Encountering posts, news, or even worth of mouth comments about yet another literary magazine struggling to survive makes me question the unhealthy financial situation of most of these initiatives.

Lit mags, in general, deeply depend on government assistance or on the donation of a billionaire passionate about culture.

The buzz is a constant. They are either fighting their way up to the surface to be able to publish another issue with an infimum budget, or their survival is a stake because the funding was reduced or even denied.

The call for diversity is loud and clear.

Using diverse revenue channels or sources of income helps ease the fray and provide peace of mind to the creatives that lead and make many of these publications a reality. But beyond that, it increases content visibility.

The problem with such a financial struggle is not only that we lose the top platform for emerging writers, and the entire media industry has to attend another funeral. It’s that many of these magazines invest their budget in creating, editing and producing masterpieces full of poetry, illustrations, short stories, art, essays and more. What happens with distribution?

We have pieces of art itself reaching so few. It comes down to basically the collaborators wanting to get their hands on the issue their work shows up, a non-scandalous number of subscribers getting their copy delivered, and a few copies sold at events. The reach is so scarce that I sigh with frustration knowing that this fantastic content deserves more avenues, eyeballs, and opportunities to touch humans’ hearts, minds and souls.

The demon here has many heads, but one that I feel is overlooked is that the art of literary magazines is not slowly dying because of the increasing government budget cuts only. It actually has been digging its own grave by focusing on publishing and letting the distribution fall through the cracks.

Lit mags have forgotten that demand creation starts with allowing people to know you exist. The content that so carefully has been curated and created to give birth to each issue needs a significant effort on reach.

Literary content will gain more followers, subscribers and devotees when more can discover it. More people wanting the content translates into more people and money to keep lit magazines afloat and even thriving.