Chamber Four

As promised, we’ve done an interview swap with online magazine Fringe. Editor-in-Chief Lizzie Stark was kind enough to answer our questions about digital publishing and some of the challenges of publishing an online magazine as well as their ideas on keeping up with a constantly changing literary and online landscape. You can read the other half of the swap, where we answer questions about ereaders, ebooks, and our plans for a the future on the Fringe blog.

C4: Why did you choose to create an entirely online magazine? Was it primarily a financial decision? Did it have anything to do with Fringe’s goal to publish progressive/non-mainstream writing? What are the advantages you see with an entirely online magazine?

LS: We decided that being online-only would waste fewer resources, which is a way to live our political belief in environmentalism as a magazine.  Being entirely online also means that (in theory, at least) we can put out issues more frequently than the usual literary magazine. The geographic advantage is that our editors can live in different states, which means we can keep staff for longer periods of time.  We’ve also been able to publish some cool multimedia things, like flash poetry and audio collage — it’d be very hard to do that in print.

Most importantly, we’re able to reach way more readers online than we’d ever be able to reach in print.  In the last year, our smallest number of monthly unique users was 6,500, and our largest number was 35,000, with 14,000 being our average monthly number.  It’d be incredibly costly to reach that many people on a print level.

C4: Are there any areas where you feel a print mag would better serve your goals/your readership?

LS: No.

C4: Clearly, there’s still a stigma among writers about publishing online vs. publishing in print. How do you feel about the difference between online and on paper credits? Have you noticed a change in the online/print prejudices of your contributors in the years since you started Fringe?

LS: My basic attitude is that published is published.  It may feel more palpable when you can hold a print object in your hands, but if you want people to read your work in the 21st century, you have to be online in some capacity — blog, Twitter, personal website or through online publication.

And yes, I’ve definitely noticed a change in the prejudices of our contributors since we’ve started Fringe.  I think for an online literary venture, the first years are hard because in addition to trying to establish the fact that you’ve got literary taste and editing chops, you also have to prove that you’re not going to let your site go bust next month. Some contributors worry that if an online journal goes bust, their work will evaporate.  For the most part, I think this is an unfounded fear.  A reputable journal can find ways to archive itself through Biblio, and barring that there’s always the WaybackMachine.

Interestingly, we’ve found that known poets are more likely to send out their work via email than fiction writers.  Not sure why that is, but there you have it.

C4: Have you considered a downloadable format for collected volumes?

LS: Yes. Right now we offer printable pdfs for all the work on our site, but we have thought about releasing a dead-tree anthology when we turn five, for example, and we’d definitely want to offer that in an ereader format. In terms of our new website, however, producing a downloadable format for each piece on the site is going to be prohibitively expensive in terms of money and coding and loading time. Instead we plan to offer work in printer-friendly formats.

C4: Do you find certain types of writing (fiction, poetry, blog posts) are more or less popular with online readership?

LS: It varies from month to month, story to story, and on how much of an online network the readers we publish already have; writer with blogs, for example, tend to generate more traffic to their pieces.  We don’t host our blog posts on our site at the moment, so comparing stats from blog posts to literature wouldn’t be a fair comparison.

In general, though, online readers are lazy. Pieces that are shorter and break up long blocks of text are more readable.

C4: A lot of writers and readers we’ve talked to have a negative knee-jerk reaction whenever they talk about ereaders. What do you think about the emergence of digital publishing and its future effect on and relationship with print publishing?

LS: That’s a pretty big question. In general, I think that e-readers will become more popular but that books will never die. There’s something magical about the way books feel and smell. I love reading library books because the history of the physical book — the idea that people before me have read it — gives me arcane enjoyment.

However, I think digital readers are going to open up a whole new realm of experimental literature. Ishmael Reed included photos in his experimental novel Mumbo Jumbo. Perhaps in the future experimental digital novels will include hypertext, video and audio, but keep the page-by-page readability of a novel. I think that’d be super fly.

C4: Have ever tried reading on a dedicated ereader device? Would you be willing to?

LS: I have not, because I’m a journalist and apparently, my industry is in decline and not very lucrative. But I’d jump at the chance to try out an ereader.

C4: Fringe incorporated as a non-profit; why did you choose to go the non-profit route over other incorporations which might have been cheaper and less of a hassle?

LS: We wanted to be able to apply for grants, we wanted to make donating to us tax-deductible, and we wanted to hold true to our theme song, which includes the line, “This magazine is owned and Published Co-operatively by Its Editors. It has no Dividends to Pay, and nobody is trying to make Money out of it.”

We also knew that some people would be wary about submitting to an online journal and we thought this was a good investment in the future, a way of saying “we’re going to be around a while and you can trust us with your work.”

C4: Fringe is in the process of raising funds for a website remodel. What are you changing and what do you want to do with the new site?

LS: The new website is going to change a lot of things — we’re basically re-envisioning the magazine to take advantage of the technology that’s already out there. We’ll publish one piece weekly instead of in big issues every four months. We’re also going to make the site easier to navigate and more visually compelling.

As we clean up the back end of the site and reduce loading time, I’m hoping we’ll have more time to pursue techie-oriented writing projects, like the digital Round Robin story we’ve just launched from our blog.

C4: A lot of sites are changing from Flash-heavy destinations to more content oriented blogroll-type approaches to accommodate the changing habits of internet users and increased traffic via mobile devices. The Kindle can access blogs (for an unfortunate fee) and many other ereaders can load blog and newspaper content via Calibre, not too mention a good many internet users read their content though a centralized RSS/Atom feed source, such as Google Reader, or a mobile device like the iPhone. How does the growing flexibility and user-customization of the internet alter your ideas about site design? Will your new site be designed around this (relatively) new change in internet standards?

LS: Well, we’re not going to be accommodating the Kindle anytime soon.  Would we like to?  Sure.  But right now it’s a matter of the financial and temporal resources we have to devote to the redesign, and at the moment I don’t think that the Kindle audience is large enough to pay off in terms of the resources we’d need to devote to it.

However, we will be making Fringe web 2.0 with this new redesign, and we’re using lessons we’ve learned from watching highly-trafficked media sites.  We’ll be adding social networking widgets, an email function, “Most recent” and “Also in this genre” pages to increase traffic. We’re toying with the idea of letting readers vote for pieces and then generating lists based on that.  We might add comments to our site via a link to the blog, combining reader feedback with an author’s need to let her work stand alone.

In addition to our blog RSS we’ll have an RSS for the whole site and for each genre.   Finally, we’re going to introduce decks for many of our pieces — teasers/one sentence excerpts for everything but poetry that will entice readers to click in, and that would provide a taste of the goodies inside to mobile users as well as people coming to the site.

C4: What are you future plans for Fringe content-wise? Will this change at all when your site’s redesign is complete?

LS: Our plans are much the same as they’ve always been: to publish the best work we can find and to do it in a way that’s sustainable for the staff over the long term.

This isn’t a business — all of the editors have day jobs and as we get older, our time is at more and more of a premium. We’ll keep publishing Fringe, but we’re going to do it in a way that’s smarter, faster, and more readable.