paper mag vs e-zines: thoughts on which gets more eyes on one's story?

steveg144 said:

s there any real "plus" to being published in the paper mag, as opposed to the e-zine where one's work is seen by more eyes and is google-able, etc?

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Unless you pick up your computer monitor and stroke it lovingly, you won't be able to hold the work in your hands if it doesn't come out in print form. A physical element will be missing, paper, which you won't make up for online no matter how hard you try. And when the website is long gone and your words lost in cyberspace, you'll wish you had a copy of the magazine to show your children's children.

Even those who are trying to make a living at this gig, rather than do it as a hobby, have as their primary motivation to be read. The two do go hand-in-hand.

In the specific scenario you paint, I'd go with whichever has the higher circulation/hits and is better known my the reading public.

Silver King said:

Unless you pick up your computer monitor and stroke it lovingly, you won't be able to hold the work in your hands if it doesn't come out in print form. A physical element will be missing, paper, which you won't make up for online no matter how hard you try. And when the website is long gone and your words lost in cyberspace, you'll wish you had a copy of the magazine to show your children's children.

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That's why you print out copies - for posterity.

As for the original question, the 'zine with the most audience and prestige would be my choice although I seldom submit to ANY publication that doesn't offer compensation.

A litzine with 500 readers would appear to indicate up to 500 paid purchases.

On a site, "500 visits" is so vague as to be useless. Is that 500 people who've viewed the page(s) containing your piece & who (according to the applets the site opens in the browser window) have stayed on that page long enough to likely read the content & not simply "flipped past" you? Or 500 people who pop into the site's homepage from Google? or 500 who show up only to read the submission guidelines? or 500 total viewings from the writers & their friends & families?

Even a saddle-stitched ephemeral zine is going to last a lot longer than a vaporware litsite that hangs out for a few unexciting years. If the zine's got a tiny bit of clout, it'll be archived in obscure public & school libraries long after the site's an unlamented memory.

Given equal funding by the same college, & staffs that're equivalent, I'd bet that the deadtree venue will succeed more quickly & more lastingly.

Anthony Ravenscroft said:

On a site, "500 visits" is so vague as to be useless. Is that 500 people who've viewed the page(s) containing your piece & who (according to the applets the site opens in the browser window) have stayed on that page long enough to likely read the content & not simply "flipped past" you? Or 500 people who pop into the site's homepage from Google? or 500 who show up only to read the submission guidelines? or 500 total viewings from the writers & their friends & families?

Even a saddle-stitched ephemeral zine is going to last a lot longer than a vaporware litsite that hangs out for a few unexciting years.

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Great point here.

The only point I can think of on the flip side is that my own lit mags pile up unread -- I cherry-pick the stories and some get left behind as I buy new mags and other stories and books elsewhere grab my attention. If I "hit" an Internet-based story, it's akin to me opening and at least beginning one specific story in one of my magazines. So if hits are measured by story (I realize that won't be how the ezines advertise their own readership numbers) I suppose you could count the story-hit as more valuable than a single magazine sale. That is, of course, if you remove all other values like pay, permanence, so-called prestige, and so on, and purely value the number of readings of your story that you could count.

Anthony is absolutely right about the hit-count numbers being useless for judging that number of readings, though. Technically, all file downloads count as hits. So a page consisting of an HTML file with a few graphics and an imported script or two might count as ten hits all by itself. A more intelligent web stats counter will get beyond mere hits and attempt to provide figures on individual readers reading whole pages, and even dividing those figures among those who appear to stay on a page or depart without the time to read it; but all of those stats are too spongey and variable to compare against anything but stats from the same web site measured by the same counter (e.g. the webmaster can usefully compare performance between months on his own site).

Despite the fact that my own lit-mags pile up and many of the stories in them escape my reading, I would hope that if I published a mag with a circulation of 500, that it was reaching the eyes of at least 1,000. (Experienced editors might have a more likely figure with which to correct me here.) My expectation is based on the fact that most households contain more than one person. And hopefully, half the copies get passed on to others by donation rather than thrown out. Some sit in office lobbies and the periodical sections of libraries for a month or more and are read by dozens more people. So even if we assume the statistics of a web page can accurately reflect readership, we know that reading stories on that web page is practically never a shared activity. Each unit of that circulation count is limited to the value of one.

Furthermore, if you could accurately scale your comparison between the two circulations -- say you can determine that the readership of 500 on the web site is worth the circulation of 200 for the print mag -- there are questions remaining that pertain to your value of getting read. Read by whom? And why? If you want the readership of those who buy books and write/edit for print magazines, for example, it is possible that the print magazines will still pull in more valuable eyes than the Internet -- but that's just my guess.

steveg144 said:

I've been thinking about this issue a lot lately, and am interested in the opinions of any AW folks who have thoughts on the matter.

Assume a paper lit-fic mag, circulation 500. Assume a well-visited lit-fic e-zine site. Assume neither of them pay anything. Assume a writer's primary motivation for writing is to have her work read, rather than trying to make a living at it.

Given these assumptions, is there any real "plus" to being published in the paper mag, as opposed to the e-zine where one's work is seen by more eyes and is google-able, etc? I understand the "traditional prestige" angle for paper, but are there other aspects I'm not seeing? Even if one is in search off "pub credits," what is the current thinking?

Thanks as always for use of the collective brains of AW. ;-)

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It isn;t just about having your work read versus earning a living from it. Work you give away is worth just about what you're paid for it, and will be read by darned few people, and liked by less.

The value you place on your own work is roughly the value readers place on it. Magazines pay for fiction because it's worth paying for.

Forget earning a living. If you want readers to value your writing, then you also need to value your writing.

If the goal you have with your writing is to soley have it read, then why not print it out and send it to friends. Or pass it out around town. Leave stacks of it in the library, and supermarket for people to see. Doing this will probably give you a higher circulation than the examples you listed above. Also remember that if a mag has a circ of 500 your story will be read by less than 500.

For me, I want to get paid for my writing. I do it because it is an addiction, because I love doing it, but if the opportunity comes to get paid then show me the money!

Now if I had the option exactly as you stated above I would go with the print magazine and here is why. The print magazine gives you a tangible. You can flip through it and show it to your friends. Also the print will be around for a while. Even if a website archives its work, rarely do people search through old "issues". And most importantly is this: It costs nothing to print something online. Printing something in a paper magazine costs money. So even if they are not paying you to do it the print magazine will be more selective as to what they choose to print, and if they select yours than it shows something good about your work.

There many small paying magazines that are regional. What's to stop you selling your article or story to the best one and then offering lower paying secondary rights to others whose membership doesn't overlap. the first magazine? This used to be done quite often years ago but it seems the practice has dired out.

We all want out work read, but I'd rather have my words read in a magazine I can hold in my hands rather on my minotor screen.

I also wonder if being published in printed magazines carries more weight in your resume than publication via ebooks.

Carmy said:

I also wonder if being published in printed magazines carries more weight in your resume than publication via ebooks.

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As with all things, it depends entirely on the quality of the publication. There are some E-publications like the late (and lamented) SCIFiction area of sci-fi.com, run by Ellen Datlow, which would have been quite a feather in your cap to have a story with.

Thanks to POD technology making it cheaper and easier, there are all sorts of magazines that would be more or less as worthless as some e-zines.

It's why it's important to pick a good market. "St0ri3Z" maybe published your story, but they also published "Why I Love Women" as a lauded article, so what good does this do you as a credit? ANd if they pay you...well....I'm still not sure that would be much higher on the totem pole than your mom paying you 'cause you finished a short story.