How to start a literary magazine

1. Decide what it is, narrowly

"A magazine for good writing" is not a magazine. It is a mood. The journals that survive tend to be describable in one sentence: flash fiction under 100 words, haiku only, poems of exactly three lines, work from one region. A narrow scope does three jobs at once. It tells writers whether to submit, it makes your slush pile readable, and it gives the magazine a reason to exist that "we publish good work" never provides, because every magazine claims that.

Decide the genre, the length limits, the publication schedule, and roughly how much of the slush you expect to accept. One percent and ten percent are different magazines. Write this down before you buy anything.

2. Name it, then buy the domain the same day

Search the name before you fall in love with it. Check for existing magazines, presses, and defunct journals whose ghost still ranks in Google. Then buy the .com. For an online journal the domain is not marketing, it is the magazine itself, and every poem you publish at your own address builds a body of pages that belongs to you.

Hosting can be ordinary shared hosting, the cheap kind. You do not need anything exotic to run a website and a submission system; a plan in the range of a modest print bill per year covers both.

3. Write the guidelines before you open

Guidelines are a contract offered in advance, so write them like one. What you want, in what format, at what length. When you are open and when you close. How long a writer should wait before nudging you, and whether you take simultaneous submissions. Say what happens after acceptance too, which is covered under rights below.

Two rules from experience. Never promise a response time you have not tested against a real month of reading. And never leave "we are temporarily closed" up for a year; a dormant magazine with live guidelines quietly burns writers, and writers talk.

4. Build the reading workflow, including blind reading

Decide who reads, in what order, and who says yes. A common shape: every piece gets two readers, scores get compared, and disagreements go to the editor. Even a two-person magazine benefits from writing this down, because the workflow is what keeps decisions consistent when the pile gets deep.

Take blind reading seriously from day one. Reading without the byline protects you from your own habits — the familiar name you overrate, the stranger you skim. It is also the single policy most likely to be asked about by careful submitters. If you run contests it stops being optional, since paid entries judged by someone who can see names is a scandal waiting for a venue.

5. Pick how you will handle submissions

At tiny volume, an inbox and a spreadsheet work, and there is no shame in starting there. The problems arrive with scale: statuses writers cannot check, blind reading done by hand-stripping names from files, no scores, no history.

This is the part I have opinions about, since I built Green Submissions after years of running slush out of an inbox. It is free, self-hosted software: it runs on the same cheap hosting as your website, takes unlimited submissions with no per-submission fees, and gives you the slush pile, blind reading mode, reader scoring, statuses, decision emails, revision threads, and contest fees paid into your own PayPal. Writers pay nothing. The documentation walks a non-technical person through the install in an afternoon. If you would rather pay someone to host the system for you, that market exists too, and I keep an honest survey of it at Submittable alternatives for literary magazines.

Whichever you choose, choose before you open. Migrating live submissions between systems mid-reading-period is misery.

6. Build the first issue small and good

The first issue sets the magazine's level, and nothing published in it can be unpublished. Better eight strong pieces than twenty that include filler; nobody has ever complained a debut issue was too short. Sequence it deliberately, the way you would order a chapbook: a strong opening, a strong close, and tonal logic in between. Then proof it twice, once by someone who has not read it before. A misspelled contributor name in issue one follows you around.

Expect your acceptance rate to feel brutal and your rejections to be hard to send. Send them anyway, promptly and kindly. Speed is a form of respect no new magazine can afford to skip, because it is the only reputation you have.

7. Decide about money, and say it plainly

Most literary magazines pay contributors nothing. If that is you, state it on the guidelines page in plain words, and do not dress exposure up as compensation. Writers will submit to a non-paying magazine that is honest about it; what they resent is discovering the terms late.

If you do pay, pay a flat amount you can sustain for years, however small, rather than a generous rate that dies with issue three. And keep submission free if you possibly can. Reading fees at a brand-new magazine with no track record ask writers to fund a promise. Earn the track record first.

8. Rights, in one honest paragraph

You do not need a lawyer for a journal; you need clarity. The standard arrangement, in words you can adapt: the magazine acquires first serial rights, meaning the right to publish the piece first; all rights revert to the writer on publication; the magazine keeps the non-exclusive right to keep the piece in its archive; and the writer agrees the work is original and previously unpublished. Four clauses. Put them in the guidelines, and repeat them in the acceptance email so nobody has to hunt.

9. Launch, and go find your submitters

Open submissions before the first issue exists — the first issue is made of them. Then get listed where writers actually look for markets: Duotrope, the Poets & Writers database, and for genre work the Submission Grinder. The listings are how unknown magazines get found, and they cost nothing but a form.

Beyond listings, the honest channels are slow ones. Ask writers you admire to submit and say so directly. Announce the magazine wherever your scene already talks. Publish on schedule, because the second issue arriving on time does more for your reputation than any launch post.

10. What actually kills new magazines

Not obscurity. Volume and drift. The slush pile grows past what the founders can read, response times stretch, guilt accumulates, and the magazine goes quiet without ever deciding to. The defenses are all upstream: a narrow scope, a written workflow, software that shows you the pile instead of burying it in an inbox, and an issue size you can sustain. A small magazine that ships on time for five years becomes an institution. Plan for that, and issue two takes care of itself.