Hello
again, Editors of Literary Journals,
Dzanc Books here, hoping our initial email last week piqued
your interest in our foundation and our future plans to provide
financial and networking aid in order to assist literary journals
in their subscriptions, distribution, promotion, fundraising
and overall exposure to the reading and writing communities.
You are also probably curious as to how exactly we plan on
coming in and making your literary lives that much easier
not to mention wondering what in the hell Dzanc means. As we
mentioned in the original missive, we have many ideas as to
how we’ll go about getting all of the above into motion, but
also want to pick the brains of the people who have been out
on the front lines. While we are in the process of that picking,
to give you an idea of what we at Dzanc have in mind, here are
some of the things we already plan to do:
1. Library subscriptions We have developed a large list of
libraries, both university affiliated and not, to contact and
promote literary journal subscriptions to. We will act as liaison
, create group deal offerings to libraries, coordinate subscriptions,
follow up and continue to contact libraries on your behalf.
2. Event planning More and more book festivals are popping
up every year and, more often than not, we know the organizers.
We plan on setting up literary journal tents or mini-festivals
at these events. We have seen past successes with events such
as these when readers see many of you together, they wander
in, ask questions, and understand why the rest of us are so
excited about literary journals.
3. Readings We also are in contact with many Reading Series
directors across the country and plan on setting up Your journal
here nights where one journal will have 2 to 4 of their authors
come in and read on an evening. We will also set up variations
such as a single reader from three or four journals on a night,
and other mixes that will help promote your journals as well
as the authors doing the readings.
4. Mailings Be it single journal postcards, or multiple journal
offers, or fliers and remember, we will be sending out subscription
offers, issue announcements and other such mailings at no cost
to the journals involved.
5. Advertising We will help with advertising your journal
driving for lower rates with multiple journals advertising
helping with layouts (and with multiple journals expect to
be able to do so at discounted rates) etc.
6. Teaching Getting university professors to utilize literary
journals to teach their students helping build individual
issue and subscription levels.
7. We have great connections with the litblog community (Dan
has one and is a member of the litblog co-op) and these connections
will be used to expand something that has been seen lately
full reviews of journals at one blog on a story by story basis.
8. We plan on putting together a Dzanc Books anthology, akin
to the Pushcart Prize anthology accepting nominations from
the journals participating with us on our projects for the year.
9. We will continue to develop the writer database that we
have so we can send authors updates on your various needs for
submissions, and let them know when to submit, when you are
looking for a particular story, running a special topic issue,
are close to ending submissions and looking for one or two more
stories. That is, Dzanc will again be your liaison, this time
to a large base of authors.
10. For you Online Journals, we also have ideas about how to
get the great stories you are publishing more widespread attention
as well as we have very good connections with literary blogs,
the Million Writers Award and other avenues as well.
For our joint efforts to succeed in the future, we believe
getting as much information about things that have been successful,
and unsuccessful, in the past for as many journals as possible
and with this in mind, have come up with the following questions
that we’d like journals interested in participating with Dzanc
to respond to, helping us to confirm and develop our theories.
A reminder Dzanc has no interest in influencing any of the
editorial decisions of these literary journals. We only want
to help journals succeed in achieving their missions, and hopefully
relieve some of the stresses that go with doing so. All of our
services to literary journals are 100% free, provided as part
of our ongoing commitment to bring greater exposure of fantastic
writing to the public.
The responses you send to us will be absorbed into a database.
The database as a whole, averages, or trends may be shared with
those who participate, but no individual responses will be seen
by anybody beyond you, or Steve and Dan of Dzanc Books.
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