpark. Every time I began to doubt my choice of “Puffin Circus” someone would tell me how much they loved the name, and now I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Once you have these basic things decided it is time to start finding good writers, which will be discussed in an upcoming article.