Hello! Been awhile. That’s cause we’ve been pouring our attention into our other newsletter, Sub Club.1 And, since Substack allows one newsletter to hold (cradle? consume?) other newsletters, we2 figured we’d3 make our4 lives5 a little easier and tuck this bad Larry in there so we6 can give it the attention it deserves.7

What that means for you:

Also, 49% of you are already subscribers to Sub Club so, yeah, you’ll feel nothing. Not even a little pinch. For the rest of you 51%8 …also pretty much nothing. Sit tight. I’ll set it so it shouldn’t add you to any other sections of that newsletter.

Once you’re there, you can manage your subscription anytime to see what else is going on, or just hang out and wait for some new Things We Do While Waiting to Die.

We’re going to focus more on behind the scenes industry/writing world stuff, like we’ve done in the past.9 We’ll also be cleaning up and reposting some old goodies. Inviting on new guests. Leaning into the stats we have on Chill Subs to provide folks with more insights.

That’s all. Thank you for your patience. If you’re afraid of change, no worries, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of this email. Or if you simply cannot stand the wait, you can head over and subscribe there now.

The merge will happen in 24 hours.

We’ve been all over the place with our own stuff lately. Too much. So it was such a pleasant surprise to hear from Charlie Fish about his FISH list of lively indie lit mags. So nice, actually, we gave him full access to our data and asked him on here to write about his journey creating the first rankings list of independent-only literary magazines. Read on below.

Then come back and check out the list here. And if you use your Chill Subs bookmarks, you can save all of these top 100 lit mags from this list to your favorites.

Subscribe now

I’ve published a ranked list of lively independent literary magazines, and it’s awesome. It’s called the FISH list– Finest Independent Story Houses. (Oh yeah, my name is Charlie Fish.) I’m going to tell you all about the FISH list, but first:

Having spent many days visiting literally thousands of lit mag websites, I FEEL SO INSPIRED. There are so many people out there making beautiful literary art, so many niches snugly filled, so many jokers and prophets and lovers and fighters, so many wonderful stories finding an audience. Literary magazines are packed full of love, craft, art for art’s sake, art for life’s sake.

There are mags from across the world: from Florida to Wales; New Zealand to Singapore; Eastern Europe to Africa; India to Indonesia. All genres are represented: from noir crime to sci-fi poetry; ghost stories to punk. There are mags publishing voicemails and postcards and memes and musical mash-ups and description-defying surrealism. There are mags dedicated to speculative cat stories and chicken poetry. There are mags dedicated to younger writers and olderwriters; people of colour; parents and childless; queer and trans and non-binary; veterans and refugees.

In a world full of divisions, where we are bombarded by shallow media and tyrannised by selfish politics, literary magazines are antidote, antithesis, haven. We must support them, for they ARE US.

Now, pull up a chair, because I want to tell you how the FISH list came about, how I put it together, why I think it’s valuable, and what it has taught me about the many-hued universe of literary magazines.

The big idea, and why I did it

Six weeks ago, I had a crazy idea. One of those ideas that got under my skin. I could think of nothing else for the five days (and late nights) it took me to finish it.

The idea was to make a list of the best lit mags, similar to Brecht de Poortere's, Erika Krouse's, Clifford Garstang's - but focussing instead on indie lit mags.

Granta and The New Yorker are great, but I wanted to focus on the passion projects. The kaleidoscopic cutting edge.

I selected 14 metrics – things that I personally consider important and attractive for a venue that might publish one of my own short stories – and scored 1,000 literary magazines against those metrics. (Yes, a thousand. It took many, many hours.)

The results pleased me greatly. The magazines at the top of the list were exactly the kind of underappreciated gems I wanted to draw attention to. The hardest working, volunteer-run, lifeblood of the literary world. The ones that survive on wit, will, and way too much caffeine.

You see, I love Brecht’s list, it’s an incredibly valuable resource, but the way it’s put together doesn’t allow for much diversity. It focusses on magazines that have won the most awards – Best American Short Stories, Pushcart, O. Henry, PEN DAU, Best of the Net, Wigleaf, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction – all of which are USA-based awards. Therefore, Brecht’s list leans heavily towards USA-based publications. Especially those affiliated with USA universities, which have the resources to attract big-name authors.

(To illustrate the point, the top 100 literary magazines on Brecht’s list include just three from outside the USA, and exactly zero genre mags. Not so the FISH list.)

My metrics for the FISH list focus less on awards and prestige, and much more on the features of the magazines themselves. Is there an active community of readers? Do the editors give feedback on submitted stories? Is the magazine going to stick around, or fade away like so many do? As an author wanting to find great venues to submit my own work, these are things that matter to me.

And I confess, I have an ulterior motive. I’m the founder-editor of my own literary magazine, Fiction on the Web. I’ve been publishing short stories there since 1996, but I made a New Year’s resolution at the start of 2024 that I would make it one of the best magazines out there. Since then, Fiction on the Web has:

· Recruited an Associate Editor and a staff of readers (after 27 years of being a one-man-show).

· Started routinely giving feedback on rejected stories.

· Started regularly publishing audiobooks.

· More than doubled its readership.

All of which has taken a LOT of work. The FISH list gives me a way to validate how I’m doing against my fellow indie lit mags, and recognises all the other editors out there who are dedicating the same amount of passion and commitment.

The even bigger idea, and the eligibility criteria

The whole idea of the FISH list seemed very aligned to the Chill Subs vibe – like, I'm a huge fan of their Community Favourites lists. So, rather than publishing the FISH list straight away, I pitched the idea to Chill Subs co-founder Ben Davis.

He loved it. And he made me an incredible offer. He provided me additional data from the Chill Subs database so that I could make the FISH list bigger and better, and he agreed to integrate the FISH list into the Chill Subs database’s new Lists feature. Now, on top of the 1,000 magazines I’d already scored, I was going to add another 2,500.

(Oh my goodness… another 2,500? Do you know how long it took me to do the first 1,000? I was gonna have a LOT of time to reflect on the virtues of this list…)

So, how was I scoring these magazines? First of all, I created four criteria for eligibility:

1. Independent, i.e. not affiliated with or funded by an institution.

2. Active, i.e. published in the last year, and plans to keep publishing.

3. Relies on unsolicited submissions, i.e. more than 0% acceptance rate.

4. Fiction on the Web is excluded (although it would come in at #7!).

That first criterion by itself is a stumbling block. How do you define independent? What about magazines that rely on grants? What about 501(c)(3) non-profits? I wanted to spotlight the ardent volunteers, not the revered critics; the spare-timers not the salarymen. In the end, I pretty much only excluded the magazines that were explicitly affiliated with educational institutions, and relied on the third criterion to filter out the rest.

By excluding magazines with a 0% acceptance rate (the third criterion), I hoped to filter out the ones that mostly commissioned their content. Cutting out mags that can’t afford to rely on unsolicited subs makes room for indie energy, and makes sense to me as a small-time writer because I might actually have a chance of getting published there. I want to find the lit mags propped up by hard work rather than money.

As for the second criterion, active-ness, so many literary magazines seem to go defunct after just a few years. Sometimes they fade out, and their ghost is visible as a never-to-be-updated web page. And sometimes they vanish, taking all their great literature with them. This I knew, but as I painstakingly scored 3,448 lit mags, I was nevertheless astonished by the vast number of dead magazines haunting the internet. I want lively magazines. Liveliness is at the core of the FISH list manifesto.

After applying those criteria, the list of magazines had halved, leaving 1,829 magazines eligible for the FISH list. Well, to call them all “magazines” is deficient – they are all flavours of publishers: websites and presses and hybrids and experiments; publishing short fiction, but also poetry, CNF, visual art, and more.

The scoring metrics, and “liveliness”

My score comprised 14 metrics, each weighted with “liveliness” in mind, but also thinking about where I would personally want to be published.

The first metric is the primary focus of the other lists I mentioned (Brecht’s, Erika’s, Clifford’s). But rather than asking how many awards a lit mag has won, I’m just asking whether they’ve ever won any at all – they get full points even if they’ve only ever won one. That’s because I don’t want to give too much weight to the same-old darlings of the lit mag scene: I want to illuminate the margins.

Being free to submit, and being a paying venue, both score a chunk of points. Oh, how I admire the 515 eligible magazines that manage to achieve both!

Then there are two metrics that are vanishingly rare: magazines that attract reader comments, and magazines that give feedback to all/most submissions. The “reader comments” metric is worth lingering on, because it underscores the intent of the FISH list, but also hints at its limitations:

For reference, at the time of writing, the last nine stories published at Fiction on the Web got an average of 1,937 reads and ten comments each. That means 0.5% of readers left a comment. To wit, fostering a lively community of readers that regularly leaves comments is a Brobdingnagian task. Some writers may not care, but I’ve received plenty of feedback from writers who find it incredibly validating to see their readers’ reactions right there in black and white. So, I gave a bunch of points to magazines that attracted reader comments.

But, of course, that disadvantages print-only magazines. Which perhaps seems unfair; after all, some of the print-only magazines on the list are exactly the kind of idiosyncratic hothouses of creativity that I want to highlight. There’s the rub – the FISH list is not really a ranking of the “best” lit mags. No such thing can exist. My vision is for it to be a ranking of the “liveliest”. Just as Brecht de Poortere’s list is not a ranking of the best lit mags, it’s primarily a ranking of the most awarded. Nevertheless, to help compensate, I’ve also given a point to magazines that regularly publish a print version (rather than being online-only).

Another benefit of the “reader comments” metric is that no-one has measured it before. It’s a point of differentiation. The more differentiation, the more likely that the FISH list will surface hidden treasures.

Of the remaining metrics, three are aimed squarely at “liveliness”: publication frequency, whether the magazine gets a lot of submissions (please report your submissions and responses on Chill Subs to help improve the accuracy of this stat!), and whether the lit mag is active on social media. None of those things by themselves suggest a lit mag is good, but they do suggest it is lively. Most of the rest of the metrics are about hygiene. Together, they help answer whether this is the kind of lit mag I’d like to submit to.

One last metric I want to talk about is whether the lit mag has a masthead, or at least a named editor. By giving a point for this, I’m effectively penalising anonymity. Rare as it is, there are some charlatans out there posing as lit mags, perhaps phishing for personal data or money; but there is zero overlap between those dastardly few, and the magazines that proudly display their editorial staff. However, there is another reason some lit mags get published anonymously – because they’re marginalised, and their very identity is dangerous. It pains me to disadvantage these kinds of platforms, so I applied this metric very lightly. For example, it’s not really clear who exactly is behind the t4t project, “a zine by/for/about trans artists & storytellers of color”, but they got the point anyway.

Not everyone will agree with my scoring system, but I’ve published the raw data in full, so you can pick out the things that are most important to you, and you’ll get a FISH list of your own. And any other editors out there that value the same things I do can see exactly what they need to do to boost themselves up the list. Perhaps if they responded to submissions a bit quicker, or started nominating for awards, or revived their dormant social media account, they could crack the top 100.

Despite my earnest attempt to be rigorous, there is still a lot of subjectivity in this list, and there are bound to be errors. I warmly encourage feedback, and I will happily re-score any magazine on request.

My hope is that the lit mags that have come out at the top of the list will earn more readers as a result, and that the editors will be proud of their position (I’ve created “Top 100” and “Top 500” badges they can display).

Above all, my hope is that the FISH list will help you find your new favourite magazine.

Chill Subs: A Home for Writers.

That’s the plan, you know. We’re even toying with that as a future tagline. By “toying with,” I mean “I’m trying to convince everyone.” And you’re only hearing about it cause everyone else forgot the password to our startup diary.

But even if we don’t go with that as the tagline, it’s still the goal. Because, I mean, c’mon, seriously, internet? Talk about a place that is absolutely the worst for writers (never mind giving them a home).

Why has this happened?

I think it’s because most companies have gone in one of two directions. They target the hustle-writer (Slam content. Bash out listicles. Make dough…bacon? Cheese? Ugh, yum.), or they go full-tilt the other direction with craft-heavy workshops, conferences, loads of educational materials, and usually shit web design.

And, like, what if I’ve just got some poems, man? What if I want to write about my life a little and publish it? What if there’s this really neat story I want to tell, but I don’t have ten years (or $60K) to learn how to tell it the way these folks seem to want? What if I want someone other than my mother to tell me my work is special!?

Cause that’s where a lot of writers are. That’s where a lot of writers begin their journey. It’s like, “Hey, I do words good. Maybe people like read words…” then blam! Cormac-fucking-McCarthy…or like, Todd. It’s a crapshoot.

So, if that’s the baseline (I write words and want to do something with them other than blog), then we should start there, right? I hope so. Cause that’s what we’re doing. Maybe we’re just too lazy for hustle culture and too anti-social for conferences. Maybe shut up.

So, what does this look like?

• Pleasant user experience - No ads. No investors. No sponsored content.

  • So, we need to make a subscription model work.

• Access to information - free access to all the essential information a writer needs to find publishing opportunities.

  • So we better create some damn good unessential tools and content to make money.

• Community first model - AI will eventually destroy any business model that depends on content or information aggregation (unless that business uses a bunch of AI [and fuck that])

  • So we need to insulate ourselves from technological advancements by creating a community space. Communities are timeless.

• Healthy community - Writing is stressful. The internet is stressful. People are stressful. Every social/networking community dies or only finds profit through ads or or becomes a pig-pile clusterfuck of bad actors and porn bots.

  • … … … OK we’re working on it.

But the writing world is not only made up of writers. Editors, publishers, agents, readers, people who bookmark a lot of things they plan to read someday…cats. Lots of cats.

So, here is what you’re going to see.

1. A new admin panel for editors to manage their presence on chill subs

2. New premium profiles created to serve writers and industry professionals

3. Unified feed for exploring, connecting, networking, following, sharing.

4. Group functionality for writing clubs, reading clubs, and hopefully that’s all.

5. A revamped browsing experience for discovering submission calls AND exploring magazines for the sake of reading

And more stuff. Because stuff is what we need. Nice stuff, happy stuff, enough stuff to fill a home, you might say. Or maybe a shed. Or at least a suitcase.

If you think we can pull it off, feel free to support us now by becoming a member.

HERE

If not, I’d like a promise that when we pull this off, and you can’t resist becoming a premium member someday, I want you to send me a picture of a kitten with its paws up in an email with the subject line: “YOU GOT ME!”

For reference:

The other day, I checked my YouTube history to find that from the hours of 10PM to 4AM, my account was watching “Miami Booty Walks”. I didn’t know what a booty walk was either. Now we both know.

Turns out I’d left my YouTube signed in on a TV at an Airbnb. I don’t know who watches “Booty Walks” for six hours but the very last video was suddenly: 3 Hours of Beautiful Snow Walks in Finland - Slow TV 4K.

And….and, well, now I’m not sure I understand anything about what people want in this world. Let’s not pretend we don’t all know what Booty Walks are. And let’s not pretend we don’t know what people do while they’re watching booty walks. And let’s not pretend we haven’t all felt a little like snow falling in Finland at the end of it.

But I don’t think the folks who made these Booty Walks were intending them to be watched for six hours. There is watching a fashionista show off a pair of tight pants for 10 minutes to see if they’re for you. And then there is watching six hours of back-to-back booty walks. Same action, one thing changes…everything.

Now, did I need four paragraphs to introduce the idea of unintended misinterpretations of content? No. Was I looking for an excuse to tell everyone about my booty walk misadventure? You bet.

Anyway, we made a post last week that had unintended consequences. It was this one:

But, OK, so we have a lot of newsletters and services. That is why I wrote it. It was like, “Hey, I know we have a lot of paid membership options, so I am making this ONE thing free for all.”

As in this thing right here. This startup diary ‘Things We Do While Waiting To Die.” (Not Chill Subs, or Sub Club or Forever Workshop. Yes, yes, I know we have a lot of projects, we’re working on it.)

But, uh, yeah, there was a misunderstanding and some folks unsubscribed from our paid services with a note that said, “It’s free now!” Which was an unforeseen consequence that has been very stressful to watch so I’ve instead been watching three hours of snow walks in Finland on repeat.

So if you got that email and thought: Yay! Everything Chill Subs does is free now! I am sorry to say we have not won any sort of lottery to allow for this. (But we still have our endless scholarships). Anyway, if this sounds like you, uh, please start giving us money, again? If this doesn’t sound like you, well, at least now I am not alone in this weird hell of trying to stop thinking about what some stranger was doing watching six hours of Miami Booty walks on my YouTube account. Welcome to my world. It’s dark and all the shapes vaguely resemble a father figure.

Has anyone seen Steve Job’s first iPhone unveiling? It was a big presentation — stage, screen, turtle neck, yada-yada — and there’s this moment when he is about to reveal the iPhone.

He says:

“So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough Internet communications device.” 

And again:

“An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator.”

And then the reveal:

“An iPod, a phone… are you getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone, and here it is.”

Wow. Truly, an incredible marketing campaign. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend checking it out. 

Yeah, so anyway, we’re doing the opposite of that. Over the past six months, we’ve tried to extricate ourselves from, well, ourselves. From now on there will be Chill Subs, Sub Club, The Forever Workshop, and Write or Die. Each do different things and have built up their own audiences. So, we will be growing them separately and trying to isolate each membership before building some sort of bundle.

What does that mean for this newsletter and all of you? Well, good news!

This newsletter is now completely free. All paid subscriptions will be donations. We won’t be paywalling any more content. We have enough paid subscriptions for things that are actually worth paying for. I mean, I’m not criticizing your spending habits. But like, thank you for sticking with paying for Things We Do While Waiting To Die. You’re either really nice, or really irresponsible, or…mother? Are you still here?

Anyway. Some things are just for the birds and the bees. So if you want to stop giving us money, please cancel your paid membership to this newsletter.

→ Manage your membership ←

But, I mean, if you insist:

Subscribe now

Thank you, thank you.

I will continue using this startup diary to update everyone on all our disruptive synergistic innovations decentralizing the writing world…or some shit.

You know how we said a few weeks ago that we were leaving Substack for Ghost. Wasn't that funny? SO funny. No, you stop it. No, you!

I said stop it.

Yeah, so we're bringing our diary back to Substack. Why? Oof, deep breaths…

We started our journey on Substack in January of last year with this newsletter. It was a way to bring users behind the scenes, grow our audience, and blow off steam. It went pretty well. 

Then we launched Sub Club that May, and things went very-very well. It became the primary source of funding for Chill Subs. 

Then, with Substack becoming its own "growth" focused platform, we figured we'd move our regular newsletter over here so they could feed into each other like some giant snake? Worm? Centipede!

We grew, launching The Forever Workshop and folding in our Write or Die weekly newsletter, treating Substack like our proverbial wall. And, yeah, it sorta worked. 

Sub Club is the 13th biggest literature Substack, and The Forever Workshop is 8th in education.

But as we grew, so did Substack, and we've found some major drawbacks over time.

1. We don't have much recourse when they do things we disagree with. 

2. It's much more expensive than any other platform (10% of revenue).

3. The stats and audience segmenting suck.

4. People will get burnt out with newsletters very soon.

There is nothing we can do about those first 3. Every platform has its gives and takes. But #4 has been on our mind for almost a year. And it's obvious, right? Nobody wants their inbox flooded with emails all day. And Substack knows this as well (I imagine that's why they push their app so hard). They don't want to be a newsletter platform, and I don't blame them. Who wants their content popping up next do Victoria's Secret Holiday Sales and half-written birthday emails from grandma? Random examples, no relation. And internally, we wanted to unify our content.

We started all of this because our website is custom-coded with no built-in blogging platform and no resources to build one. But we're in a better place now, so we started shopping for solutions. This led us to Ghost. They seemed perfect—an all-in-one blogging website designed for a customizable newsletter strategy that wouldn’t exhaust readers. We met with their concierge team, were well-assured it was right for us, and started making the leap. And….

You ever wake up in a shit mood? Then can't find your glasses? Then knock your elbow on the door frame? Then, forget to turn off your alarm? Then your alarm goes off while pouring your coffee, so it spills all over the floor? Then after cleaning it up, you open your email to find that Ghost's concierge team still hasn't emailed you back six weeks later, and your entire content structure is in limbo between two platforms, and you think fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck, but that first platform was problematic and limited and now you have to go back and tell your team that has been working on this transition for the past three months that we are, in fact, going to get blind drunk and text our ex.

Every time I think about stats in indie lit I get that Lil Jon song stuck in my head. You know, the one that goes:

Shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots

Shots, shots, shots, shots, shots

Shots, shots, shots, shots, shots

Except, well, it’s not exactly that song, because in my head I just think:

Stats, stats, stats, stats, stats, stats

Stats, stats, stats, stats, stats

Stats, stats, stats, stats, stats

And yeah, I mean, I don’t know if you can even call that “getting a song stuck in your head” because I don’t know any other words to that song. So it might be more accurate to say that every time I think about stats in indie lit I…yell a single word at myself inside my head over, and over, and over.

Neat.

Why am I thinking about stats so much, you ask. Well, we recently hit 100,000 tracked submissions, then we partnered with The Submission Grinder to make our stats more accurate (adding on another 500,000+), then got to thinking how the only truly accurate stats would have to come from submittable, and then and then and—hey, let’s just take it from the beginning.

Not so long ago in the Chill Subs Universe…

Karina and I always thought stats should be free. By “stats”1 we mean acceptance rates for submissions to literary magazines. The percentage of submissions a lit mag accepts and publishes.

Basically, what are your chances of getting in? I don’t know many writers who full-on don’t care about stats. At least not many who treat indie lit as some sort of advancement opportunity. Also, humans are competitive. It’s just a thing.

When a lit mag with under an <1% acceptance rate accepts me, I feel better than when a lit mag with a 7% acceptance rate loves me for the same reason it means more when my dad says, “I love you” than my mom. Scarcity breeds value.

So, but like, how are these stats created and what might we be missing when we see them?

First, there is the issue that not all writers track their submissions. Maybe half? We did a poll on Twitter once, it came out like this:

Confidence, inspired.

THEN you have the problem wherein there are like, a dozen different trackers you can use not to mention the many-many who use their own spreadsheet.

So, end of the day, you’re looking at hopefully 10-30% of all submissions for a lit mag being used to tell you their acceptance rates depending on where you’re looking—BUT THERE’S MORE!

Rejections are under reported. For the same reason I call my brother up to tell him our dad said, “I love you,” but don’t on days our father just says, “catch you later.” We are proud of our acceptances and want to tell people when they happen, hell—we want our future selves to remember those wins on days when seven rejections come in at once that we can’t be fucked to go and log into our tracker.

And, of course, we may not remember the day or update our trackers late, and so on and on and on.

Then, on the editorial side, magazines change hands, readers come aboard, boards get shaken up, and those running the magazine three years ago might not be those looking at your work today. So the statistics you’d be getting aren’t even relevant anymore. So, really, at some point the weighted value of tracked submissions needs to lessen the further back you go.

Different places have tried to manage these problems. The Submissions Grinder, for example, only tracks submissions from the past 12 months to account for indie lit’s revolving door of readers and editors.

Duotrope paywalls their tracker and claim it makes their statistics more accurate because their members are more invested and therefore more likely to actively track submissions. Because, sure.

We went a couple of different routes to experiment with what works best. First, we just ask editors what their acceptance rate is. We assumed this would lead to the best rates and likely would if all editors were honest, up to date, and controlled their admin panels on Chill Subs. Hmm, not always the case, let’s say. (Especially with something like response times, editors are inevitably…optimistic. But focusing on acceptance rates today.)

And don’t even get me started on how much acceptance rates vary by genre and what to do about partial acceptances for packets of poems. If 2/5 are accepted is that three rejections?!? Yeash.

So…WHAT TO DO?

Well, as a platform trying to suss out this information, it’s on us to come up with new fun ways. For some outlets, we now have our data, their reported data, AND Submission Grinder’s 12-month average which we hope will give writers all of the information they need to make an informed decision. But we are working on something even better that will give us 100% accuracy for some magazines. Basically, the only place that can provide pinpoint accurate submission statistics is the submissions manager editors use. And this is quite neat because Submittable allows editors to download this information for each call. So not only could we get exact statistics for the magazine, but have them for each genre. Not bad. Still, this takes time. We’re working on something for it.

So what can you do in the meantime?

Have a little bit more perspective on stats2 . Especially with acceptance rates. A lot of the time a magazine is way more competitive than you think. For example, I asked Shannan to share some of ONLY POEMS Statistics for us. Since they’ve been around less than a year we should at least be able to avoid the question of editorial changes and all that jazz.

We have them at 277 tracked submissions with a 0.78% acceptance rate and a 31 day response time. Submission Grinder has 33 tracked submissions with a 0% acceptance rate. Want to know how many submissions they’ve actually had? 3,438. How many acceptances? 9. That’s an acceptance rate of 0.26%

Is 0.26% all that different from 0.78%? I don’t know, Dad, is it?

Maybe not, but when you’re dealing with an equivalent disparity of something like 7% vs 2%3 that is much different. Right or wrong, people perceive that 7% acceptance rate differently.

The good news is that a lit mag is almost always more competitive than the statistics would indicate. The bad news is that acceptance rates matter…almost not at all in the grand scheme. They tend to be a side-effect of what actually matters (depending on your goals): readers, awards, popularity, presentation, community building, etc.

I think following them can be fun, and feels good when you get accepted, and can reflect a publication’s popularity. But, it can also just be a lit mag with limited space and a super choosy editor.

Don’t be a sucker for hard to get.

But also, I’m not going to listen to that advice because hey, it’s dumb. It’s dumb in the same way only eating whole grain pasta is dumb. It feels good to get accepted somewhere with under a 1% acceptance rate even if it means nothing.

Scarcity doesn’t breed value, value breeds value. I get that. Logically. 100%. But I’m human with a dumb brain that likes shiny things and to be in the club that says, “Not a lot of people get to be in this club!”

So maybe don’t care? Maybe do? Maybe tell your kids you love them more so they don’t have this problem later in life?4 And maybe eat regular pasta sometimes? Unless you have a gluten allergy or something cause that wouldn’t be good. And maybe I’ve run out of shit to say about acceptance rates because they aren’t so important…

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Shel and I got hammam massages the other day. The woman who did them was sturdy and mean. Told us to lay this way, turn that way, sit! It felt great to not have to think or make a decision for thirty minutes. Like having a mom again. That’s what I think we all wish working at Chill Subs was like—like, if we had a tough, badass hammam mom who could tell us what to do all the time. No responsibility! Ah, the dream.

After, we walked home through some back streets where we found a twelve year old boy and a man in his fifties having a rock fight. Not pebbles. Rocks. Size-of-your-fist rocks. And it wasn’t a he-he-ha-ha rock fight (whatever the fuck that is). These two were furiously chucking rocks at one another until the twelve year old boy got the upper hand and the man ran. Undeterred, the boy picked up a baseball-sized jagged rock, and started walking down the road after the man. As he made his way by, we locked eyes and he nodded as if to say, “sup?” And I nodded back as if to say, “Please don’t throw that rock at me.”

That’s more what working at Chill Subs is like. Kinda stupid. A little dangerous. Sometimes, duck.

So of course we are always surprised when someone agrees to join our family. This time we are being joined by Shannan Mann! Yay! And damn, she learns fast:

She will be taking over our data management department. And she had some notes…

Hah! That’s only the beginning. Get ready for some incredible new processes and organization here at Chill Subs that you’ll never see but hey…less screams? Can you hear the screams? Don’t worry, it’s just Karina’s cat.

ffs, not that one.

That one.

One of the people who has been “unimpressed” by our vulgarity in company communications found Karina at a coffee shop the other day:

Woof.

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my neck from working on the computer for the past couple months, so I made myself a standing desk:

Then stood so much that I got shin splints

Marcin had an ethical dilemma over a knick-knack

Shelby made a minor error on socials

That she fixed with all of our usual professionalism and grace

AND it was Nikita’s Birthday this week! Yay! He turned….twenty…something? Dammit, I know this. I’ll ask him later. So anyway, on Shel’s birthday he sent her a video of him playing guitar and singing Happy Birthday.

So for his birthday, Shel reciprocated:

nailed it.

Some spam artist invaded our emails…

…and clearly struck a nerve

And we still aren’t successful enough to wily-nilly question our super expensive corporate lawyer so we’re always playing games of, “Is this important enough to ask Paul?”

Anyone know?

That’s right, we’re crowdsourcing legal advice now. So what? Sue us. Wait, no, don’t sue us. Shit, can we say that? Paul!?

Hurray! Another indie lit person doing business things. We are about to switch things up a bit to organize this newsletter. We’ll do a whole announcement once Mariam has finished the art. But for a sneak peak, we are changing our guest essays section to, “Smart People Do Words Sometimes”

You can find this section in the nav on our homepage or by scrolling through the front page content where we’ve now sectioned things out.

In our guest essay today, book inc. founder J. Greg Phelan discusses his experience workshopping his novel in writing workshops and an MFA program and details how changing his approach to critique allowed him to finish his projects more successfully.

What if we approached workshopping and giving feedback to one another differently? What if we focused on the writer’s strengths instead of their weak points? Would the feedback still be useful?

Back in the early days of the Internet, I started a consulting company to build web applications. The technology was developing so fast that it was like learning to ski on an expert slope. To succeed, we had to keep improving–that meant constantly studying the industry and our competitors to adopt what businesses call best practices. Simply put, we actively sought out what worked for others and continuously updated our approach to do that.  

After selling my company, I took a break from consulting to dedicate myself to finishing a novel I’d started years before. I saw no reason I couldn’t apply the same dedication and hard work I’d used to be successful in running a business to my writing.  

I rented a tiny office in an old Victorian a mile from home and got to writing. After six months of working on the novel alone, I hit a wall.

I realized that I didn’t have the ability to make the novel what I wanted it to be. So, I did what I used to do:

I investigated what other writers did to be successful. What were their best practices?

Workshops seemed to be a popular way to hone your craft and connect with writers, so I decided to sign up. I assumed my experience and skills in presenting to clients would help me be successful at sharing my work with a group.  

As you may have guessed, it didn’t work out that way.

I found being workshopped harrowing.

I had trouble sleeping the night before my piece was to be discussed. As soon as the group began sharing their comments on my work, I felt my cheeks get hot and my heart race, desperate to defend myself from even minor criticisms. With all the cortisol pumping into my veins, it was difficult to take in what people were saying.  

At first, I chalked up my extreme reaction to inexperience, trusting I’d eventually get better at receiving feedback––and giving it, too, as I saw the other writers adopt a familiar defensive stance when I critiqued their stories-in-progress. And I did get a little bit better as I attended more workshops. At least I was no longer surprised by the punch-in-the-gut feeling each time. And, however painful it was to hear the feedback, some of it must have sunk in. My writing skills did improve.  

Still, I couldn’t help wondering if attending workshops was an effective way to make progress as a writer. One off-handed comment could set me off on a drastic rewrite where I’d change the structure or point of view or abandon a project entirely. And as far as connecting––like me, the other writers seemed too preoccupied with their own work and how it was received to be of much help to each other. We seemed to have little vested interest in each other’s success.  

Seeking a better way forward, I enrolled in a low-residency creative writing MFA, hoping my workshop experience would improve with a more rigorous and defined curriculum,  accomplished writing faculty, and committed students. And it did raise the bar.

The instructors were skilled and insightful, and the students were more motivated. Still, the workshops often seemed to be more competitive than supportive, the feedback geared to scoring points with the instructor rather than being helpful to the writer. Not the best practice I was seeking. I got so much conflicting feedback at times that my work languished.  

Then, I had the good fortune to be in a workshop with Brian Morton, an unusually kind and skilled writing teacher (and fantastic writer, too) committed to maintaining a positive tenor in his workshop discussions. That made a big difference. The students were less defensive, more generous to each other, and more helpful. And Brian’s annotations on my manuscripts were especially useful. Instead of offering criticism, he pointed out what was working and encouraged me to build on that.

He honed in on the potential in my work. His approach gave me newfound confidence and fueled me to keep going.  

After the workshop was over, I asked Brian why he’d adopted what seemed to me a  radical approach compared to other workshops, focusing on what was right rather than  what was wrong, and he seemed genuinely surprised by my question.  

“I’ve found that writers are self-critical enough,” he said. “What they really need is  encouragement.” 

Simple, but very true. I sensed this was the best practice I’d been seeking.  

Soon after I graduated, I seized the opportunity to teach writing workshops myself.  Emulating Brian’s approach, I approached stories-in-progress as not filled with problems to be solved but with the potential to be highlighted, employing specific comments about what was working to help the writer move forward. I encouraged the participants in my workshops to do the same. I believed (and still do) that if, after being workshopped, the writer feels energized to keep working on their story, the group has done its job.  

As I realized, though, keeping a workshop positive is far easier said than done,  especially in a culture that believes self-improvement depends on diagnosing and fixing what’s broken.

What’s more, many writers I’ve worked with over the years insist they don’t want or need encouragement.

Tell me what’s wrong, they say. I can take it.

But that’s not how making art works. I learned this the hard way.

However much I wanted others to tell me what was wrong with my work and give me solutions on how to fix it, I needed to figure out my own path forward. To make decisions that are pleasing to me.  That’s what art is. You and me, we’re the deciders.  

That doesn't mean feedback isn’t important. It’s critical for writers to understand how their stories-in-progress are experienced by others. Not by getting criticism from fellow workshop participants acting as amateur editors but feedback from fresh readers exposed to the story for the first time––what they connect with, what compels them to keep reading, what they’re curious about, what they’re expecting to happen, and what surprises them.  

As a workshop leader, my challenge was to provide a solid framework for this positive feedback exchange that would help all of us maintain our focus on what was working in the story without backsliding into what was not and trying to fix it. I needed to develop a best practice we could rely upon to accomplish that.  

I lucked out when I found a gifted therapist who happens to work with writers and other artists: Dr. Dan Tomasulo, the Academic Director at the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University. Dan introduced me to positive psychology, a decades-old field founded by Martin Seligman and expanded by Dan and many other psychologists who were disheartened with the ineffectiveness of their profession to help stem the tide of anxiety and depression.

Their key insight was: what if, instead of diagnosing weaknesses and trying to fix them, we help our patients identify strengths and how to cultivate them?

This approach works. Positive psychology researchers have proved that identifying and cultivating strengths not only lowers incidences of anxiety and depression but on strengths also builds resilience, joy, and a sense of agency. Adding to the good news, the benefits are long-lasting.  

Naturally, I got excited about the potential of positive psychology to help creative writers. So much so that we launched Book Inc., a writing collaborative that incorporates positive psychology and other best practices to foster a strength-based approach to writing memoirs and novels. Our core curriculum is a two-year sequence of courses that we offer as a practical, low-cost alternative to an MFA, starting with year-long Memoir and Novel Incubators, with our Book Revision Lab and Book Submission Lab in the second year. Another key differentiator is that the program leaders, our Peer Artist Leaders, write along with the participants. 

We start by having our writers do a free character strengths survey offered by the VIA Institute on Character (a nonprofit dedicated to the application of strengths-based research). Discussing the results of the survey lays the groundwork, getting the writers thinking about how to identify and cultivate their own strengths as well as each other’s.  

We also don’t exchange our writing right away, but draft and revise alongside each other, building trust and community as we gear up to share each other’s work.  

As we ramp up to our reading rounds, we provide in-depth training on how to give and receive feedback, instructing our readers to identify what is working as specifically as possible, through annotations on the manuscripts, filling a worksheet with guided questions about plot, theme, setting, and characters; and through a live discussion. The combination of these three channels helps the writer understand how their story was received, giving them a variety of tools to build on the strengths of their story to realize the commercial and artistic potential of their work. 

book inc. is in our fourth year, and early results have been promising. Since 2020, we’ve drafted and shared 55 memoirs and novels, read by at least two readers each who have given detailed strengths-based feedback. We’ve also shared and given feedback on 181 revised drafts. One of our writers received a prestigious PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. Many others are submitting their memoirs and novels that they started and finished during the program to agents, indie publishers, and contests.

Even more encouraging is how enthusiastic our writers have been about getting and receiving feedback in our supportive, collaborative environment focused on strengths.  Our approach has been very motivating for our writers to get their books drafted and revised, especially the live session when readers discuss your book-in-progress.

“It was like listening to a podcast with two people who really enjoyed my book,” one writer said.  

That struck me as a great characterization of how I felt when my novels were discussed by my readers. Gone were my hot cheeks, racing heart, and defensiveness I felt in my old workshops, replaced by a sense of gratitude and pleasure that my readers got my story and they genuinely wanted me to succeed. Without expending all that energy to shore up my defenses, I was open to hearing what my readers had to say, filling pages of my notebook with insights and ideas inspired by their feedback––an invaluable resource I frequently draw upon during my revision process.  

Yes, sometimes, even with other writers rooting us on, we can still get stuck. That’s part of the writing process, too. But with all the energy we receive from our fellow writers,  especially the positive feedback during the reading rounds, we're able to push through and keep going. I have. Since our inception, I’ve completed one novel and am well on my way to finishing a second. It’s the most productive I’ve been since I started writing. 

I’m not as angsty, either. “You seem to be enjoying yourself,” my wife noted with some degree of incredulity, as it's not easy to be married to a writer. 

She’s right. I am enjoying myself. Yes, you could write memoirs and novels on your own, like I did in my little office for many years, not sharing my work with anyone. And you can hone your craft by getting critiqued in competitive workshops and MFA  programs, which I also did. But writing alongside a community of other writers who actively help you identify and cultivate your strengths that’s a lot of fun. And much more effective, at least it has been for me and our growing community of memoir and novel writers.  

Making art in this world of ours is challenging enough. We writers could use all the encouragement we can get. In fact, we thrive when we do so.  

J. Greg Phelan is the director of book inc, a writing collective offering an two-year  alternative to the MFA for memoir and novel writers. His writing has been published in  The New York Times, America, The Millions, and other publications. He recently  finished a coming-of-age novel which takes place in the canyonlands of Utah, in the  summer of 1964. 

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Lately, I haven't been able to shake the notion that AI on the internet reminds me of zombies: mindless, ruthless, relentless, brain-eating imitations of human beings.

Before claiming my 'Cleverest Boy Alive" award, I checked the internet to see if anyone else felt the same. And, as with all my super-smart ideas, someone else thought of it first. There is even a closely-related term: philosophical zombies.

A philosophical zombie is a being in a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal person but does not have conscious experience.

This has even been talked about specifically in relation to ChatGPT1. So, fuck me. But I have yet to see it discussed as it pertains to the Zombie Apocalypse of the Online Writing World, so I'll take my Cleverest Boy Award whenever you're ready.

Oh, you need the whole theory first? Right, OK. Let's do it.

Let's start with Zombiepedia's The Progression of a Zombie Apocalypse.

• Stage 1: Infection Information → Before getting into the brain-eating stuff, I should clarify where it all began. This zombie virus spreading through the online writing world is a mutated virus. It started when everyone became convinced they had to please an algorithm over writing engaging words. Our curator began to mutate into the first zombie. Specifically, everything became measured by how many SEO holes we could machine-gun into our content.

• Stage 2: Patient Zero → Search Engine Optimization and Algorithmic Content Curation leads pre-hype adopters of LLM produced content.

• Stage 3: First Cases → Mainstream bad actors begin using ChatGPT to create the same style-drained, empty-worded yet over-long content we've all grown accustomed to, pretending ChatGPT was as good as humans, ignoring the fact that it was only as good as the limitations we've all been living with for the past decade. Still, hype grows.

• Stage 4: Losing Control - That hype turns into a fear of what it might do to the writing world. The hosts of every tech podcast on the planet orgasm in unison.2

• Stage 5: Panic Strikes - Authors start using it to cheat. Writers are getting fired left and right to be replaced by zombies.

• Stage 6: Infection Spreading - Amazon gets flooded with knockoffs and crappy books. Cheap content is getting churned out faster than anyone can keep up with.

  • → It is important to note at this point that Amazon knockoffs and stolen cheap content were all over the internet before AI. It didn't invent ripping people off or churning out bullshit. It's just kicked it so much into overdrive that more people are noticing. Anyone who has worked in content for a while saw this all the time—plenty were hired to create it.

• Stage 7: (Phase we're in) → Quarantine Measures — Communities increase security. Writing communities put up blocks to prevent AI from accessing their work. They try to fight back.

• Stage 8: (Phase we're entering) → Total Anarchy - Algorithms created the internet as we know it. For a decade, all media has become geared toward pleasing those algorithms. But do you know what can fuck an algorithm like we never could? Another algorithm. It's going to get nasty.

• Stage 9: Military Engagement - Governments will start creating regulations, trying to contain it. They'll fail. Lawsuits will happen. They'll fail, too.

• Stage 10: Societal Collapse — Long-standing companies and media will go out of business. There will be little to no trust in what you see anywhere that is not managed by a verified source.

• Stage 11: Rebuilding - The internet transforms into a place where people discover people again. Content is found through recommendations and word of mouth over algorithms and clickbait ads. People settle into communities based on trust and participation.

I am sure some smart somebody at some point in time has done some math to discover the number of people within a society before power dynamics emerge. I don't know. But I've seen it happen everywhere. And the internet was no different. Followers, views, likes, claps, or whatever, are not the real power. The real power is in the hands of those who control the algorithms, who own the advertisers, who have turned everyone into little engines that could. They were The Curators. And they did a hell of a shit job.

Because long before writers started getting replaced, curators were replaced. But now that the writing side has joined those curators in the zombie world, what the fuck are any of us good for?

I do not believe the cynical notion that we will all suddenly become observers of content. That humanity is doomed to watch Zombie Curators make love to Zombie Creators for all time.

I believe people will be drawn to people and that we care as much about who creates something as we do about what they've created. I also think all the people trying to tell you to use AI to create content are the same sort of folks who have to practice crying in the mirror before their mother's funeral.

Maybe, they're hoping, maybe if we convince them they need to use AI to compete, our Zombie-curator will survive.

This is a bad-faith argument. It is a con that only works if they can convince you that everyone else is stupid, selfish, and probably evil, too3. That people have given up on people. That we're alone and must use whatever tools they give us to survive in the coming zombie apocalypse of the internet.

But literary magazines are ahead of the curve. Literary magazines are that nerdy kid in class who had no friends, read too much, smelled kind of funny, and was admittedly a bit pretentious. The one everyone thought would be an easy kill who pops up halfway through a Zombie Movie to save all the hot people. They have been adamantly losing money and spending thousands of thankless hours building communities outside the Contaminated Zone of the general internet. While so many mainstream magazines chased trends, created listicles and sixteen-page recipes, perfected their click-bait titles, and created more and more addictive, disingenuous content, lit mags held onto their soul.

Years from now, when humanity is wandering the wasteland of the internet, suspicious of anything moving through the trees, lit mags will be those weird little safe havens guarded by those quacks, those doomsday-preppers of the written word. From time to time, a zombie will get in, and some people will freak out. A few of us might eat each other. But I, for one, am kind of looking forward to it.

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Hah! End note: what a fun coincidence to discover this on the day I publish this article about Chill Subs:

Founded by literary enthusiasts and tech-savvy entrepreneurs Jane Doe and John Smith, Chill Subs is a dynamic new platform that is revolutionizing the way writers approach the submission process.

Touché, Zombies. Too…shay.

Someone recently emailed to let us know about a bug and said, “Don't worry, I can see that you're in the 'whack-a-mole' stage.”

Gosh, if there were ever a term to describe what we do every day, that’s it.

But what moles, exactly? Running a business has started to feel like standing in front of a piñata full of problems while all the voices in our heads scream, "SWING!"

It is a recurring nightmare so riddled with hints of psychological dysfunction that it would turn Freud on faster than a PTA meeting on Mother's Day. So, we swing. And, just fuckin' moles. Everywhere. Then, off we go. Six of us. Blindfolded.

We love it.

Mole #1: Being an international team creates so many problems we couldn't foresee.

Do you know what an EIN is? How about an ITIN? Or an fw8ben? How about a K1 distribution? Do you know how much paperwork for managing a business requires folks to have an SSN? Rhetorical questions.

Point: Our core team is American, Russian, Belarussian, Polish, and Georgian. We work with freelancers in Australia, Ukraine, UK, and New Jersey. Not to mention paying writers from all over the world.

To pay people, we use a combination of PayPal, QuickBooks, Bank Transfer, Wise, and Uber Eats. Each place requires verifications, Tax IDs, phone numbers, addresses, birth marks and eulogies.

OK, too much sarcasm. Basically, we spend an absurd amount of time navigating bureaucracy1. For example, after reforming our company as a multi-owner LLC, Stripe paused our withdrawals, Substack threatened to stop allowing payments, our bank told us they'd close our accounts within 30 days, PayPal paused payments until we went through a new verification process, and it cost us $13,000 in legal and accounting fees.

So, yes! Everything is fine. We're fine.

Mole # 2: If you're gonna stir up some shit, write your name on the stick.

We had someone accuse one of our volunteers of stealing our email list. Here's the thing: Nobody has access to our user data. Even if they did, we have everyone we work closely with sign NDAs. Yeah, like some Succession levels of security around here. We are silly but not when it comes to that sort of thing. Still, I don't mind a heads up if someone is concerned, but ffs, put your name on it.

This sort of thing is a bit annoying — and is getting more and more common. We’re going to start requiring folks to put their name or email on the feedback they send us. Every mean message, every unverified accusation about a person, comes from people who conveniently leave the contact part of the feedback form blank.

It feels like high school when someone slips a note into our locker that says, “Brian stole Sarah’s boyfriend!”

Well, time to kill Brian, I guess.

Mole # 3: Our membership program is confusing AF.

Seriously, if you make your way through all the windy passages of our membership program, you'll find David Bowie singing to a bunch of muppets.2 It's getting ridiculous. We tried to mind-map it and create a clear problem statement.

It started out fine:

Then things got a bit out of hand

Sooo, yeah. We’ll be making some big changes soon.

Mole # 4: Bank of America’s customer service can…eat a dick

So, I live in Tangier. I don’t have a recurring phone number. Or permanent address. So, since my name is on our banking information, BoFA will only talk to me about specific accounts. This is as we are moving all of our expenses to our new company credit card so BofA flags it because all of the charges are coming from Morocco, and SURELY NOBODY LIVES IN MOROCCO. thirty-seven million people live here, BofA; get your shit together.

So for hours Kailey has to call me on Google meets, call BofA on her phone, speaker-phone it, and we talk through this. And gosh, I’ve worked in a call center before, so I have a lot of sympathy and patience for folks on the other end of the phone. So…inside screams. Just like mother said.

Mole # 5: We've started going on Butt Sniffing Expeditions.

In the business world, people meet. You have a company; someone else has a company. Sometimes, you take your companies to the park to see if they get along. Externally, these are called "Business Meetings," internally, we call them "Butt Sniffing Expeditions."

We don't really know if other companies have these kinds of habits. Like, do they say, "Sally, go tweak Chill Subs' nipples." Or "Brian, are you peeing in Chill Subs' liter box today?" Do other businesses have a sense of humor? I hope so. They're going to be sorely disappointed if not.

Mole # 6: Someone asked for our business plan, and we sorta freaked out

I think we look like we give pretty good advice. Need a good dandruff shampoo? We’ve got you. Want six things to add to instant ramen so you can eat it six nights a week without feeling the weight of a bank account that is somehow both extremely light and crushingly heavy? On it.

But business stuff? ehhhh. Have you read our startup diary? yeash.

Mole # 7: We’ve finally smartened up and added some boopy-boopy, fadey-fadey stuff!

Let me explain.

Nikita likes to call the phase we’ve been in our “playground phase.” We’ve done a lot of different things. Launched all sorts of weird fun features and added this or that at random. Usually based on frantic Zoom meetings after getting too much feedback about something. But our latest update from Karina and Marcin is one of our favorites, yet the least flashy and obvious one yet.

Up until recently, when you switched pages on our website, if it took too long to load, it just sort of froze in place and shook excitedly like a kid playing freeze tag. Then, it whacked you with the next page.

It wasn’t an obvious thing. It’s not like folks kept emailing us to say, “Hey! Your website keeps slapping my brain!” But that’s a bit what it’s like.

At the same time, the way the data was loaded for our browse caused a few seconds of delay. Since everything we built is custom code, and we built it really fast, there are a lot of sluggish bits. So, we’ve made huge strides here.

First, Karina optimized the browse to load way faster!

And! We’ve added boopy-boopy fadey-fadey things to transition between pages! It all feels so much smoother.

I know there is a technical term for all of this, but we just call them boopies and fadies because that’s what they should be called. If the whole dev and design world would just start calling things by their real, logical names, we lay folk would be able to participate better in conversations! We know all about whoosh-woosh, pew-pew-fast, and slidey buttons.

Help us, help you.

In Other news:

Shelby HATES meetings:

Marcin tried to get tickets to a Justin Timberlake concert in Poland:

Karina moved apartments again, so Earl had to wear his chastity belt.

Didn’t stop them from trying…

And Karina found a Vercel (← word I def understand…) of Chill Subs waaaay back when she first started. → https://chill-subs.vercel.app/

And that’s it. You’re up to date.

Yes, Forbes, we await your interview request.

Welcome back to the “sensitive Karina” column!

If I think about it (and if you read my piece on not submitting to lit mags, you know), a lot of my anxiety comes from the impostor syndrome and thinking too much. The constant stupid fear that I’m not doing enough or not doing the right, smartest thing, that the people I work with must be angry with me for a million reasons, that I suck as a leader, and that tomorrow I’ll google “Chill Subs” and will find an article like “You thought Chill Subs is a great website? Here are 10 reasons why you were wrong and should stop using them right now”

But apart from that, there are very strong objective reasons that come from the uncertainty of not having a constant place to live and not having enough money to support the lifestyle that made me the most alive (=going to a lot of concerts…) I love traveling, but I don’t think I’m the nomad type (though it would have been easier if I could pick places to live lol) I love having a home base too much. I’m also a hoarder and I like to have a place to store useless shit that means something to me. And so not having that puts the extra pressure.

So yeah, it’s intense over here. But I figured instead of just whining, I’m going to share a few things that help me not go insane and weather the storm. Here we go!

1. Learning to say no… (and in my specific case, not releasing website updates at the end of the work day/week)

People pleasing makes me agree to all sorts of things I shouldn’t agree to. Like saying “Yes, sure!” when the team asks me if the new update will be ready by Friday to go in the newsletter.

If it’s ready, everyone will be excited and no one will think I’m working slow or not committed enough or anything. It’ll give me a few days where I’ll be more or less sure that everyone is pleased with me! (until it resets when something new comes along)

[For you Instagram people, I saw a great reel a few days ago] (yes, I’m that person who thinks you hate me if you’re texting with a dot and don’t use emojis)

But…wait for it. It’s a trap. Because here’s what happens:

• I stay out late the whole week trying to finish the update. Don’t do the things I love outside work that energize me and so ultimately turn into an angry tired blob of stiff muscles

• In the end, I’m able to pull it off at 10 pm on Friday, text everyone IT’S READY, LET’S SEND THE NEWSLETTER!

  We send it out, I go to bed, and then on Saturday I wake up to messages from people saying something is broken

• The next few days I’m sad and embarrassed

🤡🤡🤡

So nothing good.

For some reason, it’s hard for me to soak in that there’s no need to have an announcement in every newsletter.

• People won’t unsubscribe if we just say “Hi everyone, this week we just did our best. Hope you’re good, bye!”

• My team won’t say that I let them down. Whenever I’m brave enough to say “No, it won’t be ready, let’s move the release to next week”, everyone agrees and says that they thought about it too, and I have this surprised Pikachu face like “wtf, we could do that?!?!”

• And the website will feel only better as it won’t receive untested updates right before the person responsible for them fucks off into the sunset (bed)

Soo what you can take from it if you’re not releasing website updates: just constantly paying attention to what’s comfortable to you in the moment and learning to say no if it doesn’t. Of course, occasionally the situation might call for some intense sprint, but that shit is not sustainable.

More often than not, you’ll find that people are absolutely fine with it. And if not, well they’re probably assholes.

2. Not checking mail outside of work hours and not being logged in on mobile

Disclaimer: this really only works for me thanks to two things:

1. I have Ben who can handle more stress than me and notify me when there’s something urgent

2. That first point about not releasing stuff before bed/weekend. If I don’t upload anything to the site before logging off, it’s more likely that everything will be stable while I’m away

But really, this is a deal breaker for me. Checking email used to be the very first thing I did when I opened my eyes. And so the amount of times I had a horrible start to the day was ridiculous. My whole state for the day depended on whether I got a scary message when I woke up or not.

Those could be:

• “THIS DOESN’T WORK WHY DOESN’T YOUR SITE WORK YOU SUCK”

• “HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THAT PERSON/MAGAZINE DID? DEAL WITH THIS RIGHT NOW!”

• “WHY DID YOU RENAME YOURSELF TO SUB CLUB THIS IS SO CONFUSING”

Wow good morning!

Same thing with evenings. I stopped working, but then the work somehow continued when I received a notification about some noncritical bug and wanted to fix it ASAP. And then it was midnight and I didn’t understand what the fuck happened.

But then two things happened:

1. Once I suddenly got logged out from work mail on mobile. I didn’t realize at first until I noticed that I’ve been feeling better lately (hmmm) So I keep being logged out. It’s especially good when I’m away and don’t have my laptop with me and get some notification and then feel horrible for not being able to act right away. But this is useless. There’s nothing I can do, so I can just spend that time…not worrying.

2. After the vacation in January, I felt super committed to protecting that inner peace so stopped checking mail outside work hours completely. Now I only open email after I have my breakfast, spend time with my morning thoughts, and now sit at the desk.

And, to my surprise, most of the time I discover that the world didn’t end. Wow.

But one of the things I want to do this year is set up more monitoring for the website to be notified on a separate email address whenever some critical stuff happens.

3. Informing the team about what’s going on

I started sending end-of-day updates to our Slack dev channel. The goal is to make it a whole dev team practice, but it helps even if it’s just for my brain

This way I’m letting everyone know the current state of things and reducing the probability of someone asking me “sooo how is it going?” in the middle of the day (that makes me sweat 3000 times and also distracts from work)

Then every Monday we also started sending a list of things we’re aiming to accomplish this week so that everyone knows the goals and also your workload.

4. Spending time with myself

This year I brought back my morning writing routine. I realized I was too tired at the end of the day to do more than mindlessly play guitar or watch TV, and morning writing also worked great for me 3 years ago (and really brought me to sharing my work and also starting Chill Subs)

So now I have breakfast, then set a timer for 1 hour, and write whatever is on my mind (in January I needed to write lyrics for 3 songs, and then this month I want to write more blog posts about stuff I learn while building Chill Subs)

And then when I’m done, I already feel so much better about my day and ready for 8 hours of changing the lit world!

I also finish working at 7 pm (unless I really want to finish something before tomorrow, then it’s 8 but this one is a hard cutoff)

It’s working wonders and helps me feel like my life is not just Chill Subs. It was hard to allow myself this because hey, it’s my company, and “proper startup people” think about their project 24/7, and I also have 5 other people working full-time with me now and it’s a lot of responsibility.

But really, it makes working on Chill Subs so much easier and more fun instead of being something I’m sick of.

5. Not checking the feed on socials

This one came easy to me even before Chill Subs. The only place I’m on is Instagram and I’m mostly watching stories from my friends now and that’s it. Sometimes I go directly to pages of creators I love and check out what they’ve been up to. But scrolling the whole feed is just a horrible experience for me.

I know, I know, networking and blah and blah. But that shit is exhausting and often leads me to question what the hell I’m doing with my life and “oh maybe I should try what this person is doing!” (no I shouldn’t. I’m ME)

I’m a big believer in just making something genuinely cool first. It’s so much easier to promote something cool if you ever want to. Chill Subs basically promotes itself. (ok not really, it’s a constant effort from 6 people and then other people who help these 6 people AND YOU! YOU READING AND TALKING ABOUT US. what I mean is just it’s so much easier because we don’t have to make up bullshit about how good Chill Subs is, kidnap you, and make your whole family signup otherwise we’ll cut your toe off. we ARE good)

A nice Instagram post will make you feel good for like what, 5 minutes? Quality work will make you feel good for a lifetime cause you’ll be proud of what you’re doing and be more confident that other people will love it too.

Honorable mentions:

• Cats. I mean…

• TV shows: my weird brain always thinks I need to do something productive as hell even when I rest, but I’ve finally allowed myself to just watch a show in the evening and sometimes during lunchtime. Cause hell, you need to relax! Although I need to try to get into fiction cause I think it should have a similar effect (I’ve been mostly reading nonfiction and song lyrics all my life)

• Exercising is fantastic but I abandoned it during all the moves and couldn’t get back to it yet. Stretching works for me now though!

• Going to a favorite cafe always helps too. I don’t know, I guess it’s easier to freak out at home haha. But when I’m drinking a nice cup of (decaf) coffee and my favorite music is playing and there are people around, I just feel better and more relaxed.

I love being around people. It’s exhausting for me to interact with them too much, but just sitting near someone who is also working on something or just chatting about life with their friend is good for me.

I also just feel more alive this way rather than living outside the city, barely leaving the house and just constantly being in my own bubble. It all feels like one neverending day where you’re overworked and tired of your own thoughts. So GO OUT

Bonus: because I’m not alone on this mountain of stress, here are a few words from everyone on how they deal with it:

Ben: Ibuprofen and screaming into a pillow.

Shelby: I take the Instagram app off of my phone on the weekend. Since our socials are my job, it’s impossible to disconnect from work if I leave it on there.

I didn’t want to do this originally because it seemed like a pain in the ass to sign in again each time I re-download - but turns out it signs you back in automatically!

I mark deleting it as my last “to do” on Fridays and re-installing as my first “to do” on Mondays. [This way I’ll actually do it]

Nikita: I stumbled upon a silly quote somewhere on the internet. It looked something like ‘Create work that fulfills you, regardless of whether anyone else sees it’. Which echoes the title of one of my favorite books: ‘Work and Love’ by Tove Jansson. Since overworking is inevitable I’m doing my best to adapt and adopt a mindset that keeps me inspired rather than feel like a Sisyphus (a.k.a. dung beetle).

What else:

1. Exercise every day
2. Read/watch/listen the good stuff
3. Act silly to make my partner laugh
4. No twitter. Ever

Kailey

Stepping away from my desk for at least fifteen minutes. Or if I have more time, leaving the house all together. Taking a drive, a trip to the gym or yoga class or even to grab something at the grocery store. Being in the world and out of my little CS x WOD cave reminds me that my never ending to do list can’t actually grow teeth and swallow me.

So that’s it! 

I’d love to hear about your anxieties and coping mechanisms too, so go leave that comment.

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When my brother was a freshman in high school he decided to join ski club. On day one, he went up the mountain, came down, fell, and broke his wrist.

One year later, not deterred, my brother rejoined ski club. On day one, he went up the mountain, came down, fell, and broke both his wrists.

I'd like to end this story with something inspirational. Like, "And then he went up a third time and now he's in the Olympics!"

No, my mom had to help him pee for three months, and he never skied again.

This is the kind of energy we have at Chill Subs. We go up. We come down. We fall. Shit breaks. Up we get.

I don't think this is usually how a business is run. I think it's because so many businesses build behind closed doors. Heck, I don't even know who owns half the companies in indie lit, and I'm a snoop.

But this is changing. There is a new trend called, "Building in Public." I'm pretty sure it's the business world's version of shirtless mirror pics at the gym. Essentially, it's saying, "Here. This is everything we're doing. All the skeletons. All the broken wrists."

It means being transparent with operations, open with finances, clear about our goals.

So, what have we been building lately?

Well, we transitioned from a C-Corp to an LLC because C-Corp sounds evil. Also, it turns out C-Corps are mostly for when you want to dress your business up in skimpy clothes, walk it to a street corner and wave at fancy cars hoping for a ride. Investors seem awful and the more we looked into the types of shares you have to give them, the more awful it seemed.

So we chose to be poor for two years, rope two of our friends into the business, and get married. Like a normal business!

So, now we are a multi-person LLC — get this, we're officially called Write or Die Magazine now. Cause we're broke we tried to cut corners as much as possible (while still paying an absurdly expensive and professional lawyer because we're not doing this shit twice—uh, I mean, three times!) so since part of all this was Kailey legally merging with us, she already had an LLC.

The other part was those two we roped into our party, Shelby & Nikita. They are co-owners too now! Yay! So there are five of us total running things with skin in the game — Karina: Boss ass dev, Kailey: Write or Die (and like, a million other things), Shelby: Social Media & Marketing, and Nikita to make us look fly as hell. And I do this...uh, words. And I still shout at Karina all the time with whacked-out ideas because that's never going to end.

Now we have a really cool chat in slack called 'admin.' So, yeah. You know. Cool.

Speaking of Slack. Marcin wanted to try Slack premium so he clicked the popup and now we have Slack Premium for a month.

The main perk of this is that it gives you the full history of all your chats. So, of course, I decided to go and search the names for all of the folks on our core team to see who gets pestered the most (usually when we need them to do something). Let's see:

• Shelby - 319

• Ben - 391

• Marcin - 459

• Kailey - 564

• Karina - 1061

• Nikita - 1521

Poor Nikita. It's okay, those are mostly catcalls.

Ooo how about everyone's first public message ever?

Poor Nikita. If only he knew the consequences of that message.

What else?

Karina and Marcin are working on something called “refactoring” — I can’t be certain but I think that has something to do with extracting oil from the ground with chemicals.

Nikita has been making unbelievably cool artwork for our latest venture for Write or Die — write or die 101. If you haven’t checked that out, you can here:

Write or Die 101

New workshop. New instructor. Every month. Forever. — An educational experiment for writers.

By Kailey Brennan DelloRusso

I’m also teaching a full 12 lesson course on submitting to lit mags throughout the month of February. You can learn about it here:

Write or Die 101

Sorry For the Inconvenience — A Submitter's Guide To Lit Mags

Welcome to WoD101’s first workshop! This Substack is designed to offer one new course to writers every month with a new instructor. It is an experiment in making educational content for writers more accessible. We hope you like it, and invite you to learn more…

Read more

2 years ago · 93 likes · 53 comments · Benjamin Davis

I’ve been using loom to make some mini tutorials throughout and they have this auto-title thing that happens when it saves a video. It really can’t accept that our business is called Chill Subs:

Oh well, the course is going super well so far! Lots of great feedback. Also, hopefully it can pay for our lawyer. We looked at our contract and realized they charge $450 an hour. AN HOUR! He makes our monthly salary in 3 hours…oh god. Why didn’t we make a database for lawyers.

KARINA! I have an idea!

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Want to know the secret to the social media shitstorm?

Be privileged enough to hire someone else to do it.

Can’t do that? Neither could Ben and Karina, that's how I got my job (;

I’m Shelby, Chill Subs & Write or Die’s Social Media Girl. I joined the team when CS was 8 months old, my qualifications being that I’m Ben’s girlfriend and have a smartphone.

Those things weren’t gonna get me far, so I hard launched into learning everything I could about social media. After taking various courses and burning through gurus I began to notice some repetition in the advice;

1. Post 5 stories a day.

2. Get on tik-tok.

3. Buy my E-book. 

This isn’t bad advice, but it's not how we grew. I’m too self-conscious for tik-tok and we don’t have enough to say to post 5x a day. Maybe the good stuff was in the E-book I was too cheap to buy. 

Regardless, it irks me that most social media advice is useless if you don’t plan on becoming an influencer. There are way more people using these platforms like my dad than Kylie Jenner. Where is the advice for them? 

That's why I wrote my E-book…… kidding. It’s why I made today's post, hope it helps.

If you are a magazine/business/someone who is looking to build a personal brand through creating informative social media content, read all of these tips.

If you’re a writer/creator/person who wants to be show up casually but as effectively as possible, you’ll mainly get value from the tips with *stars next to them. 

*1. I’m going to be selfish 

And tell you to optimize your bio and your damn username. So often I go to tag a writer and spend forever scouring screen names, only to find out that the brilliant poet who’s words brought me to my knees’ username is sugarkitten95 -_-

Unfortunately not everyone will spend the time looking and you’ll miss out on exposure and opportunities to engage with new audiences, so just give it a little love. 

This is the best guide for doing this I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of guides.

2. Your hook/title is 90% of it

The hook is what gets people in, the first 3 sentences get them invested, and connection and sunken time keep them reading.

Recipe for an effective hook:

• Start with a number

• Make it super easy to understand (shouldn’t require context)

• Use sexy adjectives

• Address a pain point

• Plainly state a benefit

Something like ‘10 tiny tweaks that had a massive impact on our social media growth’

3. NEVER save the best for last

Ok hooks all set, now let's talk about those first 3 sentences. 

Start off with your best stuff first. Naturally people are going to think “there's more where that came from” and feel motivated to keep reading if you start with something good.

Same thing happens when you put something shitty first, they will think “there's more where that came from” and click away.

Bread crumbing IS a technique you can use where you lead people to the final slide to get the good stuff, but this only works if the content along the way is also engaging. 

*4. The biggest social media booster that almost everyone ignores 

Is engagement. Divvy up your allotted time between engaging and posting. Getting your content in front of people is hard because there are many accounts and Instagram's search mechanisms suck. 

When you comment on posts in your niche, you support fellow creators and put yourself in front of their(and your)audience. THE COMMENTS HAVE TO BE GENUINE THOUGH <3

Why it works: People only read comment sections when they are interested in a topic. When they see an interesting comment with a niche relevant username, they're likely to check out that profile.

When they’re met at the door with your great content - boom.

*5. A plug and play 15 minute engagement routine 

• Reply to every comment and dm.

• Thank everyone who shares your stuff. 

• Leave one GENUINE comment a day on a post within your sphere that resonates - Think of this comment as micro-content: Make a joke or share a tip.

This comment from Karina makes me laugh every time - but there’s a little lesson here:

AT LEAST 14 people saw this comment.

Let's say writing 1 comment a day put you in front of 14 new people, if you did this 365 times you’d land in front of 5,110 faces that are interested in what you’re doing.

*6. The best advice ever (for real) 

When I first started building our socials and had no clue where to start, Ben gave me a piece of advice that changed my life.“Find people that do things well, figure out what it is that makes what they’re doing good, and apply those same techniques to what you’re doing” 

I did that and it worked. Every time I found myself enjoying someone's content, I figured out why.

I kept revisiting Kalypsodesigns page because the slides evoked the same feeling Apple products do. I reasoned that if he knew to create that feeling then he understood how to capture people’s attention. I wasn’t about to rip off his signature design, but I did observe how he taught concepts through storytelling in a simplified way and I figured out how to bring that onto our feed. 

I found myself frequently caught by the hooks on the covers of sugarpunchmarketing’s carousels and loved that the advice that followed was equally as interesting. I felt respected as a reader and vowed to do that for our folks too. 

“The artist is a collector… Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.” 

- Steal Like An Artist (PS EVERY CREATIVE HUMAN SHOULD READ THIS BOOK) 

7. If you don’t wanna read it neither will they

This isn’t my advice actually, I don’t remember where I heard it but it's good. Basically it was “If you, the writer, the person who has more vested interest in the piece more than anyone else can’t be bothered to finish reading through it, no one else is going to.” Oof. Stings but it's true. 

Any content we post gets at least 2 read throughs and nothing publishes till I can read it cover to cover without venturing off into thoughts about what kind of dog I would be or if the stanley cup is worth the money.

To deliver a delightful scrolling experience prioritize…

8. Readability over style every time

If you have to make any sort of effort to make out what something says - fix it. Change the font, colors or make it bigger.

9. “Why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick” - Kevin Malone 

If trying to share lots of words, try not to make the writing take up more than half the page. Less words will make people read longer, which will end up delivering your point better than if you used more words for a thorough description. 

I struggle with this cuz I think everything I have to say is important, it's not.

When this does happen to be the case, the best results come from dividing the content into multiple posts or a series.

*10. If you take one thing from this post please god make it this

Social media is overly saturated and bad for us. If you’re a writer, creator, magazine whatever the fuck and you find yourself discouraged/too burnt out to work on the your actual project because trying to promote it on social media is a full time job I strongly urge you to do this: 

Turn your socials pages into landing pages. There's a million ways to do this and there is no shame in it. Spend a month building these up, then just post whenever you can. No schedule, no pressure, nothing. 

You’ll likely find yourself showing up MORE because things feel manageable. I can make a followup post about how to do this if you want, just please PLEASE don’t let social media steal your joy.

Let’s circle back to privilege 

Chill Subs is naturally easy to promote. The database is useful, there is name recognition and I swear to god the people in this community will go above and beyond to help you out because they know how shit it feels to pour your heart into something and have people ignore it.

Also I’m not doing this alone. There are pieces of all of us in our posts, words from Karina, Ben, Kailey, ridiculously talented contributors the list goes on and on, and they are beautifully packaged by Nikita, a brilliant designer and even better friend. 

We’ve had selfless people with strong social media presences such as lilith noah give us a hand and magazines constantly hype us up.  Sometimes I feel like my position may actually be tits on a bull because our community just takes our  content and runs with it. 

The real secret to social media is fucking luck.1  

Okay, now I gotta do my thing. FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA ⬇️

• Submitting advice & opportunities: Chill Subs Instagram

• Writing memes & motivation: Write or Die Instagram

• Industry discussions & updates: Chill Subs Twitter

• Published works & magazine updates: WoD Twitter

• If you prefer facebook: Chill Subs Facebook / Write or Die Facebook

Hi, it’s our 2-year birthday on Saturday, and I’m just a tiny bit emotional (how has it been two years already?!)

So I thought the most appropriate post for this week would be some Chill Subs history, which includes a lot of people, places, ideas of different levels of success, and, of course, FEELS.

Enjoy.

1. January 2022 - THE BEGINNING

That’s the story I had to repeat over and over to the point where I started thinking about imagining a completely different ridiculous story just for fun. Like that I was meditating on a mountain in Italy or something and some unknown force told me to help writers get published.

But no, that’s not how it happened.

How it happened was my husband and I moved to Poland in December 2021. We spent a week quarantining in a small studio apartment in Gdansk, then spent $200 on COVID tests that were luckily negative and we were finally free to explore the holiday season city. I found a couple of bars that locals claimed to be a must-visit and made my husband go for a walk with me (he’d rather stay home and work) (who am I kidding, me too)

We got our beers and started discussing startup ideas, cause we’re both developers and that’s what we do. Here:

I caught myself thinking that all my ideas revolved around having a searchable database of some sort. Searching people, searching beers, searching concerts. And then I realized that I already had a database! It was my ugly spreadsheet of lit mags I had started a couple of months ago to research the whole indie lit world and how to get published! Okaaaay.

So on the way home, I was taking drunk notes until my hand almost fell off cause it was like -10°C (14°F).

Here’s the very first note, it was kinda boring but had the essence:

Then I came home and went completely bonkers with ideas and made a giant note with everything that really became Chill Subs in two weeks.

And this, friends, is the very first UI prototype:

The code name for this whole thing was Lit Mag Finder (thank god I knew the name had to be cooler)

Then I sent Veronica from Bullshit Lit some screenshots to check it out (this was super helpful to keep the drive going and also for spreading the word later cause I didn’t have any Twitter followers)

And then, THE ANNOUNCEMENT. Holy shit that was crazy.

This was us celebrating to Parks and Rec.

And the rest is history! (which you will now know more of)

2. April 2022 - Ben

In April, some dude started sending me these ridiculously long (but super exciting) emails with praise and ideas. They were amazingly reassuring and helpful, but I have this horrible habit where I don’t reply to messages until I’m ready to really think about it and give it the attention it deserves.

So I always replied in like two weeks. Then he emailed back with another awesome email.

Here’s A PART OF the very first one:

This lasted for about two months until I thought what the hell, let’s just do this together. If this guy stuck with me through my fantastic emailing habits, he’s gonna stick through all of it.

And he did! Man, I don’t know a person who got their shit together more than Ben. And even if he doesn’t, he sure knows how to make it seem like it.

Thank you Becky!

3. May 2022 - Quitting freelance

I’m gonna build this thing! It needs my full attention! Fuck the client, I’ll learn to earn money with chill subs!

But my client is a very persistent fellow, so the next Monday after I texted I quit, he was like “So, Karina, here are this week’s tasks!”

Took a few weeks of ghosting him till he got the message (was totally worth it)

4. October 2022 - UK startup visa (kinda)

So I always wanted to move to the UK or the US. Then in 2022 I found this UK startup visa program and thought ok. I’m gonna try to apply to this once Chill Subs is stronger. Then Ben came on board and said he was up for it too. And so we created a whole ass business plan and a pitch deck that was designed by Ben’s friend Nikita.

I even took the IELTS English exam and we had all the requirements ready.

And then in October right before thinking to finally apply we chickened out. The thing is, you need to get an endorsement first, either from a university if you’re a student (so much easier) or typically from some startup incubator. And here it’s either by giving up some equity or paying like $20,000.

We didn’t have any money (lol still don’t) and we didn’t want investors (this wasn’t the first time we said no to them, that summer there was also this rich guy who wanted to basically buy Chill Subs), and even if we magically got the endorsement some other way, we didn’t want the pressure of living in an expensive country not knowing how to make money yet.

Soo we thought ok, let’s figure out this part first! And so opened a company in the US and started planning the money stuff.

(By the way, my English exam expires in September 2024 and I still haven’t used it and I feel like an idiot, help)

5. January 2023 - Nikita and Shelby

Luckily, Ben has a lot of talented friends who are also okay with being broke for a while if they’re doing something cool.

So it was just a matter of time before they joined… Well, Shelby kinda had no choice. She moved across the globe to live in one-room apartments with Ben who talks about Chill Subs 24/7 so she might as well do this too.

And they’re killing it.

6. Winter 2023 - “Let’s merge with Write or Die”

I remember I was sitting in a cafe drinking one of my last coffees (I quit more than a year ago) when I got a message from Ben saying he wanted to pitch something to Kailey (who initially invited us to her online party for an interview and we thought she was fun so we started thinking of ways to collab)

Ben’s reasoning was basically “Well she’s like us and she’s not an asshole and she has the writing community while we are both bad at this so why grow apart when we can grow together”

And so a couple of boring and terrifying lawyer meetings later, we did!

7. February 2023 - fuck you Poland

Got rejected Polish residency again and we didn’t have a strong enough case to reapply cause our income was even less than in 2022 so had to plan to leave till August.

I could keep fighting this, but that would mean being stuck in Poland for longer and not being able to leave the country and I was tired. So a small sabotaging part of me thought “Well fuck it, I’m gonna finally travel somewhere again!”

8. April 2023 - coming back to freelance

Sooo I ran out of money.

To compensate for my limited availability we decided to hire another developer, and that’s where Marcin comes into the picture! I found him on like page 90 on LinkedIn because I never give up (on having a headache while browsing search results).

And thank god he had a sense of humor and was killing it with silly memes the moment I invited him to the Slack channel. Vibe check - done!

9. May 2023 - money, we started earning money!

Write or Die merge was announced, our confusing Sub Club membership was announced, and sandwich recipes were shared. The future was bright!

10. July 2023 - moving

Left Poland, came to Istanbul to recharge at my mom’s for a bit, thought we’d live there for at least 3 months (that’s the limit if you don’t get residency), but it took about 10 minutes of remembering what it’s like to live with my mother to open Airbnb and book an apartment in...another country.

Now, I wouldn’t have done this if Ben hadn’t constantly told me to come to Georgia while he, Shelby and Nikita were there. At first, I was stuck in Poland and then just wasn’t sure what to do. But there in that very moment, it was perfectly clear. Thanks mom!

So this gave us 3 months of real-life Chill Subs coworking! And knowing that I’d get the fuck out of Turkey soon allowed me to enjoy it more!

And there’s a lot to enjoy. Mostly, food. Like this one:

Or this 3 dollar smoothie the size of my head

Or the fact that this can be your workplace

And of course, CATS.

Yes, I needed all this very much. Being stuck in Poland for more than a year wasn’t fun.

11. August 2023 - CHILL SUBS RETREAT

When I knew I’d be in Turkey, we immediately decided to book a Chill Subs retreat there, cause fuck, we deserved it! At that point we had been earning money for like 3 months and didn’t use it on anything other than services, Marcin’s salary, and paying writers.

And soooo. WE SAW EACH OTHER’S FEET!

I know, I know. You don’t even see our feet here. But we didn’t take better photos and it’s also reserved for people who see us in real life.

That was a dream come true and definitely cemented the whole feeling of it being the real thing. Gosh, we were a team sitting in a room discussing plans and shit!

(Speaking of, this was a 3-day planning session for the upcoming 3 months. It was hot and very exhausting but we were so happy to be together that we didn’t care)

12. September 2023 - priorities and salaries

I fell asleep twice during the day while my to-do list kept piling up and honestly, I didn’t care about anything at that point. (whenever I’m stressed, I just shut down and avoid everything I can avoid)

Then Ben texted me and we discussed wtf and we needed to do something about it so the next day Ben, Shelby, Nikita and I came together to talk about our feelings and things we needed to do/have to feel better.

That’s when we realized we probably had enough money to start paying ourselves enough to cover our mostly Eastern European rent, and so even though it was a lot less than I had with my client for way less work, I could finally leave and focus on Chill Subs again. And also this meant normal weekends. Saturday and Sunday! Wow.

We also decided to take things slower and not rush to make decisions we’ll later regret or make promises that would make us stressed and fuck with our schedule. (still learning)

13. Nov 2023 - who are we

In any company’s lifetime, there comes a point when you talk about who the hell you are (bRaNd ImAgE and VALUE PROPOSITION). That was our time.

Like obviously we knew what we were doing (kind of). But it felt like we weren’t on the same page about what our core message and strengths and voice were.

That’s when we met again and basically convinced Nikita to bring back the fucks and the fun text on the home page.

Kidding, not just this. But this is all you need to know. This was a very useful meeting.

14. Dec 31, 2023 - “I gave it a shot”

“your website sucks too many bugs you should relaunch and probably with a different name”

RUDE. But there’s some truth in it. We spent most of 2023 learning to survive managing a growing startup with very limited resources and also changing places of living, so that resulted in neglecting some parts that really needed our attention.

That’s why we decided to spend the next two months not developing anything new and just improving what we already have to not give someone a reason to send us mean messages on New Year’s Eve (thank god I didn’t check the email that day, I swear I would have spent the whole night crying to my husband and begging him to sit and fix bugs with me)

Final word

If I had to describe each Chill Subs year in only a few words, I think this would be:

- 2022 - WOW THIS IS SO FUN ALSO AM I FAMOUS

- 2023 - OOF MONEY!?! people, growing pains

- 2024 (hopefully) - having our shit together, no longer looking like kitten Earl every day

P.S. If you want to buy us a present and help us on this journey of being able to afford not just rent but maybe even FOOD (we’re not picky, we can eat eggs every day), here’s what you can do. Head over to our website and try out some of the things we created for premium & supporter members:

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One of the best things about running Write or Die over the last five years has, hands down, been the people I’ve met. Connecting with authors during interviews, direct messages on social media, out-of-the-blue inquiries that morph into conversations about writing or the literary life. 

Looking at Write or Die Magazine’s editorial team now, we all started this way. Shelby, our associate editor, DMed me on Instagram in 2019. She started regularly contributing to Write or Die, conducting interviews and writing features. We chatted about writing, of course, and she introduced me to a number of people in her circle who later supported WOD or worked with us in some way. Brittany cold-emailed me about teaching opportunities in 2022, back before we had a full-fledged workshop platform, and she was the first instructor to kick off a WOD workshop.  

I met Tamar, our fiction editor, in a WOD novel writing group and the two of us bonded over being accountability partners.

Whenever I have any frustrations about the internet and technology (you know, those days when you wanna throw your phone across the room), I remember this. I would never have met these generous, kind-hearted, brilliant women without their willingness to make a connection out of nowhere. 

As we welcome a new year, I thought it would be fun to ask the editorial staff of Write or Die Magazine some questions about the editor’s process and what we hope to publish this year. Here is a behind-the-scenes look: what's to come, how we manage submissions, and what makes us a kick-ass team (if I do say so myself). 

Shelby and the Art of Deep Connections 

When it comes to our editorial process for creative nonfiction, Shelby has a deep appreciation for essays that provide new learning experiences.

“I love getting to peek inside someone else’s brain and see how they make connections between things. It’s really exciting to read work from people who are experts at something I’m not. The best is when I get to read an essay that makes me feel like I’ve learned something new by the end (whether it’s about how Strongman Competitions relate to writing or what it’s like ghostwriting romance novels as a woman of color).” 

Our magazine has a very collaborative approach to editing and Shelby has been pleasantly surprised by writers’ openness to rework their pieces. 

“I’ve accepted essays and pitches that I was totally riveted by on a conceptual level, but that I thought could go deeper in some way,” she said. “ If I accept a piece, I don’t expect a writer to totally rework it, but I will share my questions, and let them interpret them how they want on the page. I am always nervous to suggest to a writer that they explore something more thoroughly in their work, especially because sometimes this means writing more about themselves and that can be a vulnerable thing to do, so when a writer is willing to take that on, I feel like I am getting to witness something special.” 

At the start of 2024, we changed up our submission flow, which will make it easier for our submitters to get their work to us. We have also been able to offer more money to those we accept, thanks to the ridiculous amount of support we received last year from all of our readers! And because publish one essay a week, “we really get to spend time working with writers to get it to the point where they feel absolutely satisfied with what they’ve created,” said Shelby. 

So, what does Shelby hope to see more of in 2024? She never really knows until you send it. 

“The best essays we’ve accepted were essays I wouldn’t have imagined until they showed up in my email. I am drawn to work that is both personal and critical. I’m also really nosy, so I like getting an inside look into spaces and institutions that I’ve never been invited to. If someone is an insider or knows something really niche about writing/publishing/etc. I always want to read what they have to write.” 

Breaking down our fiction submission process with Tamar and Suzanne 

When Write or Die first opened for fiction submission in February of 2023 (before the Chill Subs merge), Tamar was the sole editor and only reader.

“It was exciting to read through so many incredible pieces,” Tamar said. Our first acceptance was  “Like Saline and Sugar,” by Suzane Grove. “I knew I’d found something extra special. I was immersed in the character’s lives immediately. And Suzanne is so skilled when it comes to tension and making each sentence count.” 

Our audience grew substantially when we reopened for fiction in October of 2023, post Chill Subs merge, so I knew Tamar would need help managing submissions. Of course, we never anticipated the amount we actually ended up receiving. Tamar and I were thrilled, to say the least.

And we were also so happy we had asked Suzanne if she was interested in coming aboard. “I knew I wanted her on my team and was delighted when she said yes,” said Tamar.  “Suzanne is so gifted as an editor. It’s truly a joy to work with her and to have her in my corner as a writer friend as well.” 

With a fiction team of two, Tamar and Suzanne have accepted three fiction pieces so far (read them here. The third will be posted at the end of the month!) We will reopen on February 1st and stay open until the beginning of April.

Before Tamar reads any of our submissions, Suzanne narrows her picks down to a bundle that Tamar reads through each month. Here is a little look into her process: 

“One of my goals as a fiction editor is to usher new, diverse voices into the literary landscape. I always want to have the sense that no one else could tell this specific story in this specific way. That sense of individual voice and style shines through in the best pieces. Anything I pass along to Tamar possesses this quality. Then, I’m always seeking tension, even from line to line. I like to think of tension as the space between what your characters want and the achievement of those desires. Also: attention to detail and a unique way of seeing the world, sharp characterization, stakes, momentum.” 

Tamar then makes her selection, sends out her acceptance email (yay!), and works with the writer to make any edits. She also sends the accepted writer an interview questionnaire which we post on the day of the fiction publication. Tamar’s questions poke at the creative process and unravel how our selected story came to be. Showcasing our writers, in all genres we publish, is so important to us as a magazine, and we hope our readers love these Fiction Spotlight interviews as much as we do. 

As we prepare to reopen for fiction submissions very soon, I asked Tamar what she hoped to see coming in this year. 

“I am looking for stories that surprise me in some way. I think writers do their best to tie up all loose ends in a story, but I don’t mind when there’s a bit of suspense and unanswered questions. I love stories that leave me wondering—ones with a deep emotional depth. I like endings that are open-ended enough to stay with me for a while. I’m also really interested in setting - when place plays a distinct part in the story. I love it when the setting breathes life into what’s happening on the page.” 

Suzanne, on the other hand, has a thing for opening lines. 

“That moment when I—not just as an editor, but as a reader—am transported into the world of the story. I truly believe we undergo a transformation when we read, and we’re never the same person by the time we finish,” she said. “I feel so full of anticipation when I open a new submission, waiting for an image, emotion, thought, or action to interrupt the status quo of my regular life. You can feel it, can’t you? When you cross that threshold. I believe the best openings combine a question or mystery, character, tension, and emotion. It’s like a puzzle. I love it.” 

Rejection is also on our minds as editors. We get it. We have been there. We have received what feels like thousands of rejections, too. We don’t take sending out each “no” lightly. 

“As a writer myself, I’m learning that rejection is just redirection,” said Tamar. “Every single time I read a story, my hope is to say “yes.” When I do say no, I do my best to encourage the writer. Rejections are hard, especially when you get so many of them for one piece. I truly believe that every story has a place. It’s not if. It’s when. When it lands in the right editor’s hands, it will be accepted. We as editors can tell when a piece has been revised and sharpened. We know how much of ourselves we pour into our work. We know. We know. So keep going. Keep submitting. Each rejection is just a redirection to another magazine. Soon, your piece will find its home.” 

Brittany wants to reimagine the author's interview 

As the latest edition to our team,  Shelby and I were thrilled when Brittany accepted our invitation to help us work through Shelby’s author interview load. Interviews have been the longest-standing publication since Write or Die’s 2018 genesis —we’ve published over 250 of them—and we want our conversations to stand out and dive deep into the creative process. We don’t want to be robotic when it comes to the questions we are asking authors. Neither does Brittany.

“I love getting weird with other writers,” she said.  “Like when I interviewed E.J. Koh, she was willing to talk about transcendental art and didn’t even bat an eyelash. I thrive on these refreshing conversations and I think that writers do too, as we all want to feel connected not only to the stories and memoirs we read, but to the people who are sitting at desks, just like us, writing them.  People are always looking for more literary community, and I think that one way we can have more of this is to keep having more dimensional conversations about art.” 

Brittany will be conducting monthly interviews with writers this year as well as dropping a new series we will be posting in our Write or Die newsletter. We will have more details soon, but this is what Brittany can share now: 

“I’m super excited to recreate the 90’s vibe of interview style quickfire questions for some of the authors we’ll be featuring this year.  More to come on this later, but once again, this is a departure from the traditional (and boring!) Q&A that’s been the norm for so long.  We live in an age where writers are posting what they eat for breakfast just as much as they’re posting about writing, and I think readers are curious about an author’s real life in that they want to get to know the person behind the book.” 

So, want to pitch us? Shelby has always emphasized her interest in featuring books by debut authors and/or books published by indie presses. Here is what Brittany is hoping to see from interview pitches in 2024: 

“Truly anything except, “What was the inspiration behind the book?”  No, but seriously, I want innovative interviews.  I want questions that dive deeper than the traditional publication press we’ve all read over and over again.  I don’t want to know what the best piece of writing advice someone ever received was.  I want to know what an author puts on their hot dogs.  I want to know what a “failed” day of writing looks like; what “success” looks like.  I want personal, personality, the REAL stuff!”

As the creator of Write or Die Magazine, it makes me a little emotional when I think about this team—this group of amazing writers who donate their time to make this the best magazine we can. It's been a long journey, and there have been a lot of mistakes, fumbles, and wtf moments, but overall, we continue to grow. We continue to receive amazing work from diverse and talented writers. We continue to make connections. 

With our 2024 plan on lock (well, as locked as it can be), we can’t wait to read your work and publish your words. 

To close, here is a little advice from Suzanne for submitting to any of our open genres. Dont skip — it's good: 

“Lean into your weirdness. Lean into your interests. Read and read and read to gain a sense of what you like and don’t like, but never feel like you have to follow certain rules or imitate anyone to get published. It’s the smallest details and differences that will truly make your work stand out.”

Happy New Year!

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There are some things you can predict while running a business. Taxes will happen. Subscriber rates will plateau. That sort of thing. 500 people trying to sell drugs on our website wasn't one of them.

We got tipped off when google sent us the month’s top 3 growing queries for ‘Chill Subs’

And so we checked our most recently created profiles aaaand:

We felt like that teenager in the car who finds out someone has cocaine on them and simply starts FREAKING OUT because what if the cops come? How might we possibly explain, "Officer, no, no, we're just selling literary magazines!"

We must have passed some internet threshold where the drug dealers start to pay attention.

And honestly, I don't really blame them. Like, if you came to me and said, "So, I've got this group of people who deal with chronic rejection, imposter syndrome, and need to focus on a single task for long periods of time. How can I help them?"

My first thought would be, "...drugs?"

Thankfully, Karina caught it, deleted them all and wrote a script to deal with the situation:

We’ve discussed preemptively adding, “Kidneys for sale” and “Hand Jobs Near You,” but honestly, we’re out of our depth. So we’ve contacted our login service for help.

In the meantime, this all may have contributed to our Slack stats which Karina was kind enough to provide in our last team meeting:

Which reminds me of my ongoing argument with Nikita about how much I swear in our copy. And since I write most everything for our Sub Club Newsletter, Nikita pulled some trump card bullshit:

What else?

Well, business daddy went on to bigger and better things in the fall so we now have a Money Mamma. Her name is Joanne, she is our accountant. She is the best. She had a call with us, and after we all logged off and said, “I want her to be my mom.”

Nikita made a before and after we started learning about what taxes are…

before:

after:

*No, idk why we’re on a rock wall in a forest.

This was our chat after Joanne sorted all of our quickbooks out and calculated our tax liabilities for 2023

She answered every question we had about taxes and not going to accidental money prison (a lot of questions). Seriously, if we could give anyone starting a business any advice it would be to START with a good lawyer and good accountant. It cost us a lot of “Oh, Fuck” money to fix up a year of being like, “Uhhh, what to we do with this 300 page document the government wants?”

Turns out “Ask Reddit,” was the wrong answer. BUT! We have both now. Paul and Joanne. We actually changed from a c-corp to an LLC in the past month because it turned out being a c-corp was really only for those who want to sell pieces of their soul bit-by-bit to cardboard cutouts of Peter Thiel.

In other news, our data analyst advisor has earned an achievement award for his 100th sigh of exasperation.

…

and so on.

Jacob, who is helping us out with optimizing the website is almost done. So the website will be much speedier soon. Gosh, on new years eve somebody sent a super mean email about our website being slow. Like, on the day with the most parades, you couldn’t find a single other one to rain on?

But that’s kind of our curse. Chill Subs has grown so much. I mean, we’re even attracting all of those cool drug dealer kids (that’s how you know you’ve made it). But we are still a super small team with no funding and one back end dev. Heck, can’t win ‘em all.

We’ve got loads and loads of scary plans for 2024. Learned a lot from 2023.

Hmm, what else?

Nikita & Karina were on vacay for two weeks

Nikita got sick

Marcin got sick

Shelby got a tooth infection

Marcin and Shelby had teeth removed.

Karina and her husband adopted a new cat.

Their name is Screamy:

Earl was so happy!

hm, looks like somebody has been using Chill Subs.

Shel and I recently moved from our home in Mtskheta, Georgia to a little town in the south of Portugal because we're little babies who hate the cold. The thing we miss most is the absurd number of cats that used to live around our little cabin. Our two favorites were a pair of cross-eyed brother sister twins named Fuckhead and Shovelface. They were always coming in, jumping on the counter, crawling into bed with us and by the end it felt like they were our cats. But there were loads of others. Bed Shitter (who you know), Nipple Sucker, Handsome Red, Meow-Fuck, Meow-Fuck's Brother, Mini Charlie, Skinny Charlie, Orange Cat, Carpet, LinkedIn, Little Red (RIP), Tumor Cat (RIP), and Little Black Cat (RIP). (We learned very quickly that nature gives precisely 0 fucks about which cats we liked and killed indiscriminately.)1

Anyway, thinking about these cats and how much we miss them, remembering how Fuckhead and Shovelface would always insist on being the center of attention, I realized that Karina and I are the Fuckhead and Shovelface of Chill Subs.

So, today I wanted to talk about the LinkedIns, the Carpets, the Nipple Suckers, Meow-Fucks, and Orange Cats who have helped us out along the way. You know Kailey, Shel, & Nikita pretty well. And yes, Nikita is LinkedIn.

But there is also Marcin, Miley, Willem, Art, Zach, Jacob, Erica and more.

Marcin is our second developer who, with an egregiously discounted salary is the highest paid Chill Subs employee. We found him on the 129th page of a LinkedIn Job search. When you go to Chill Subs and see all of Nikita's beautiful designs flowing together, that's a lot of Marcin's handywork. Every day he gets better and better and one of out main reasons for growing Chill Subs is to prevent Marcin from outgrowing us.

Mariam - Mariam is the artist who illustrates everything for Chill Subs. She is brilliant and fabulous and we've all become good friends after moving to Georgia (where Mariam is from).

Miley & Willem - These two saviors started out as interns who offered to help us out over the summer and have slowly but surely become a part of our team working as researchers. They founded a lit mag this year too! Concord Ridge

Shelby, Tamar, Brittany, and Suzanne, Kailey’s editorial team for Write or Die who have been straight-up killing it. It makes us so-so proud to be married to this beautiful magazine.

Sean was our business daddy who was an enormous help getting Chill Subs off the ground by advising us on everything from taxes to filing all of those random documents we didn’t understand (and still don’t).

Mikita helped us manage our database for 7 months before going off to start his own hiking business in Poland. He was brilliant and we miss him.

Zach is a data engineer and analyst and grown adult human with very reasonable goals who constantly has to tell us, “Woah…woah……woah, hold on.” And then we get organized and he does some incredible work with spreadsheets and pythons and is helping us get our room cleaned up and installing shelves for all of our bullshit.

Art is a designer and developer who created the Rejection Whisperer and worked with us for months to help develop our tools. He has been a valuable source of expertise and kept our wacky ideas in check, guiding us toward creating the tools you see on Chill Subs in a way that best serves writers.

Erica is a new addition to our team from Australia who has volunteered to help us out with revamping our indie press listings.

Jacob is a dev and writer who answered one of our calls for help and came in at a huge discount to help us optimize our browse…you know, the main thing we offer that was getting slower and slower with more and more users. He is migrating us to new (multiple) servers and doing a load of stuff I don’t understand to make our whole website faster in 2024.

Andrea Firth from Brevity has helped us loads with beta testing tools, writing guest posts and advising us on our workshops.

Becky Tuch - From the beginning Becky has been a huge help and is the reason Karina and I met. She puts out endlessly valuable content on her Substack Lit Mag News

Erik Harper Klass from Submitit Now has advised us on so many different aspects of the submissions process when we weren’t sure. He is a damn expert on everything from craft analysis to the minutia of proper formatting.

Shannan & Karan - The editors of ONLY POEMS who have helped us with guest posts, feedback, formatting, and any weird little question we have only about seventeen times a day.

Andy Brown, the editor of Scrawl Place has advised us several times about industry-related stuff and advised us on tools we’re building for editors.

Barbara from the Baltimore Review has given us loads of advice and helped with beta tools, finding time while running one of our favorite lit mags in the indie space.

Conor was our longest running volunteer who helped build our database with us.

Kyril! Karina’s husband who is a hella-experienced developer and professional bug finder who helps us out in so many ways I can’t even begin to list.

And none of this would be possible without our mascot:

I am 100% sure I forgot some people here. There are too many who’ve done so much for us, it is overwhelming. It probably is little consolation since I remembered a dumpster fire but not you…so, sorry.

Thank you to everyone (even the rude ones) who email us when something gets buggy or we get something wrong with our data.

Thank you to everyone who likes, shares, and subscribes to receive the content we create. And, of course, thank you to those who are able to support us financially. So many of us work for free or with very small salaries to keep Chill Subs going. Every penny goes toward making it a reality,

And thank you to everyone’s parents for going through the trouble of raising decent people in an increasingly indecent world who would grow up to help our little project succeed. Or if you’re a decent human in spite of having real shit parents then fuck your parents. You’re the best and they didn’t deserve you.

Hell, thank you for just being here.

If you’d like to support us in 2024, the best way is through our Premium or Supporter Tiers on our website. We’ll be developing loads of useful tools AND beautifully designed customizable new Writer Portfolio and Profiles to make writer websites a thing of the past with their outrageous fees and over-kill features. That’s priority # 1 this spring for writers with our submissions manager, Slushpile, as priority # 1 for editors. All of this costs time and money, so if you have the means, we greatly appreciate it.

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Formatting your writing to submit to literary magazines is a hassle. Want to know a secret? I don't know why it exists. Somebody knows, I'm sure. That somebody is not me. If it were up to me, we'd all be pasting our work into text boxes to submit. But that doesn't change the reality. Lots of editors care. 

The basics of it are straightforward. Usually, people want Times New Roman, one-inch margins, double-spaced (bare minimum). Others add a word count to the top right-hand corner, name in the top left, headers, page numbers, title halfway down the page, and so on.

I do not write my work into documents formatted this way. I write my work in snippets through sixteen drafts on Apple Notes, all saved as "MOST RECENT DRAFT" and at the bottom of weekly to-do lists. Then, twice a year, I muster up the motivation to organize them to submit. It's fun.

Not properly formatting a submission is a shit way to get rejected. So, we have created an automatic prose formatter to make this headache a thing of the past.

First, we developed a Submitter's Passport for writers to save their identifying information to be included at the top of properly formatted submissions. This was the easy part. 

As the cheerleader of this whole operation, I understand nothing about the complexity of coding things. When I have an idea for something, I have no clue whether Karina will say, "Oh, I can do that in 30 seconds," or, "That takes six years and a team of trained goats to create." In the case of the formatter, this was somewhere in between. So, we enlisted the help of Art, a fellow developer, designer, and writer, and we got to work seeing how we might build this thing.

The first step was setting a standard. There are magazines that request Ariel font. Others want a bio pasted into the document, and others want your identifying information in the header of every page. It would be impossible to account for every outlier's specifications. So, we had to figure out a "most of the time" format. Lucky for us, we have a database of 3000 magazines and years of experience submitting our work. We quickly determined the best, most detailed, "most of the time" format out there was laid out by William Shunn. It says right there at the top, "Welcome to the manuscript formatting guide that more users trust—and more editors recommend—than any other."

He's not wrong. (Though we are still having an anxious debate about whether to tab the first line in a story)

Okay, so we needed to create a user-friendly portal to get the writer's work from a jumbled mess to a cleanly formatted submission-ready doc in as few steps as possible.

I'll turn this over to Karina to talk about all the troubles and dev nonsense on this journey.

[KARINA TALK] <- (actual note from the draft of this doc)

The initial version of the formatter was created around late spring when I randomly decided to secretly code a user cabinet prototype in one day to surprise Ben. Surprise went well, for about two days he only spoke in “OOOOOO”s and “FUUUUUUCK”s.

After we learned to speak normally again, we got to work.

That first version of it managed to spit out a document with all the contact and story details in place, but this definitely wasn’t a ready to submit document yet, it was more like “OOO OKAY THIS COULD ACTUALLY WORK”. And then Art helped us make it into something that almost worked and we released a beta!

Still, a lot was wrong with it. Mainly, it didn’t support bold, italics, and indentation. For this, we needed to add a normal editor, but this is only half the problem. The output of these kinds of editors is in the HTML format, and the library that we’re using for formatting provides only plain text formatting for free. To format HTML content, you need to buy a module for $500 a year. Ok, we thought this was worth it (look at us being rich like that). Reached out to the company, got a trial for two months.

Got to work again.

Then we thought it was almost ready for the real release before we realized it absolutely wasn’t. The document had weird empty lines, some blocks looked different from how a writer would normally create them, our address input wasn’t exactly right, and like a dozen other small things.

And then Art had an emergency and had to step away and I had the absolute pleasure of finishing this! When I mean pleasure, I mean stuff like this:

Oh wow, goosebumps.

And so, after another month of tweaking, asking people we know to try it out and paying $500 - we’re finally here! We really hope you like it, please like it. It’s actually really useful. It’s magic! Except created by very real humans (us)

[NIKITA TALK] <- (and again!)

We started with a simple form—basic bricks with labels. Users entered their info, pasted text, and downloaded. However, the process lacked clarity; the interface didn't show what the final result would be. It felt like working without a clear view. Then Art suggested a solution: masking the interface to resemble the final product. It's akin to typing in a Google Doc while formatting seamlessly happens. We've made strides with what we have, and your feedback can help us improve further!

Calm down, Nikita.

(Clearly Nikita and Karina have the same personalities…)

You know, before working with dev & design, as a regular old internet user, I used to think stuff on the internet just happened. Like, a tool like this popped into existence and was just…there. You know, like how houses just appear or cars drive themselves off the assembly line. But no. At the end of the day, this thing took 5 months to build. That’s like…more than half a baby.

We learned a lot from this process. It’s given us perspective on the real scope of what it takes to create a fully functioning tool. It takes butt loads of time, testing, design, dev, and MONEY. God, fuck money.

When we started, we were like, “OK, formatting sucks. How has nobody made a tool to help writers with this?” And now we know. In this day and age, spending five months solving a small problem for a limited number of people is simply not financially viable.

But we’re doing it anyway.

Because, fuck it.

If you want to support us in this tragic comedy that we love so very much, you can sign up as a premium member on our website to use this formatter. If you sign up as a supporter ($10/m) you can use our beta tools which is really-really cool when paired with the formatter because you can save your work to your drive. Then on the formatter just select a piece and click download.

I cannot wait for this to be a fully released feature sometime in the next 2-13 months!

I’ve known about JOTM for years, but I don’t live anywhere for more than a few months so I was never able to sign up. Recently I reached out to ask her to share her insights after spending years and years collecting, reading, and distributing literary magazines. In a change up from our usual guest post, below you’ll find my full interview with her along with her fun spin on my request for some recommendations of lit mags. I love the idea of literary magazines being studied in classrooms by young writers. Gosh, I wish I had instructors like that when I was young. I think too often people assume what they’ll find in literary magazines is going to resemble the works they read from long-dead writers in high school. Contemporary writers. Writing as it is today. That’s a beautiful, massive amount of value, I think only literary magazines can provide. Jenn says it so well:

Literary magazines are art for art’s sake. Some may earn out, but that’s not their primary goal. They capture a mercurial, ephemeral slice of contemporary culture reflected in words. They are a writer’s first curated audience, a student’s first teaching tool about editing, and an editor’s bouquet of the best way to explain who we are. That’s special.

Fuck yes.

She also went ahead and created superlatives for some of her favorite lit mags (an idea we’re totally going to run with more in the future). It ties in nicely with our Best Lit Mags of 2023 countdown going on in our Sub Club Newsletter. Tomorrow is the top 5! Check it out after you’re done reading this.

Interview with Jenn from Journal of the Month!

Can you tell our readers what Journal of the Month is? 

Journal of the Month is an inspiration delivery service. We drop shiny, hot-off-the-presses beautiful lit mags on your doorstep as frequently as you like. 

How does it work?

When you sign up for a subscription, you tell us how often you’d like to get lit mags -- once a month, once every other month, or once a quarter -- and how many lit mags in total you’d like. So, if you sign up for a 6-issue subscription with a frequency of every other month, you can expect inspiration for an entire year, arriving at 2-month intervals and no more often than that. 

I came up with the frequencies to address what I thought of as the New Yorker problem, back when the New Yorker existed in print only. You loved it so much that you read it only when you could read all of it, which was never. So it stacked up on your bedside table, an ever-growing source of guilt and self-loathing. If the New Yorker could come once every three months, I would have had a whole different personality (and have been better informed).

So that’s it. You always receive a current, print lit mag that includes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and you’ll never receive the same lit mag twice. When you sign up, you can opt out of 3 lit mags from our list, but that’s as close as you can come to influencing our selection process. You never know which lit mag is coming your way and we like that. Who doesn’t love surprises?

There’s one restriction: subscribers must live in the US. We are not set up for international deliveries, unfortunately. We used to deliver to Canada, but the recent rate increases knocked us out of the market. 

How did you come up with the idea, and how did you get it off the ground?

After I became an MFA, I’d spend hours at a bookstore, reading through the lit mag section to get a flavor for who was publishing what. At AWP, I’d meet editors, attend lit mag readings, flip through pages, and leave with the sense that I didn’t want to subscribe to one lit mag: I wanted to subscribe to them all. I created JOTM so that I could.

So I started with the lit mags I knew I liked. I approached editors at AWP, explained my idea, and asked if they wanted in. What surprised me most was how open and trusting most editors are. There’s a real entrepreneurial spirit among them. At the time, I hadn’t considered how many of them were also literary entrepreneurs, having started their own lit mags eons ago. When I’d describe my process to them, which involved them sending issues to a list of subscribers before I’d pay them, they agreed to do it. I was floored. How did they know I wasn’t a lit mag swindler?

It didn’t take long for the tables to turn-- for editors to offer their lit mags to me for my consideration. My table at AWP was inundated. My suitcase home was packed to the gills and so heavy. I received many more lit mags than I could read. I was a new mom, juggling parenthood, writing, and JOTM, as well as sending my writing out to lit mags for publication. But now I was also being put in a position to accept or reject lit mags for my service. It was thrilling and terrifying, but so empowering. What gave me the clout to reject them? It was my service, so I made the rules. I culled my favorites.

Has it just been you trucking along or do you have others who help out with the day to day? Is there a day-to-day?

No day-to-day. It’s just my husband and me. He coded the site and handles the bookkeeping and legal aspects of running a small company. I’m do the outreach. I communicate with editors about scheduling and mailings as well as with the instructors about journal selection and timing. Marketing falls into my camp, too, but other than teaching classes or moderating panels about literary magazines, I’m not too fond of marketing. JOTM finds subscribers and instructors largely through word of mouth. 

How do you choose the magazines you send out? I noticed you've hit somewhat of a sweet spot. There is no "New Yorker" or "Paris Review" or "Harper's" in there. There also aren't too many new lesser known magazines. Instead you have a lot of well-regarded but not "in the public eye" type magazines. Where did you draw the line on both sides? 

Thanks--I’m proud of my list. I seek literary journals that are strong, solid, and important. The writing they publish is artistically intriguing. Taken as a whole, each issue is a vital example of our cultural moment and has staying power as does the journal itself. Some journals on my list are more established, which just means that many more people already know what I know about them and have for a long time. But the whole point of running a service like this is to find journals that people may not yet know. They sign up because they want to find new favorites. So I introduce them to mine.

I’d take The Paris Review, but not the others you mention because, even though they are impressive publications that publish some creative work, they aren’t literary journals. They are funded by advertising and must adhere to market demands, which makes them an entirely different animal. Literary magazines are art for art’s sake. Some may earn out, but that’s not their primary goal. They capture a mercurial, ephemeral slice of contemporary culture reflected in words. They are a writer’s first curated audience, a student’s first teaching tool about editing, and an editor’s bouquet of the best way to explain who we are. That’s special.

I noticed The Gettysburg Review is on your list this year. How do you feel about what went down there? Is it the first time something like this has happened for a magazine in your collection? 

It’s heartbreaking. A huge loss for the literary world. Not only is it a stunning literary magazine, the editorial staff is an extraordinary gem. I wrote a protest letter to the college president as so many others did. Gettysburg is a popular choice among the instructors who teach from JOTM journals in their graduate and undergraduate classes, and I asked them to describe their experience to the college president as well. As a writer, I’ve aspired to see my work in Gettysburg’s pages, having received countless rejections and I’m devastated that now I never will. This is not the first major JOTM journal to discontinue. We lost Tin House as well as Creative Nonfiction, which was available to our classroom program only. It’s crushing.

Earlier this year, upstreet folded under very different circumstances. The editor, founder, and driving artistic and logistical engine behind the journal, Vivian Dorsel, died in late 2021. Her son Mike finished the current issue-in-progress in the months after her death, and I had the opportunity to work with him in this final act of devotion. We corresponded quite a bit as he navigated the final assembly of the issue and production schedule -- publishing was clearly not his professional expertise -- and I was struck by how honoring his mom’s work in this hands-on way might help him process his grief. It felt like a great privilege to witness and support his efforts. I hope the subscribers who received the issue, which had an editor’s note from Mike, found it as meaningful as I do.

How closely do you work with the editors of these magazines? You have this line in the education section, " If you’d like, you can video conference with editors from those journals as well." So I assume there is an ongoing connection.

How well I know an editor depends. As a writer who attended local events and national conferences, I’d had the opportunity to meet some editors long before I began Journal of the Month 11 years ago, and nothing beats an IRL foundation on which to build a relationship. Some journals are run by a rotating staff of graduate students and those are the toughest to get to know well. But I do correspond with editors several times throughout the year to work out logistics and catch up on any changes in their organization or mine. 

Journal of the Month is successful because when unexpected difficulties arise, we are nimble. We have to be. Because, as some great once proposed, “the only predictable thing in life is its unpredictability.” When an editorial office has been shuttered for a hurricane, a paper shortage delays production, or another unexpected incident prevents the mailing of issues, I ask other editors to pitch in. That’s a remarkably forgiving side effect of our service design: no one knows which literary journal they were supposed to receive and have no idea when a behind-the-scenes switcheroo has saved the day. Thankfully, editors are heroically communal in nature and always come to the rescue. Those experiences are bonding.

But your question specifically refers to our classroom program where an instructor -- usually of a graduate or undergraduate writing or publishing class, although I’ve supported high school instructors as well -- select four literary journals to use as a primary text in their class. 

Editors of nearly all our journals are available for class-wide video conferences. I hear about those conferences from the editors, instructors, and, when I’ve run into them at AWP, students. They are a love fest! It’s fascinating for students to study a journal - develop a sense of the brand and how it’s represented in visuals and language - and then ask the creator of that brand how it came to be. They love hearing about the editorial process and being introduced to the undeniable fact that editors are humans, not simply gatekeepers. Nothing feels more rewarding to an editor than to arrive in a class that knows and values your work enough to ask insightful questions about its origins. Some instructors teach the same journals term after term in part to expose their students to their favorite inspiring editors. 

You have two types of subscriptions on the website: subscribers and instructors. Which is more common?

We offer individual subscriptions and classroom subscriptions. A writer might buy herself a 12-issue monthly delivery of literary journals--that’s our most popular form of subscription. Individual subscriptions are also given as birthday gifts, holiday gifts, valentine’s day gifts, graduation gifts, etc. Recently a congregation bought a 24-issue subscription for their pastor. 

We also run the aforementioned classroom program where an instructor designs a 4-issue subscription purchased by the students in their class and used as the primary text for lessons on writing or journal-making. I created this program when an instructor asked me if I would. She wanted flexibility and control. She needed to receive the first batch of issues before students arrived so she could adequately prep but also late enough so that they didn’t have to pay for journals if they dropped during add/drop. We worked it out. That flexibility is baked in the program design for every instructor.

Some instructors love this program. Classes benefit from passionate discussions, energized by living literature, which feels more malleable and relatable to students than materials in a text book do. Instructors benefit from being able to read cutting edge lit mags as part of their job, lit mags that are given to them for free as part of the program. Another bonus? They can develop relationships with editors and feel great about how their class is supporting literary institutions they prize. Students get exposed to editing as a profession and some feel empowered to introduce themselves a AWP to the editors they’ve met over zoom. A student once told me that she had work coming out in a journal she studied in a previous year. Winning all around.

But this program is not for everyone. I’ve worked with about 75 instructors through the years. An instructor might see one lit journal as they develop their curriculum, but there will be 3 others coming. Teaching from lit mags is a deep act of faith, faith that the lit mags will deliver maerial appropriate for the lessons they plan to teach. You can see how teaching the same set of stories year after year is the less risky move, but JOTM instructors aren’t motivated by risk aversion. They want to be surprised and influenced by what a lit mag will present to them. The die-hards return term after term, using the program for as long as they are teaching and when they leave, they convinced their replacement teachers to use it, too.

OK, and you have this bit, "Our subscribers include new writers, graduates of MFA programs, professional writers in need of a dose of inspiration, teachers and good-old, die-hard lovers of literature." If you had to cut that up into approximate percentages, what would they be? The reason I ask is because to target an audience, you'd have to first understand what that audience is made up of. 

You ask a good question of a person with a product to sell. Who is your audience? With a follow up question then being -- how do you reach them? This is the question I asked of the magazine in which I paid for advertising the one time I did that. It’s sound marketing practice.

Aside from that one advertising opportunity and hosting a table at AWP, I don’t fund marketing or advertising. For one, JOTM is a small operation that brings in very little money. It’s a passion project, an act of literary advocacy. 

Maybe that’s an elaborate justification for the fact that, as much as I respect marketers, I am not one of them. I don’t enjoy that kind of work and my time goes to other work that gives back more to me. So I don’t collect meaningful demographics on our subscribers or site visitors. People find JOTM through search engines, word of mouth, and articles like this one.

I think it's safe to say that the number one struggle for many editors is to find readers. It seems for JOTM that is your singular goal, so how do you do it? What methods or resources have you used that a magazine might model themselves after?

Again, I appreciate your question, but I’m not a marketer. What I bring to the lit journal world isn’t marketing mojo. Instead I try to use my access to editors as a way to elevate the experiences of writers.

Before I give presentations, I field editors with questions, like what do they want writers to know but can’t directly tell them? About five years ago, I moderated a panel of editors for a networking group for writers of color, and before I did, I asked non-participating editors if they had any questions for the writers in the audience as well. After the panel, several editors who couldn’t be present for it asked what nuggets I had learned. A few articles emerged from that experience: I wrote one as an interview focused on writers and another a feature that focused on editors about how literary journals cultivate inclusive practices. That’s an example of the ways I hope to influence literary journals.

If you're comfortable providing some numbers, I think people would love to know what happens to work they have published in these magazines. Often, they see an announcement, get some congratulations, and it fades. But with JOTM, if you get a story in one of these magazines, how many people are reading it? Learning from it?

You’ll need to check in with the lit mags themselves for their circulation numbers. Over the 11 years I’ve run JOTM, we’ve distributed about 30,000 literary journals to about 5,000 subscribers. 

Can you break down a bit why you think literary magazines are a great tool for instructors?

There are so many ways to answer this question. I’m going to pull info from marketing emails that I’ve sent in the past.

Instructor Testimonials

On Class Discussions:

"During JOTM discussion sessions students were very vocal; more so than in any of our other discussions this semester! On delivery days, I was greeted with excited ooohs and ahhhs."

-- Amanda Rybin Koob from the University of Michigan

On Literary Citizenship:

"After using JOTM as the textbook for my mid-level poetry workshop, each student discovered a journal they love, many became literary magazine subscribers, and all came to realize “these journals, the modern vessels of contemporary writing, survive within our small sphere by our assistance" (student quote)."

-- Andrea Spofford from Austin Peay State University

In Publishing Classes

“When I inherited this class, one of the first things I noticed is that, even though students were enthusiastic about producing a literary journal, none of them had read one. As a class bonding exercise, students evaluate pieces from JOTM journals as though they were submitted to our journal.  In terrific, productive discussions about the merits of the writing as well as the visual aesthetics, students develop the analytical skills they will apply as editors of our journal.”

-- Shannon Olson from St. Cloud State University

In Writing Classes for Non-Majors

“Each student reported on a different work from a JOTM issue, and from that assignment, students started to make sense of these pieces as a part of a larger, single product—making thematic links, tracking possible reasons for the choices the editors made, the layout, the variety and similarities of the pieces, their order, etc. Talking through their observations, they developed new insights into the complex editing process that goes into taking disparate pieces and shaping them into a cohesive product.” 

-- David Armstrong from the University of the Incarnate Word

What Video Conferencing with Editors Adds:

"Every editor was generous with their time, and the process was really easy. My students prepared questions ahead of time and as the semester went on, they became more familiar with journals and editorial processes and their questions became better and better."

--Andrea Spofford From Austin Peay State University

“The sign-up process is organized and easy to follow. The magazines arrived like clockwork. It was so so easy and painless to add this to my syllabus. Also, the editors our class interviewed were the soul of courtesy and kindness, and what they had to say was interesting.”

-- Katrina Vandenberg from Hamline University

The Complete Picture:

"My grad students have already expressed hope that I will do this again next spring! It was a great way to bring together craft and professional development. We talked about what made poems work, we talked about differences in tastes, but they also found journals that were potential places to send work."

-- Morgan Frank from the University of Southern Mississippi

Here are assignments based on lit mags that wouldn’t be as feasible without them:

Incorporate literary magazines and use this as your lesson plan:

1. What do the stories in this literary magazine have in common in terms of subject matter and style, but also structure, tense, and point of view? What kind of poems would never be published here?
   Assignment: Students present an analysis of a different manuscript from the same literary magazine, and as a class, they define the brand and culture of it.

2. How do literary magazines differ? Develop critical thinking skills while “reading as a writer.”
   Assignment: Students write a review of a literary magazine, then get it published in The Review Review or New Pages. You can compile the reviews in a class wiki that serves as a publishing resource.

3. What subjects and styles characterize the writing from your class? How might a literary magazine reflect that aesthetic in, for example, the style of the table of contents, the inclusion of visual genres, the order of the manuscripts, the cover art, and the typeface?
   Assignment: Design a literary magazine for the writing in your class that uses production elements reflective of your class aesthetic.

4. Explore why literary magazines are important to writers and readers.
   Assignment: Each student prepares one question for a class-wide video conference with an editor from a mag you’ve studied. Topics range from the process of editing and book-building to the profession of editor.

5. Teach the life cycle: you write; you revise; you publish, your work gets taught in classes. With wealth and fame off the table, consider reasons for writing.
   Assignment: Students submit writing to 3 literary magazines.

You can learn more about Journal of the Month on their website.

Journal of the Month’s Lit Mag Superlatives

Most Likely to Publish Unsolicited Submissions: Missouri Review

Why? Because 100% of the writing they publish arrives exactly the same way yours does: unsolicited, through the public submissions portal. This egalitarian approach puts your writing on equal footing with the greats--no reputation, however prominent, can swing open a backdoor-- relying on the scrappy merits of the writing itself to earn the right to appear in their pages.

Best Professionally Funded: VQR

VQR is the shape and size of a literary journal with the budget and professional staff of a mainstream glossy magazine. You’ll find poetry and fiction in each issue, although VQR earns its tagline as a national magazine for the largely reported articles and essays written by writers who might be paid to do on-site research, an impossibility for most literary journals.

Most Beloved By Writing Students: Booth

Not sure if it’s the flashy design or the quirky tone, but students devour and defend Booth like no other literary journal. Are they responding to what editor Robert Stapleton and his staff coined “boothiness?” When considering manuscripts for publication, Stapleton seeks the dynamic combination of strong concept, execution, and gravitas. Student readers love it.

Most Likely to Appear in Best American Essays 2023: New England Review

I did the math. Not only are two essays featured in the anthology itself, I counted seven NER essays in the “Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction” in the back. Additional NER essays and stories were honored in the 2023 Pushcart Prizes, Best American Stories, and Best American Science and Nature Writing and the O’Henry Winners, too. NER wins 2023’s literary MVP award!

Most Selected By JOTM Instructors in the 2020s: Ecotone

Writing and publishing instructors who rely on Journal of the Month to provide literary journals as the source materials for their lessons select Ecotone, a literary journal with a hankering for place-based literature. Do they find the journal to have particularly teachable stories, essays, and poems? Or do the editors provide enlightening class-wide video conferences? Probably it’s a combination of the two.

Best Visuals: F(r)iction

Do you know f(r)iction, a literary journal that publishes “the new, the weird, and the unconventional” with an emphasis on speculative fiction, poetry, and essays? Open an issue and you’ll be struck by the captivating artwork. Each published manuscript is accompanied by images designed specifically for it. These books are gorgeous!

Most Likely to Be Missed: Gettysburg Review

Announced in the early fall, Gettysburg Review shocked us with the terrible reveal of its cessation. The last issue is currently on preorder. Another giant felled. 

Most Likely to Take a Chance on a Literary Entrepreneur: Harvard Review

HR was the first literary magazine to join Journal of the Month. Editor Christina Thompson didn’t need much convincing. She liked the idea from the start and offered to introduce me to other editors from my list of hopefuls. I was so grateful and continue to be.

Most Likely to Feature Voices You Didn’t Know You Needed to Know: The Common

With a previous feature on Kuwaiti fiction and a current portfolio of by immigrant, seasonal, and migrant farmer workers, The Common collects the writing of writers who are not traditionally marginalized but entirely off the radar of most US-produced literary journals. These themed issues transport us to vast communities across the globe, enriching our understanding with their explorations into “a modern sense of place.”