Bookslut has a long post on the life, and death, and life of literary journals.
From the piece...
The literary magazine has long had a reputation for its fleeting existence -- here today for issue 1, gone tomorrow by issue 3. But is that really true? And does the literary journal’s tiptoe along the precipice of failure differ from what other types of magazines face?
The answer might surprise you.
A study conducted by the authors recently compared the lifespans of every periodical reviewed in Library Journal from 1980-1995. The data from this retrospective study of 2,000 journals of all kinds, the first of its kind, formed our basis for comparing the lifespans of literary journals to other kinds of periodicals.
How long did these literary journals last? How many are still around in 2010? Literary magazines, it seems, do just as well, or just as badly, surviving as long as so-called popular magazines for general readerships.
With these long-held assumptions about literary magazines’ infinitesimal chance of survival upended by a long-term study, we then went around and asked those in the literary magazine world, charts and graphs in hand. Do we now have to admit that a popular, general audience title like Feng Shei Living face the same obstacles to survival as, say, Fence?
The editors, publishers, and one librarian we interviewed were surprised to find that literary journals were no more short-lived than other publications. But how to interpret the data was subject to debate. Some questioned its significance and took the opportunity to and point out that a litmag’s lifespan isn’t an appropriate measure of its “cultural worth.” Others were skeptical of the study sample. The data sparked discussions on everything from the natural lifespan of a journal, the benefits of affiliating with a college, and the reasons magazines survive or fail.
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