Back It Up
Navigating the Transitory State of Online Publishing
Art by Simon Bisley
Online magazines, anthologies, and other publishing venues seem fun, cool, and enticing especially when you see some quality writers included in the bylines. Recently Catapult decided to shut down their online magazine and stop offering classes so they can pursue a neuroscience foundation. These are people with shitloads of money, disrupting an established community for writers and teachers.
Pretty shitty if you ask me.
Then you have Bear Creek Gazette which folded after the founder announced his depression was getting to be too much and he needed to work on his mental health. This move is good for the creator, but this same move leaves a bunch of books without a home, most notably Kyle Seibel’s Hey You Assholes.
Once again, pretty shitty if you ask me.
However, these aren’t out-of-the-norm experiences in the publishing industry. If you’ve been chronically online and have had pieces published anywhere online, this is pretty commonplace. Publishers come and go in the blink of an eye.
*snaps finger majestically a la Thanos*
This isn’t something Stephen King will tell you in On Writing and this isn’t something famous egirl Joyce Carol Oates will tweet. Now I will give both of them some grace since they came up pre-internet, but still, this phenomenon should be mentioned more often in publishing and writing articles.
Those pieces you worked your ass off to submit and get published online, might disappear tomorrow. As a matter of fact, uploading a homemade sextape has a much higher chance of lasting on the internet compared to online fiction mags. A ton of the links in my bibliography dating back to 2008 don’t even work anymore. The domains no longer exist, the servers have digitally rotted into the either, and no one has saved any of this. As a matter of fact, some of these magazines can’t even be found on the wayback machine i.e. the penultimate internet archive.
This is something you must prepare for. Backup your own work. Save it. Save it again. Email it to yourself, email it to your friends. Print out a copy. Save a copy on google drive, dropbox, and maybe even on a physical thumbdrive. Screenshot it if you have to.
Maybe even start a scrapbook so you can show your kids, your lover, your robotic companion, your family, and friends your steady rise to bestseller status.
There was a time I finished writing the 1st draft of my second book A Lightbulb’s Lament in college and the very next day my laptop got the blue screen of death. Nothing could be done to fix it. 20k plus words down the drain. I contemplated giving up writing forever, but instead I decided to hold myself accountable and I asked myself what is this moment trying to teach me.
Back your shit up, the universe responded.
I have lost a few short stories because I foolishly believed the internet is forever. That’s what they tell you over and over like a pop-infused mantra. I am here to tell you my friend(s), internet publishing is like building beautiful sandcastles that will most likely disintegrate into the ether one day depending on the digital wind patterns, geoengineering, tragedy, trauma or foolishness.
You never know what might happen to your favorite online mag tomorrow. Just look at Dark Recesses Press on the brink of death, begging people to support them. They used to be a household name. Honestly, I forgot they existed…
I could probably make the case for supporting your favorite publications, but I might save that for another day. Just remember one thing…
Back your shit up because one else will.
People talk shit about Microsoft Word but I've been paying for it for about a decade in part because it comes with 1TB of cloud storage.
Haven't lost a word of anything I've written in Word since 2013.
Been there more times than I want to recall.