Hello. First off, I have the pleasant and exciting news of a publication in Emerge Literary Journal (to which the link will take you). I have been waiting for this since perhaps the month of May but probably sooner. I am very excited about this new publication, something my dry speech is not letting on but something that is very much the case.
Second off, I'd like to recount an interesting conversation I had with my grandpa today.
We were talking about books and publishing, and he (bless him) has a sort-of aversion to technology, and he was telling me about how e-books and the like are going to run print publishers out of business. The implication of "evil newfangled technology" was present in how he said it.
I had to correct him on that matter, citing Stephen Frye's thoughts of, "Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators." As long as there are people who like to read and truly value the art that goes into creating a physical book (for while there's nothing wrong with e-books, certainly, there's also nothing wrong with the beauty of a physical collection of words), there will be a group of people who want physical books, and there will be a supply to meet this demand.
And furthermore, I told him, there is a particular benefit to e-books and online literary publications that print books (bless them) just don't have.
Namely, electronic writing is much easier to distribute to large numbers of people.
When a book is available to buy and download online, anyone with internet access and sufficient funds can purchase it and get it usually instantly. This is probably a larger demographic than people who have the ability to find books at bookstore (or maybe order the physical things from the internet) and sufficient funds. (Also, I'd like to point out that print books, for perfectly reasonable reasons, are often much more expensive than e-books. So there is that as well.) But basically, it's oftentimes just easier for one to get an e-book than a print book, and if your goal is wider readership (as opposed to creating a nice object or looking "prestigious"), then there can be no harm in having your works published in electronic format.
And as for online literary publications (which have so far been the majority of the publications in which my works have appeared), they seldom cost anything at all to read, so they are usually available to literally anyone who has internet access. This is especially important when one remembers that print literary magazines are, unfortunately, not as widespread or well-known a phenomenon as books (print or electronic). Electronic publications have the advantage of being more easily-stumbled-upon during casual searches of the internet, whereas I imagine it's unlikely that one would find a print equivalent while not particularly doing anything at home or in a coffee shop or wherever one uses the internet. And while I admittedly don't know what editors for literary magazines (online and print) or Legitimate Publishing People do, it's safe to assume they Google-search the writers whose work they've been sent, and having something out there on an online publication will not only prove that you're good enough to get published somewhere, it'll give them a sense of what your work is like, a very good thing to give them.
The most important thing about online publication, however - and this is my personal view, though I'm sure it's shared by many others - is that it allows your work to be seen by numerous people. Not just numerous people; potentially lots. Ideally, a writer - and indeed an artist of any kind - wants an audience. A writer wants a wide audience. A writer, truly believing in their craft and truly believing it will affect people for the better, will want it to be read by the world; the world will almost certainly benefit from it, too. Having work published online will not guarantee worldwide readership, but it will certainly make it a possibility, something that print publication, while still wonderful and beautiful, couldn't even dream of.
"So," I concluded to my grandpa, "e-books and stuff aren't really going to run print publishers out of business, and electronic literary publications are actually a pretty great thing."
"Oh," he said. "I didn't know that. Thanks for telling me."
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