State of the Journal I

News and reflections on Futurist Letters.

In lieu of a story or essay this week, we are sending out an editorial update on the history and future of this journal. This is the start of a series that will recur as-needed, without a fixed schedule.

Futurist Letters celebrates its eighth month this week. In that time we have published thirty pieces from twelve talented authors. Most of those authors were unknown to me before I started this journal, and some have since gone on to become dear friends.

I started this journal because of a New Year's resolution to post more, and a rising dissatisfaction with the state of literary journals. In short, I wanted to build the kind of place where I myself would want to subscribe and submit. My commitment was to post weekly for a year, and we have stuck to that admirably. In the beginning, I expected to be personally authoring over half of our pieces, but we have had so many talented entries lately that I’m only writing every one in three. That's perfectly fine by me.

In brief, I can share some of our current goals for the journal.

• Expand our roster of talented authors and continue to identify quality work.

• Be a home for the literary New Wave ARX-Han recently identified, as it grows.

• Get high-quality authors and poasters [sic] to share our stories and our journal on X and Substack, for discovery.

• Run themed events and competitions, starting with a Halloween horror literature event in the month of October. This will allow us to expand our horizons beyond normal programming. More news on the horror event to come.

• Figure out ways to create extra value for paying patrons without paywalling our weekly stories.

• Create a collector's print volume of selected work once we have enough appropriate pieces to fill a collection, probably next year.

• Potentially bring on a volunteer additional editor, maybe someone who understands poetry in addition to prose, if submissions continue to increase.

• Find one or two advertising partners and run aesthetically-consistent banner ads in the journal.

Futurist Letters currently makes about $544 a year from the contributions of our paying members. Thank you all, sincerely, for your support. Our annual expenditure is about $1,400 a year in author fees and $5,200 a year in editorial work, the latter of which I am happy to do myself as a volunteer for now. This is to say, Futurist Letters lives off your support, and any patronage you provide will help ensure a reasonable publishing tempo after the year is up.

As far as discovery, our main driver of new readers is the Substack platform itself. Substack has our thanks, and we encourage you all to restack stories you like or share them in Substack notes on your feed.

Our second largest driver is Duotrope, and I want to assure all our Duotrope writers that every submission is appreciated and carefully read, even though we do not have the spare capacity to respond to every email.

Our third largest driver is X and Reddit traffic, almost entirely from provocative opinion pieces. This is where the temptation to cultivate the inflammatory seizes even the most measured publishers. For better or worse, though, we will not optimize for viral rancor. Please send us your opinion pieces if you have them, but keep in mind we are looking for nuance and depth more than we are looking for a slapfight.

Good things are happening in English-language literary fiction, mostly online and mostly without the support of legacy publishers for now. We are so proud of our Futurist Letters contributors, and we can't wait to add more people to that ever-growing roster.