There's a great interview with literary agent Nat Sobel in this month's Poets & Writers Magazine. Aside from the fact that he started one of my favorite bookstores, he said this about the importance of literary magazines:
Tell me about how you find clients.
My great love, and where we've found most of our fiction writers, has been the literary journals. I don't know how many other agents read the journals. I know it's a lot more than it used to be, but I certainly read them more extensively than anybody else.
How many do you subscribe to?
I don't know the exact count, but it's somewhere over a hundred. My heroes in publishing are the selfless people who work at these journals, who either are not paid, or volunteer, and who spend their lives putting together these journals with relatively small circulations, but enjoy it. Over the years I've developed a number of friends among them. I admire them. I admire what they do. And they are responsible for many of the writers I represent, including Richard Russo, who I found in a literary journal out of Bowling Green, Ohio, which had a circulation of something like three hundred copies.
Now, if only Mid-American Review would stop rejecting me, maybe Mr. Sobel could read one of my stories.
My great love, and where we've found most of our fiction writers, has been the literary journals. I don't know how many other agents read the journals. I know it's a lot more than it used to be, but I certainly read them more extensively than anybody else.
How many do you subscribe to?
I don't know the exact count, but it's somewhere over a hundred. My heroes in publishing are the selfless people who work at these journals, who either are not paid, or volunteer, and who spend their lives putting together these journals with relatively small circulations, but enjoy it. Over the years I've developed a number of friends among them. I admire them. I admire what they do. And they are responsible for many of the writers I represent, including Richard Russo, who I found in a literary journal out of Bowling Green, Ohio, which had a circulation of something like three hundred copies.
Now, if only Mid-American Review would stop rejecting me, maybe Mr. Sobel could read one of my stories.
