I used to work as an editorial intern for a big name lit mag and part of the mantra in that circle is If writers want to be published, they need to subscribe to the magazines they want to be published in.
This is exactly the problem that I have with literary magazines. This is what I believe their problem to be, right here.
First of all, I think it only makes sense that a writer must know his market. If you want to be published in a magazine, you have to actually read that magazine and know what they publish. I believe that to be a golden rule.
I've made a living as a freelancer for years and have never once sold an article to a magazine whose contents I didn't read first, before writing a single word of the article. I couldn't imagine doing otherwise, and I know the same applies to poetry and fiction: you have to know what the magazine's slant is if you want to make the sale. You've got to read the magazine.
But note that I said READ and not SUBSCRIBE. Yes, it's nice to subscribe and get your own copy of the magazine delivered to your box instead of reading it at a library or through some other source. But literary magazines are always begging for subscriptions. Here's where they are wrong. They don't pay. Even among the "semi-professional to pro" listings in Duotrope, well, just look at those rates---nobody can live on that kind of pay, even if you made a couple sales a week. You can't survive on that in Mexico City let alone Kansas City (or New York City). It's insane for these journals to expect their potential contributors to subscribe ... UNLESS the whole thing is a joke, unless the whole idea of the literary press is that it's just a way for college professors to build up their CVs. (I.e., they already have a day job at the university, and the "payment" they receive for a given work is just happy beer money.)
And let's face it, these journals are all obscure, every last one of them. Even the best of them---even Tin House, even the Paris Review, even Poetry. It wasn't always like that, and magazines used to pay much more for fiction and poetry, but now they do not. You just don't see them at the newsstand or in waiting rooms because they are not for the general public---they're for academia, and outside of that nobody reads them. You get a story published in one of them and nobody (except the English profs at your local university) will even know about it.
The public will not ever see it. They will not read it.
That's a bummer. I'm unhappy about that, but it seems pretty obvious: the literary journals of the world are academic ventures. It seems that if you want to reach the general public today, you would do well to start a web journal, but there are very few of those that have a big general readership (like, say, mcsweeneys.net) and that pay professional rates (salon.com, slate.com, nerve.com, very few others).
So this lack of pay, even from the large ones, rules out full-time professional writers---only academics with full-time jobs that allow them the time to research and create literature can play. And that's the problem that I have with the 21st century "literary" world---you can't make it a career. Not me, not you, not anybody. You have to have special accredation (an MFA degree that says you are a writer) and then you have to become a teacher, that's the only way. And if you do that, you can subscribe to whatever you like.
