Behind the Scenes
Once There Was Great Writing Here
I am a big proponent of electronic and online publishing but there is a permanence to a physical book or magazine that cannot be denied. This is not to say that physical books cannot disappear. They can and do, but it takes time and effort or neglect. When something is published online, it only takes one click of the mouse to remove it. That work might remain in Google’s cache for a while but eventually, it will disappear entirely, like the words were never there.
I’ve heard various stories in recent years of work being unpublished because a writer and editor had a falling out and other such drama. It disturbs me that the term “unpublish” even exists. Is deleting something published online unpublishing? It doesn’t mean the publication never happened. It only means that publication can’t be seen in the future in that specific context. There are lots of unforeseen consequences when it comes to online publishing. The longer I edit, the more I realize nothing is as simple as it seems.
A writer recently asked me to remove a story from the PANK website because they have a short story collection coming out and they want people to buy the book and that removing online work would make the publisher happy. This request was delivered politely and I’m quite a fan of the writer so this isn’t about ill will but rather, the principle of the thing. My instant reaction was, “Seriously?” I could not believe the request was even made. Is this standard practice? I’ve certainly never had such a request before. At the same time, we like writers and want them to do with their work as they see fit. Given that we cannot compensate contributors for their work, it is the least we can do. The more rational part of my brain understands that selling books is difficult and writers need every possible advantage.
And yet…
I don’t believe publishing is dying or on death’s bed but the request really highlighted for me the ways in which the publishing industry sometimes shoots itself in the face and takes a scenic tour of a graveyard. Having parts of a collection available online seems like a great way to sell more copies. I would think extant work from a collection is a great advertisement for the book and a marketing tool. I’m no expert.
I was, admittedly, pretty tweaked and in my response to the writer, one of the comments I made was that if the story in question had been published in the print version, that writer could not unpublish that work. We could not track down all 1,000 copies of the magazine to tear those pages out. I also said that I do feel that such a request is a big deal. I cannot quite articulate why I think this is a big deal but there’s more at stake than simply removing a story. Our Writer’s Agreement is clearly not, well, clear enough so this was a great wake up call to ensure that we’re giving writers as much control over their work as possible while preserving the integrity of our magazine. We’ll definitely be revisiting that agreement. In the meantime, I took the story down because it is one story and we don’t have the resources to put up any kind of fight and we want to preserve our relationship with the writer and on and on. I’ve felt uneasy ever since. It’s such a bad precedent to unpublish work for any reason because for me, it contributes to the idea that online publishing is inferior to print publishing, that online publishing is temporary, that it lacks the gravity of print publication. Unpublishing creates an atmosphere where writers can say I will let you publish my writing until I no longer feel like I want you to publish my writing. It feels a bit petulant, not in this instance, but in general. Now maybe having online work exist only temporarily or at the whim of the writer is a good thing and I’m a control freak, I can’t be sure, but if ten or twenty or fifty writers decide they want their work removed so their collections are less available online, the integrity of the magazine is seriously compromised. If such a thing were to come to pass, we would be left with a series of placeholders indicating that once, there was great writing here. I don’t think that would serve anyone’s interests well at all.
Tags: Google, Marketing, online publishing, unpublishing
On the flip side, I do sometimes feel like asking for certain work to be taken down. Not because I have a collection coming out, but because the work is many years old and I probably shouldn’t have published it at the time. The annoying thing about the internet is that there is no conception of time. If you google a writer, the first things that come up may be pieces from 5 years ago yet you may not realize this when you read them. The context is lost in the internet. Is that problematic? I think it can be for a young writer at least.
Fascinating, thanks for the post Roxane. On Fictionaut, writers can delete or hide their stories at any time if they choose to do so, but that is a very different beast, aiming to give authors maximum flexibility. For a magazine, where stories were selected and then packaged together with others in an issue, it seems to me that “unpublishing” selected stories does hurt the integrity of the magazine. It’s got a whiff of 1984-style erasure of the past to it. Published should stay published.
That said, I can also understand why you agreed to do it. But it’s almost certainly a mistake on the author’s part — since when does having a story from a collection published elsewhere hurt sales?
I understand this problem, to an extent, but I think in most cases the reader can discover just how old that piece is with just a little bit of effort. And I’d like to think that in general the kind of people seeking out contemporary fiction or poetry (which they are, in your scenario, even if they’ve accidentally found something a little older, right?) are the kind of people that might put in at least a little bit of effort. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong really with having your older work around to be seen. I mean, there was a time when you thought it was good, good enough to be published, and obviously someone else did, too, because they published it. It might no longer represent you as a writer, but it did once, and that’s something that people might be interested in, maybe.
but I guess I don’t know. maybe people really are just seeing stuff without a clear date and assuming it’s how you write now and not liking it or something.
that’s true. I have lost interest in someone’s writing after one or two poems or stories before. but I don’t know, maybe even if a person had context they might just assume that’s how the writer still writes. maybe it’s just a problem of having older work available at all. but asking for everything to be unpublished isn’t a good solution either. the other day I saw an early version of a poem in an issue of DIAGRAM from some years ago and it was sort of cool to see how it changed and stuff, and I’d hate to lose that. I don’t know anything, though. hm.
Oh yes there is no real solution here. There are merely ways in which online publication is different than print that we don’t always think about (or at least I don’t) when we submit.
FYI Ms. Gay is reading at Artifice Magazine’s issue 2 release party tonight in Chicago at Book Cellar, 7 P.M.
Excellent post.
Hmm I’ve never thought about writers taking down pieces because a book is coming out. I’d never do that myself. Still, it does present an odd problem if you have a book of stories that are all or almost all available online. Would less people buy a book if they could just find all of the stories online in a quick google search?
Yes, one could track down all 12 print mags a set of stories had appeared in, but that would cost MORE than the book.
If a book isn’t offering any new content to the reader, does it start to become a kind of charity to buy a book?
ha, tucker max has all his work up online & is on the NY times bestseller list. tell your writer that.
(only referencing tucker max, not b/c i’m a fan or have read his writing, but b/c i think it was roxane linked to his suggestions for publishing a few days ago…)
On the flip side, I do sometimes feel like asking for certain work to be taken down. Not because I have a collection coming out, but because the work is many years old and I probably shouldn’t have published it at the time. The annoying thing about the internet is that there is no conception of time. If you google a writer, the first things that come up may be pieces from 5 years ago yet you may not realize this when you read them. The context is lost in the internet. Is that problematic? I think it can be for a young writer at least.
Fascinating, thanks for the post Roxane. On Fictionaut, writers can delete or hide their stories at any time if they choose to do so, but that is a very different beast, aiming to give authors maximum flexibility. For a magazine, where stories were selected and then packaged together with others in an issue, it seems to me that “unpublishing” selected stories does hurt the integrity of the magazine. It’s got a whiff of 1984-style erasure of the past to it. Published should stay published.
That said, I can also understand why you agreed to do it. But it’s almost certainly a mistake on the author’s part — since when does having a story from a collection published elsewhere hurt sales?
I’d be ultra curious to hear about how writers/publishers with more market experience than me have evaluated the impact of a work’s online availability on the salability of that work as part of a print collection. Like Roxane, I’d think keeping part of the work online, especially when it first appeared there, would be a great draw to readers. I know that I’ve been excited by screen words enough to buy paper words even when some of the words existed in both places at once.
roxane, did you leave the link up or anything, with some sort of note, like, “removed at request of author”? that would at least recognize the story had once been there and wasn’t maliciously removed
That does seem like an odd request and one we’d never ask one of our authors to make. Hell, we use links to works in email campaigns–check this story out – love it? come back and buy the whole book.
word. as a reader of a lot of indie fiction/poetry, i definitely like to get tissue samples by finding work online. that never deters me from buying the thing in print, in fact, can only reinforce it if i like the work. it’s like an amuse bouche before the entree. which takes a couple days/weeks to arrive in the mail. so no, maybe it’s not like that at all. still. when i published rachel glaser’s “pee on water” in WAC, it was because that story was so damn powerful and, unfortunately, not a lot of people had read it because gian did too good a job and that issue of NYTyrant sold out from jump. but tons of people who went up to either myself or rachel mentioned buying her collection/getting interested in her work because they’d read that story online. also, mike young kilt it at the WAC reading by performing a poem that was originally in glitterpony. i recorded it and made it into a short vid on fbook/youtube. i got so many emails asking about that video and i know a friend who sent it around to people “who didn’t even like poetry and loved it.” i know for a fact that some of those people sought out the poem on glitterpony and then sought out the book. even if a collection is primarily available online, what are the odds someone is going to track down all those links, and print the thing off in one big ass bundle? if they like the author that much, i’d hope they’d just buy the book.
(I had a really long response typed out that my I accidentally deleted! Talk about unpublishing… To try to sum it up again:)
Without agreeing with the author’s reasons, this does showcase how editors, publishers and writers haven’t really figured out all the differences between print and online publication.
When you publish in print, your story is read almost entirely by people at the time of the publication and the number of readers is necessarily limited. Stories are never unpublished, but they fade into the past with the magazines, which is part of the reason anthologies and story collections exist.
With an online publication, the story isn’t merely published, it is in some sense perpetually published. Every time I google a story and it loads in my browser, its been published again. A print magazine gets first serial rights, but an online magazines gets, in some sense, perpetual serial rights. Indeed, it isn’t uncommon for a magazine to link to pieces from “the vaults” on the homepage in a way a print magazine would never do.
This is both good and bad. It is good because a piece can be constantly read. It may be quite helpful to have, say, published an interview last year who has a hot book come out this year. But I could certainly see how it might negatively affect your a collection to have so many stories published online at anyone’s fingertips for free.
Not that I have a solution here, but the problems are interesting.
I don’t think we know the problems yet because it is only just now that online magazines have been big enough or around long enough that someone might publish a book whose stories or poems were almost all published online.
At least I think it should be obvious that just having a story online wouldn’t hurt sales, but isn’t it possible that having 75% of stories online might?
how did the publisher even know the story was there? they never seem to be able to find anything.
I can’t imagine it being a problem. Honestly I think you could post an entire novel, for instance, and it would only have a positive effect on sales, if not perhaps on “prestige.” I think the one thing that *might* not work that way is print magazines, where often you are essentially buying because you recognize one or two names and you want to see what they’re up to, but for instance quite a lot of Rachel B. Glaser’s book is online, including the titular story, and I still hell of wanted the print version, for all sorts of reasons, because she’s a really excellent and entertaining writer.
If people won’t buy your stories because they can read your stories, that’s just another way of saying you’re a boring writer and you need to up your game.
I understand this problem, to an extent, but I think in most cases the reader can discover just how old that piece is with just a little bit of effort. And I’d like to think that in general the kind of people seeking out contemporary fiction or poetry (which they are, in your scenario, even if they’ve accidentally found something a little older, right?) are the kind of people that might put in at least a little bit of effort. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong really with having your older work around to be seen. I mean, there was a time when you thought it was good, good enough to be published, and obviously someone else did, too, because they published it. It might no longer represent you as a writer, but it did once, and that’s something that people might be interested in, maybe.
but I guess I don’t know. maybe people really are just seeing stuff without a clear date and assuming it’s how you write now and not liking it or something.
It isn’t really an issue of whether or not someone CAN find the context/date of publication (you certainly can). But… think of it this way. Say you are an editor and someone mentions a writer you should check out. You google them and find a story that happens to be one of the first they published and don’t like it at all. Are you likely to keep googling to find more work? Probably not. And so then maybe this person won’t be solicited by you, whereas if you’d read their newest work maybe you’d love it.
All hypothetical of course. I don’t know how often if ever this kind of stuff happens.
that’s true. I have lost interest in someone’s writing after one or two poems or stories before. but I don’t know, maybe even if a person had context they might just assume that’s how the writer still writes. maybe it’s just a problem of having older work available at all. but asking for everything to be unpublished isn’t a good solution either. the other day I saw an early version of a poem in an issue of DIAGRAM from some years ago and it was sort of cool to see how it changed and stuff, and I’d hate to lose that. I don’t know anything, though. hm.
Oh yes there is no real solution here. There are merely ways in which online publication is different than print that we don’t always think about (or at least I don’t) when we submit.
Hasn’t Dan W. made the salient point? – namely: an appetizer doesn’t diminish, but rather whets the appetite for a whole meal. I thought that that had been demonstrated to a level of general acceptance: giving some product for free generates more consumer desire, not less. Maybe the print publisher (or the writer) is stubbornly contrarian, or – I’m guessing: more likely – is making a fetish of the indivisibility of the collection.
Also, how “unpublished” is that writer’s work for having been scrubbed from PANK? If even one real fan of the story or writer copy-and-pasted the story to their own blog, or made a PDF of it, or simply printed it – well, the thing then could easily be put in the way of google . . . right?
oh funny this is here. i wrote a couple of days ago like 1500 essay about a similar thing, the malleability of online publishing contributing to its inferiority, etc. i’ll probably delete that essay though it was kind of antagonistic.
Good post, Roxane. I’d like to read that essay, Darby…
Online publishing is still in its infancy, with the oldest mags only 15 years old. For the editors here, think where you’ll be in 15 years, because a lot of these mags just dissappear. Even when you pass along the mag, the archives can disappear. I’ve had that happen to my stories more than once. Since a lot of magazines are run by a small crew with no university associations, it will probably keep happening. Just recently 15 years of Mississippi Review Online with work from lots of famous folks that was available for free just disappeared with the (contentious) retirement of Frederick Barthelme. It’s not clear whether Rick took the archives down or someone at the U, but that was a mouse click that wiped out 15 years.
I’m in the process of starting an online mag at the U. where I work, and there are a ton of hoops for me to jump through. But I sat down with some folks in IT, and as we talked it over, as I brought up archiving possibilities, they told me there just wasn’t an infrastructure for that. If I leave the U, if I leave the editorship, someone from my department could ask that the work be taken down, and it would disappear. I sort of feel I would owe semi-permanence to the writers who gave their work for free and the students who worked on the mag for free, but there just doesn’t seem to be a good answer right now.
As for “unpublishing” printed works… I’ve come around to online mags 100% and would rather be published online. I love the care print editors put into the mag production and I love the objects. But since they don’t reach much of an audience, I tend to think of work printed in print mags as DOA. One of the nice things about Fictionaut is that it allows for both. Previously published works can be put up there, reach a wider audience, and get a second life.
If a writer asks you to take something down, I think the only honorable thing is to adhere to their wishes. They gave it to you for free after all. It was up for a time. I don’t really see why this requires a policy revision.
Probably, it was the publisher who asked the writer to ask to have it taken down. Because the publisher is worried about sales. They might be wrong, but they are investing in this writer, and the writer is entering a contractual agreement that is different than the one PANK entered into with them. You should still be getting a mention on the acknowledgements page.
As Lincoln points out, having most of the work for a book come out first online is new. I tend to be of the camp (seconded here) that having the work in online mags is like free advertising. But I also wonder, as Peter Cole asked a week or so ago (was it here or was it on Facebook?) about the point of saturation. How much do you give away for free and still sell books? It’s easy to see why the publisher would worry.
i dont know if you would. it was pretty depressing. i was trying to suss out a real value in online literature and ended up convincing myself that it really doesnt have value and that people should just accept that. and i get really mean and like how i get sometimes you know.
tucker max is a gawd among bros and bro hoes, the rules do not apply to him
As a couple of people have hinted at, or even explicitly said, one of the odd things about online publishing is indeed those ways that it is different than print. I totally understand the “We could not track down all 1,000 copies of the magazine to tear those pages out.” argument but, at the same time, those copies aren’t easily accessible like stuff on the web is. Obvious enough, but I don’t think people always think about this when submitting/publishing/etc., and most of us certainly weren’t thinking about this 5-10 years ago. Another interesting aspect is, really, stuff online can be “unpublished” but, at the same time, not really/completely. There’s Google cache and the Internet archive and probably other shit I am too unsavvy to know about. I’ve a number of times tracked down “lost” stories from dead journals. If I Google myself right now, the 1st thing is Hobart, the 2nd is a recent Everyday Genius piece, and then 3rd is something from Eyeshot from ’02. Something else still on the first page is from ’03. I mean… I’m still proud of those stories, but they are something like two of the first three things I ever had published, and I’m prouder of them in concept than when I reread. When I was trying to collect my shorts I remembered, oh, I had some cool shorts on rad journals years ago, and then I reread and was like… eh… I’ll stick with the new stuff. But that’s the first stuff that comes up if someone happens to Google me. I’m sure it doesn’t happen often, though I did have a classmate say something like, I read that Lego story of yours online. I liked it. Me: Oh? Really? Thanks. (thinking: yeah, I wrote that when I was like 23. That seems weird.) I don’t know what I’m getting at with any of that, just that that’s that.
I’ve never had anyone ask to take down a story because of publication, and I don’t at all understand the thinking, either from author’s or publisher’s POV. I have a couple times had an writer ask to take down a story because it was “too subversive” or something that sounds super lame like that, but they were trying to get a job and employers kept Googling them and finding weird stories and the author hadn’t really considered that when 1) being self-employed in 2004 when online publishing just seemed like this fun thing that no one knew about, and 2) before Googling job applicants not only happened but became common practice. In those cases, I just took the stories down. It felt weird “unpublishing” something but… I don’t know. Fuck it. Good luck getting a job, dude. You know?
I don’t know what any of that means, except that whiskey is delicious and I felt like typing something…
There is very little, shall we in fact acknowledge, NO evidence whatsoever that online availability hurts the market for the print work. And I’m not talking excerpts, I’m talking the entire work. The only analysis in books with any rigor (ie not sponsored by companies selling anti-piracy software) is by Brian O’Leary at Magellan Media, working with a lot of data from O’Reilly Media (computer book publishers), and a little from Random House and from Thomas Nelson (Christian publishers). Preliminary albeit inconclusive data: free in its entirety online publication increases market for the legit versions (sample size too small to make data conclusive, however.)
Regarding Lincoln’s early comment: “If a book isn’t offering any new content to the reader, does it start to become a kind of charity to buy a book?” I would argue that people do not necessarily buy books for content only. It has to do with many cultural variables like participation, convenience, identity-building, identity-expressing. You can download most any pop song in the world for free, yet people spend billions on iTunes and tens of millions on vinyl…
Shouldn’t every writer have a web site? Wouldn’t that come up first in a Google search by an editor?
As promo, Seth Harwood podcasts his books online — one chapter a week — before the print version comes out. He told me it’s been good for sales of the print book and it’s also sustained and led to greater interest in his work. I’m thinking of following his lead.
I definitely want to see it now…
That’s true Richard, I think my comment was badly phrased. Indeed, I’ve often argued literature has one leg up on music in that people actually buy books for the object and it is an object you directly interact with, thus it has some advantages on ebooks (although some disadvantages as well) while something like a Cd really has no practical advantage over digital files.
And I publish online and edit a magazine that puts up online content, so I’m certainly not against online publishing (and I’m very excited about the work you are doing in this field.)
That said, I do think we are just starting to learn the parameters of the new publishing world so its worth thinking about some of the differences. I’m not sure music is the best thing to bring up though, as music sales are definitely down and most of us here are old enough to remember the moment when half of our friends went from buying several CDs a month to literally never ever buying music, even if some people still buy vinyl or itunes.
Wow! What a weird request. I agree that having stories up online is actually a great marketing tool for the book.
I know print has a permanence to it, but I actually think online journals have more staying power for individual stories. If someone stumbles onto some of your work and likes it, what’s more likely — they go buy a bunch of back copies of lit journals or they read what’s available online? (And if you do have a collection, they probably want to read a couple of pieces online before buying said collection).