How To Get Spoon Fed By Howard Dean in a Bunny Costume (Twice)

And other insights on becoming one of the most-read Substacks in the indie-lit world.

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We’re happy to introduce our first guest writer, Becky Tuch, without whom Karina & I would never have met. Becky founded & writes the long-needed Lit Mag News, a Substack reporting on all of the goings-on in the literary industry and unapologetically advocating on behalf of writers everywhere. 

As much as this newsletter is about sharing our story & insights, we also want to elevate the stories of others who have found new ways to make a living in the creative sphere. Who better to kick things off with than the person who inspired us?

Nobody, that’s who. 

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In 2008, I had the sudden and wild idea to launch a website dedicated to all things lit mag. I’m not kidding when I say this idea was sudden. One minute I was standing over a table, taking down a customer’s order at the restaurant where I worked, the next minute I was in the server station, shouting to everyone around me that what the world needed was a site for literary magazine reviews.

I’m sure you can imagine the enthusiasm this pronouncement received among my co-workers. But it didn’t matter. I was enthused. More than that: I was possessed.

I spent the next few weeks talking to anyone I could, finding ways to tap into the expertise of everyone in my circle. My friend who knew about software development told me about Drupal websites. Another friend who knew the book business encouraged me to reach out to journal editors for “review copies.” (I had not known that was a thing.) My visual artist friends helped me with graphic design, my business-savvy friends suggested cheap places for business cards, my website-savvy friends talked me through domain names and hosting plans.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without support from the literary community. That year I attended AWP, and every single editor I talked to about the project met my enthusiasm with excitement of their own, often handing me a free journal right there on the spot. I chatted for an especially long time with the friendly folks at New Pages, Casey and Denise Hill, who have been in the lit mag reviewing game longer than anyone. Though I was encroaching on their territory somewhat, they were warmly welcoming and offered great advice.

Later, in fact, Denise and Casey would be among the first to reach out to me after one editor publicly lambasted me over a review I wrote of his magazine and went on to make a cartoon of me being spoon-fed by Howard Dean dressed up as a bunny.)

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Occasional frictions with editors aside, running the site was a deeply rewarding experience. In a little over a decade, I posted reviews of hundreds of literary magazines, interviews with hundreds of lit mag editors, hundreds of pages of publishing and craft advice, with the occasional piece “blowing up” and generating all kinds of exciting conversations. The site also contained a searchable database of over one-thousand lit mags (not unlike Chill Subs!). There were also classified listings announcing calls for submission and writing contests.

In 2010 I also started a newsletter for the site. At first, this was just a way to reach out to other writers and editors to let them know of new reviews and interviews that had been posted. But soon I started including little bits of news from other magazines. Gradually, I started adding more news and little by little added more of my own voice, which in turn gave the website more personality, which in turn fostered deeper relationships with readers.

Now, I know I’ve been invited here to talk about my current project. But all this is important backstory because it kind of sets up the next thing.

At some point, in spite of all the ways the site was enriching, I felt I just could not, really should not, continue. I think every person who invests in any kind of start-up faces this moment at least once. You recognize that you need to grow the site, which could mean doing a costly upgrade, taking on hired help, working harder to promote it, spending even more time with it, and so on. Or you have to walk away.

A lot of lit mags have been going under lately, which is something I cover in Lit Mag News (my current newsletter) regularly. This trend is certainly concerning. But it’s also important to remember that lit mags are both continually launching and going under. They have a natural boom and bust cycle. It makes sense. Editors coming out of MFA programs or who are new to the literary scene want to maintain or build that community, keep their networks and interests alive. Then they get older. Attentions shift, priorities change.

Obviously, that’s not everyone’s story. But it’s pretty much mine. In 2015 I had a baby. I continued to work on The Review Review. But I could feel myself pulling away from it more and more.

Here’s the other thing that lit mag editors may relate to: So much of making a literary start-up is extremely un-literary. There are website glitches to deal with, work tasks to assign, finances to keep track of, inquiries to reply to, advertisers to solicit, interns or employees to coordinate with, content to upload or remove, documents to mail, stamps to buy, checks to write, posts to schedule, etc etc.

All this is manageable, exciting even, when you’re in the first blush of passion for the project. But once the mundane tasks begin to outweigh the creative work, once you find yourself asking, Why am I doing this?, again and again, once you notice yourself going weeks without responding to people you once would have done cartwheels over a message from, once it all just feels like a giant headache and you see that there’s so much more you want to achieve as an artist while your free time is increasingly getting vacuumed up into the vortex of life’s demands, well, then, my advice, not that you asked for it, but if you find yourself here, I’d say it’s time to walk away from the machine.

At least, that’s what I did. In 2019 I sold the site to a university.

I thought I was done with this sort of thing forever.

Then, in 2020, I felt a familiar itch.

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I don’t know what it is that draws people to entrepreneurial endeavors. Sometimes I think it’s hubris, a refusal to take orders from anyone but oneself. Other times I think it’s a spiritual restlessness. Sometimes I wonder if it’s impatience, a yearning for instant gratification that can’t be found through the long, slow process of trying to publish one’s writing.

Or hell, maybe it’s just really freaking fun.

Quite possibly, it’s even genetic. As an interesting sidenote, my maternal grandfather lifted his entire family out of post-Depression-era poverty by launching his own magazine. The subject was flooring, a magazine perfectly timed for a new generation of post-war families who would start investing in and upgrading their homes. As my mother frequently likes to point out to me, “Of course you’re interested in magazine publishing. It’s in your blood!”

Anyway, one feature of The Review Review that I always enjoyed was writing the newsletter. When that itch to do another project returned, I posed the question on Twitter—“Should I resurrect my Review Review newsletter?”

I was, well, floored, by the immediate support and enthusiasm.

So I went forward with it. And I’m so happy I did.

My Substack, Lit Mag News, now provides a bi-weekly roundup of all the news in the lit mag world, a weekly column with perspectives on publishing, a weekend “community and conversations” thread where we gab and laugh and blow off steam about all things related to lit mags, a monthly Lit Mag Reading Club, an interview series with live editor interviews that are all mostly free and open to the public to attend, and monthly info sessions for writers.

This time around, though, it feels different. Substack has an incredibly easy interface. Rarely do I have to deal with site glitches. When I do, their support team is ready and available. This allows writers to not have to focus on any of the technical features, and really just think about the writing.

No, not just the writing. Also: the readers.

That’s another thing that Substack offers, the ease of connection with readers. I cannot express how much I adore my readers. I have been consistently and wonderfully surprised by the conversations that develop around pieces I post, the range of perspectives people bring, the huge variety of experience both in the literary world and the world at large, the thoughtfulness, care, humor and just general support people show in the discussion threads. Is it possible to be in love with over 6,000 people? Sometimes I really think I am.

Going back to the question of why we do this, for me, this is, of course, the reason. You do it to reach people. You do it to feel less alone. You do it because you feel like something is missing in a particular corner of the world, and you wonder if others might feel that thing is missing too, and might just be waiting for someone like you to come along and take this on. You do it because you have something to say, and quite possibly you think others might care to hear it, and may even want to say something similar themselves.

You do it, I suppose, for the same reason you wanted to write in the first place: Because you have to.

So, that’s my startup story.

It’s magic, it’s fun. It’s educational. It’s hard work. It’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done professionally.

My only regret is that it took this long for someone else to step up and make another cartoon of me being spoon-fed by Howard Dean dressed up as a bunny.

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You can read more of Becky’s writing in Lit Mag News.