So given our topic, publishing in the 21st century,
I think the most obvious place to start
is talking about internet publishing.
Rebecca, your journal, the Drunken Boat is online.
And Ander, New Michigan Press publishes in print,
but your journal DIAGRAM is online.
And Kristen the University of Arizona Press
publishes both physical books and online books.
I'm curious, how do you decide whether a publication should
be online or print?
Or why did you choose print or online for your press?
What were those considerations?
And I don't care what order we go in.
I'm putting this up for you.
Oh, OK.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, actually, at the University of Arizona Press,
all of our books are in print.
And we do have some titles online on our website.
But those are largely out-of-print books
that we're trying to make available to the bigger,
wider audience.
So right now, we are in the process
of trying to figure out how to navigate
this digital revolution of publishing.
And we hope to be publishing e-books and online books pretty
soon here in the next few months.
I started on my journal DIAGRAM about a little
more than 10 years ago, because we just celebrated
our 10th anniversary.
And I started it when I was--
I had just finished my editorship
at Black Warrior Review, which is the literary journal out
of the University of Alabama, which has a pretty good budget,
and they have a staff of 25 or 30.
And I saw at the time-- and this was still kind of in the early
days of the internet, relatively speaking--
that I stumbled on these sites like Web del Sol.
And it occurred to me that what we
needed to have at Black Warrior, when I was working there,
some sort of online component, especially
because I found really fast that when I went to--
I think, in my first AWP Conference, Associated Writing
Programs Conference in 2000 or so,
that there was a lot of people that were publishing
interesting work online.
And I've been working in--
I've always been a computer person,
so I've worked with HTML before, and I've worked in the web
before.
And so what I did is I tried to start--
I started an arm of Black Warrior Review,
called the Warrior Web, that would have-- it would
publish additional content.
And we'd still keep the print journal,
but we'd also publish extra stuff online,
because we have so much good work that we couldn't really
publish at all.
And it was great for two issues that I was the editor for,
and then I was no longer the editor.
And then, all of a sudden, the next editor
killed the project totally, thus making
one of the potential downsides of the online very obvious.
That it didn't physically exist in the same way,
and it went away.
So in my anger over this, and the decisions that I had made,
I understood that I clearly had the best
taste among all of the people in the editorial staff, which
is the only--
which is actually a very useful thing as a writer
and as an editor, because then I wanted to start my own journal.
And so I started a journal called DIAGRAM.
And we just started it online just because we
couldn't afford to do print.
There was no option.
I mean, I'd worked with letterpress printing
in Alabama's printing and binding program, the Book Arts
program.
And it started online, and it had always been online.
And at the time, there weren't very many--
there were not a lot of online journals.
And the ones that were, a lot of times,
they published their own editors.
They wouldn't have professional turnaround.
They didn't have a good design.
And they didn't even have something
like a reliable regular publication schedule,
or an ISSN, or anything like that.
And so we got all of that.
From the get-go, we really wanted
to make sure that we did as much as we could to convince people
that we were serious about being a journal,
and we were going to be around, that we weren't online.
We would publish-- we were online,
but that doesn't mean that we were fly by night.
There's plenty of print journals that print an issue,
and then go under because the editors have
something else to do.
And so even a couple of years later, we would--
even the Black Warrior's a great journal.
And then we had probably 3,000 subscribers.
Two-- I think, in our third year,
we started to really look at our traffic in DIAGRAM.
And we would get over a million hits, certainly
over a million hits a year.
We'd get tons of hits.
And that worked out to something like 30,000 unique viewers.
And they're not just in America.
They were all over the world.
And they were weirdos like us.
They really liked this idea of publishing schematics,
and hybrid texts, and things like that.
And to me, it became very obvious
very quickly that, at least for short form work,
online had major advantages that print didn't have.
Our budget is still almost nothing.
We publish online, and it's--
I mean, a lot has changed in the last 10 years,
clearly, between how things have moved.
And now, if you apply for an NEA grant,
they actually count online publications,
even though certain tenure committees
don't include online.
So to me, the war has been won in favor of the online.
Having said that, I also publish a print.
We publish print anthologies, and I love the book.
So my press is all in print.
We don't publish anything digitally, which may or may not
change as we get a reasonable e-book format that'll actually
do line breaks reliably.
Anyway, that's enough for now.
Wow, this question, I've only published online.
And that's interesting, what Ander said about anchor,
because that was one of the things that motivated
me to start the Drunken Boat.
I was living then in an isolated corner of New Mexico.
And I wanted to get involved more in a writing
international type community.
And so I signed up to be an editor
of a then-online publication.
And I was promised complete editorial control, which--
and we seemed to have a good working relationship.
So I put this issue together.
And just about the time it was supposed to go online,
the person who ran the website said,
oh, no, this is what I'm going to put in there for your cover.
And these are the images I want.
And I felt that the images not only did not
fit with the content that I had gotten
from various contributors, but that there
was a way in which it cast a negative light upon some
of those contributions.
So I said, well, what happened to editorial control?
And so, basically, at that point,
my position was entirely volunteer, so I quit.
But I still wanted to have an online publication.
So I thought, well, the only thing
that's stopping me is that I don't know how to do HTML.
And I realized that, in a way, with online publication,
it's not about inventory or money or the funding
that you have to back you up because it is very inexpensive.
You don't have to worry about the length
of the work, the format of the work, how much it costs,
or any of that once you've got the website, the domain
name, and the host that you pay for your space.
But it's knowledge.
It's knowing how to do that HTML work.
And that's what I didn't have.
And in this other situation, that's
what the person who ran the website had,
was the computer know-how.
So at that point, I decided that the easiest
way to get around the conundrum was to learn HTML.
So I got one of those books, how to teach yourself
HTML in 24 hours.
And it actually works.
[CHUCKLES]
And so-- and I had some help, too,
from one of my daughters at that time.
And this was 2001.
In 1999, she had built a robot that she ran from a website
that she built. And she was like, 15.
So if I was doing something that wasn't working,
I could be like, what about this?
So I think that online publication,
in terms of journals, particularly,
is a great thing, because you don't have to worry
about the cost of publication.
And this means, for me, in publishing the Drunken
Boat since April of 2000, that I've been able to give space
to a lot of work that has been considered to be too
much for the regular print journal, or some print format,
or it's too long, it's too experimental,
doesn't fit within the standard format of the page, et cetera.
So it's a great place to explore these enthusiasms,
to let writers have this space for the innovative
and the explorations that they might be interested in.
It is true that line breaks are a problem.
But you can get around those in terms of just
by doing the HTML work to get around.
And then you have to look at the pages in all
these different browsers.
But it does also attract a great readership.
And I'm not sure that the people who are reading poetry online
are the same people who are reading books,
because there seems to be a much different and more
numerous interest in online publication
than you usually see with a print journal.