In a long, 5 page, article in Publishers Weekly, the founders of Electric Literature discuss their past, their future and why they strongly believe literature is NOT dead.
I’d heartily recommend you put the article on your reading list:
Our company, Electric Literature, launched in 2009, was born from conversations Scott Lindenbaum and I had while editing the Brooklyn Review, the literary magazine published by the Brooklyn College M.F.A. program.
At the time we entered our program, there was a lot of pessimism about the future of literature. As young writers, we know how much hard work goes into writing a great story. Yet looking around, we saw only steadily diminishing returns for that labor. There’s no shortage of new literary journals, online and in print, of course, but most of them either can’t pay their writers or can only afford to pay them in complementary copies. So we asked ourselves, what could we do to expand the market for literary content, particularly short fiction?
Encouraged by reports of the popularity of cellphone reading in Japan and the introduction of e-readers in the U.S. marketplace, we conceived of Electric Literature with this mission: to use new production and distribution channels to help establish a vibrant market for literature.
Using digital distribution, we found that we could displace upfront printing and other setup costs, perhaps $5,000 for the average small literary journal, and instead we could put that money where it belongs, paying five writers $1,000 apiece for their stories.
At Electric Literature, we reject a future where a writer’s creative work is not compensated. And practically speaking, we can’t pay our writers without being paid for our books. So we set out to find a new way of doing business—and we did.
