I’m not trying to do a prediction market thing here but if you’ve noticed the current online lit dIsCoUrSe about a new lit mag popping up seemingly every day like a bad case of cystic acne, it definitely feels tempting to start taking bets.
Anyway.
I wanna do a discourse. Let’s do a discourse.
This is maybe my fourth post about online lit stuff this summer. Let’s keep it going.
Ever since Loser—Conor Hultman and Mai Bell’s new print-only journal where every submission received within a certain window of time is accepted for publication until all 200 pages of the issue have been filled (and you won’t know you made it in until the issue is released)—entered the scene back in early June 2026, a number of copycat lit mags with similar premises (only tweaked!) have joined the fray attempting to ride on those conceptual coattails.
I haven’t been able to keep up with all the new online lit mags. There are quite a few I’ve seen in the past couple weeks and I’m sure I didn’t catch notice of them all. Some of them are getting buzz, some of them are getting scorn, and some are probably entering the scene without much of a splash at all.
We’ve got Deadbeat (a print only magazine requesting only your very worst poems), we’ve got Saint (a print-only magazine publishing “transgressive” work in limited runs), we’ve got The Cult Lit (a magazine where writers are invited to submit via summons from other writers who had previously been summoned, and as of July 15, 2026 has locked down their Twitter account but still has not fixed the ai-generated typo in their header from surnmons to summons), and there are probably more that I’m forgetting to mention but I think you get the gist.
People aren’t just talking about the new mags. People are making fake literary magazines in response.
And the fake magazines, memes themeselves, are being memed further.
Are these responses exuding ridicule, or are people just having fun? I have seen what I perceive to be oversized indignancies, but overall I think most people do not care, or are just making jokes because this is what we do online: we make jokes when we’re not actively making or promoting our own art. It’s fine. It’s all fine, really.
Lit mags come and lit mags go.
Be About It Press has been around since 2010. I’m not saying we’ve stood the test of time, but we’ve made it this far, and we’ve gone through various phases and fluctuations.
I feel like I’ve told this story a million times, but it feels important in this context, and perhaps not everyone has heard it already. I decided to start a zine because it seemed like a fun idea. I was inspired by this book I read called How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead, a non-fiction pseudo-self-help book by Ariel Gore that talked about DIY publishing and zine-making as a punk rock statement of self. My dad bought the book for me for Christmas one year and I let it sit around on a shelf until I felt bored one day and picked it up. It changed my life. I mean, I had already been blogging and expressing myself that way, but actually engaging with (and building!) a community around a creative project of which I was the captain, the editor-in-chief, really made me start taking myself more seriously as a writer.
[Speaking of taking myself seriously as a writer, (please note that this is a long tangent, so please feel free to skip if you aren’t interested in me and my life) just today I was at my mom and dad’s house rummaging for the first time ever through the “memory box,” an enormous vintage suitcase that has served as a storage bin for all of my and my sister’s important documents: awards, report cards, my first holy communion banner I made with felt and glue and wooden dowels, notebooks from our gradeschool years, and letters to Santa. I was looking for test results. Rachel Bell posted her IQ on instagram the other day, and it made me wonder what my IQ score was/is. When I was 9 years old I took an IQ test to get accepted into the mentally gifted program. My parents told me that they didn’t remember my score, and they weren’t sure if they were given any sort of documentation about the test results, but my mom brought out the memory box from its dusty hiding place and invited me to dig around in case they saved it. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find my teacher’s recommendation to admit me into the program because my creativity, reading prowess, and writing skills were something to be tended to and nourished. Attached to the teacher’s recommendation was a note from my father: “Alexandra loves to read and has a knack for writing and illustrating her own story books at home. With math, she needs more coaxing.” I also spent some time flipping through my kindergarten journal where I would draw pictures and dictate the story behind them to my teacher, who recorded my words alongside. I was always making up stories about vampires and ghosts, and going to the moon. This composition book I held in my hands, a physical starting point of my writing career, from crayon drawings and simple fantasies about houses on fire and spaceships, was a comforting salve to my ego, and knowing where I am now, publishing novels and full-length poetry collections, it was a really nice reminder that I’ve always had this in me, that I am doing the thing I have been doing all of my life and was most likely meant to do.]
In the 16 years I’ve been in the publishing biz (lol), I’ve learned a lot. I had no idea what I was doing when I started out making a zine, but I worked with what I had and what I picked up from reading that Gore book and what I’ve seen other writers and artists do. When I was a teen, I liked indie comics. Mini comics, they were sometimes called, but they were essentially zines: small, staple-bound editions of folded paper adorned with Xeroxed images and words. I had read and seen plenty of these to have them serve as inspiration.
I figured I would learn on the job.
I probably made some questionable editorial choices in the beginning, I was basically only publishing my writing and my friends’ writing and whoever came through the inbox so long as it seemed cool. I didn’t know any “real” writers, and I didn’t have a mission statement aside from “I’m going to do this.” That’s why I called the press Be About It. I wanted to try something. I wanted to take an idea and make it real. I didn’t want to just talk about it, I wanted to be about it. Through doing the press, bringing it to life, I created a lane for myself and became acquainted with a world I would likely have not encountered otherwise.
In those 16 years, I’ve seen presses and lit mags rise and fall. Even outlts that were considered institutions in their time (HTML Giant, Metazen, Spork Press, Misery Tourism, just to name a few) have shuttered their proverbial doors. It’s the way of the lit mag world. Hardly anyone is making money from doing indie press/online publishing, and even if that’s not a substantial enough reason, people just have their own lives and not everyone has the time to spare to keep it going. And it does take time!
My original publishing intention was to publish at least two zines per year. I mean, I didn’t start out thinking that, but I had been publishing two zines per year and that felt like my natural rhythm, so I decided to keep it up. And I did for a while, probably up until 2018, which was when I started a job that demanded a lot more of my time and energy—I loved this job, and I loved my coworkers, but it did take over my life while I was there. Previously, I had been working silly little office jobs where I was able to fuck around on the clock and write entire chapbooks in a day during my shifts and read through emailed submissions for the zine and use my job’s Microsoft Office suite to format issues and books all on company time. Sure, the money was terrible, I was barely making rent, but the fact that I could do so much while I was supposed to be working felt like a decent payoff. But then I got a real job. And then years later, I had my first baby. Be About It Press stuff was put on the back burner. I managed to eke out a few books by authors who wanted to work with me, but I felt done with zines, and I had completely neglected any online presence I had built up in the past.
This is all to say: life happens, stuff happens. We do what we can with our passion projects, and sometimes we have to give them up because we have no other choice.
Now, I don’t know how much of this relates to all the new lit mags. I believe Conor has stated that he has and end goal in mind for Loser, that it has a predetermined termination date that the public will find out about when the time has come. This seems cool and fun and organized. Very conceptual. A friend told me The Cult Lit (which seems like it’s done before it even got off the ground) may have been a convuluted marketing gimmick for some new shitcoin and if that’s the case then good riddance.
I personally don’t have a problem with new lit mags proliferating, I think it’s a good indicator of a healthy literary ecosystem in the same way that having too many reading series is. If a new audience can be created, if the idea captivates a crowd or even a couple people that might not have known about this wonderful world we coexist in, then that seems like a good thing. We should always be looking for fresh blood, fresh writers, fresh readers. And sure, it might not all be good, but what ever is? I’m not a gatekeeping person. I have taste, and I have my own set of criteria when it comes to deciding what to publish on my mag, but it’s not my job to police anyone else. We can all choose to read what we want to. And sometimes, even if there’s a bunch of shit in the way, there’s always at least a few lovely surprises that seemingly come from nowhere. It’s our job to find these green offshoots and tend to them and nourish them. Solicit them for our own magazines. We’ve all got to start somewhere.
Should I bring it up again? Yeah, whatever, I’m going to. How do we turn this energy into profit? How do we get paid from all of this work that we do? Is that ever going to happen? Are we going to make online lit mainstream? Is that even possible? Is that against the ethos of this community that we’ve built? Is the idea of online lit being a springboard into legitimacy the antithesis of its mission?
Are we going to get grant money or CIA funding or private donations from oligarchs who care about the arts? Are we okay with yapping at each other, passing the same dollar bill back and forth like Beavis and Butthead that time they tried selling candy bars? I mean, I guess I’m fine with it, but it would be nice to take some money from people and entities that can afford to part with it! If you have any get-rich schemes you’d like to share with the class (aside from creating a fucking shitcoin), please leave me a comment and we can brainstorm.
Until next time <3
Thanks for reading talk about it! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Feel free to check out the posts below for further reading if you wish:
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