Jenine Bockman, Co-Editor/Publisher of Literal Latté
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with Jenine Bockman, co-editor/publisher of Literal Latté. Launched in 1994 as a free literary magazine for the New York City area, Literal Latté switched from tabloid-newsprint format to an online-only publication in 2004. The journal offers five annual writing contests: the Fiction Awards (deadline January 15), the Food Verse Contest (January 31), the Short Short Contest (June 30), the Poetry Awards (July 15), and the Essay Awards (September 15). Top prizes are $500 for flash fiction and food verse, $1,000 for the other three contests. In 2009 Literal Latté released an anthology of poetry and prose from their 15 years of publishing.
Jenine Gordon Bockman has worked for a variety of publishing houses and arts organizations, including HarperCollins, Henry Holt, the 92nd Street Y, and the Theatre Development Fund. She has a Masters in art history and Bachelors in English, both from Williams College.
Literal Latté, founded by Jenine and Jeff Bockman in 1994, had a unique recipe mixing the content of a top-quality literary magazine with the structure of a local, free paper. This enabled it to offer great new writers unparalleled exposure in the publishing capital and avid readers extraordinary entertainment free of charge. Now it maintains those goals by offering literature free online to the world. For fifteen years now, this exciting brew has been caffeinating minds and careers. Literal Latté has received a Pushcart Prize, Best American Poetry, Best American Essay and Mystery honors.
Q: Your website says that you and co-editor/publisher Jeff Bockman started Literal Latté as "a community literary paper featuring mind-stimulating stories, essays and poems for consumption by New York editors, agents, writers and readers." Can you share some success stories of writers who were discovered in Literal Latté, or other significant connections that were made?
A: I love telling these stories as they remind me that the recipe really works. Jeff and I saw coffeehouses opening all over New York City. We realized these spots offered us a venue for bringing hot literature all over the "publishing capital," which did not yet have a unique literary recipe for the public. So we created a top quality literary magazine, poured it into a friendly free format and offered it in coffeehouses, bookstores and arts organizations. With 30,000 copies per issue, six times per year, we were reaching a lot of readers, not just the folks who usually search out litmags in the dusty back corners of bookstores, but people who had not read a poem since high school and editors who were relying too heavily on agents.
So, first story. We published a story by G.K. Wuori. He had been published in literally dozens of literary magazines over the previous twenty years and had been featured in the very first Pushcart Collection in 1976. But it was not until his story appeared in Literal Latté that an agent called us, he got an anthology with Algonquin and Algonquin came back to advertise it with us. One of the other ways we "caffeinated" the literary equation was offering publishers a place to advertise literary stuff that was cheaper than the New York Times yet still reached a concentrated New York literary audience.
Next story. Robert Bly is sitting at a café in SoHo and picks up a copy of Literal Latté. He selects one of our poems for the Best American Anthology he is currently editing. Again, the crème is getting lifted straight to the top!! Sorry for all the coffee humor, it comes with the territory...
Q: How do you publicize your site and your authors, both online and in the New York literary community?
A: I am still learning how to do online promotion! I have interns sending out updates via Facebook... It is an exciting open road. I am thrilled that we can promote our authors' work on the site by linking to their websites and selling their books if they have them. Someone can discover a work we published from years ago, and instantly get more by that author, ask them questions, buy their books. That's a great advantage of the web. As always, we are having readings and events here that we also use to keep Literal Latté in people's minds and to promote our writers. We had one at KGB Bar this weekend that was terrific.
Q: How have your audience and mission changed, if at all, since you switched to the online format?
A: Actually, the web really mirrors and enhances our original efforts. We were always about being free, unimposing and available to a large audience...and that is what the web is all about too. You no longer have to commit to a $15 literary magazine to taste what litmags offer. That was and still is what we are about. Of course our audience is not as New York–centric anymore. That was the key for selling ads in the hardcopy days. We'll have to see if we reach as many of the "publishing capital" folks, editors and agents. I am happy with being free to more readers. The biggest change for us is I yell at the computer more.
Q: What are the pros and cons of online versus print publishing, in your experience?
A: Well, I am an old-fashioned print person at heart, no matter how much I sing the praises of the web. I do miss the tactile aspects of the old days and getting out to all the cafés and coffeehouses more. But the pros I've listed above, the accessibility, the interactive nature of the web, those are hugely appealing factors. And of course there is cost. Paper and ink are horribly expensive. I don't have to worry about that anymore. That is liberating.
Q: Many literary publishing ventures fold after a couple of years. What are some factors that have helped Literal Latté survive?
A: Insanity! I feel like we got that first issue out (by the way, it paid for itself via ads I sold door to door at stores and restaurants in New York) and it has dragged us along beside it for fifteen years. I am not sure how. I think being free of constraints from either funders or universities helped a lot. No one told us what to publish, or how. So we kept shifting quickly with the times. We had a lot of music advertisers for a while. When they started suffering, we started attracting more publishers. Also we were different. We were really just about the writing, not who knew whom or who was hot.
Q: Though you're an online journal, you only accept postal submissions. Are you looking to add an online submission feature in the future? Why or why not?
A: Yes, I would love to save the paper and make things easier for writers. I am carefully researching it right now. There are a lot of issues from the publisher's perspective that perhaps the writer doesn't think about. How do we read thousands of submissions online? If we need to print out, that is a huge expense for us and the green effect is negated. Will writers be more likely to send off inappropriate work if it is easier for them to do so? We will probably end up charging a small fee (less than it would cost the writer to print and mail the manuscript) to cover our printing costs.
Q: How has Literal Latté been funded, both now and when you had a print edition? What's your advice for other publishers who might be weighing the benefits of a paid subscription base versus reaching a broader audience?
A: When I first moved to New York, I went to a party organized by my alumni association. It was a cocktail party at the Guggenheim and they were charging $20 per person in the 1980s. It was expensive. It was a fancy, tiny event. I went to an organizational meeting for the next year's event and said, why not just get some jugs of wine and a big wheel of cheese and charge $5 per person. They said, sure, you organize it if you think it will work. They were obviously not convinced. But I did do it and it did work. Their way they had brought in about 20 people and made no money. My way, they had over a hundred people come, they made money and it was more fun and effective. That is my economic and literary theory in a nutshell.
Of course, it is different when you have big costs. As I have mentioned, paper and ink are expensive and they cannot be replaced with cheap wine (although wine helps!). But now you can replace your paper and ink costs with cheap online production costs, bringing in not just new but larger audiences.
In the old days we were funded by advertisements, subscriptions (even though we were free we had subscribers outside of New York City and folks who did not want to miss a copy) and finally writing contests: the magic litmag triumvirate (although most have grants instead of ads as the primary income).
Now, we still have contests. We will soon have ads on the site as well. I am still prepping for that (learning the lingo). We just eliminated the subscription income. We also hope to make money from sales of our new anthology in both hardcover and paperback. That is exciting for us as the newsprint format, although more tangible than web format, was never as eternal as the book format. So we have gone virtual and more eternal this year.
To get back to your question...As you can imagine, I am all for the broader audience if a magazine can swing it. Of course if you are affiliated with a university, there will be more issues with a virtual format, I imagine—access and privacy issues. If you are getting grants, they may also demand a more tangible subscriber base or prefer a local thrust.
But I think paid subscriptions are getting more and more limiting as more is available free online. I find, to my delight and horror, that I spend too much time reading free content online. How are traditional mags going to battle that if they expect readers to pay? The literary world is already small, we need to bring in as many readers as possible. We will never be popular in a romance novel kind of way. But we can try to be as inclusive as possible by being free and friendly.
Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of Literal Latté? Are there genres and styles that would not be appropriate for your pages? Conversely, is there a type of work that you wish you received more often?
A: Eclectic. I always say a great meal comes in a feast of flavors and textures and we try to achieve that in Literal Latté. We don't accept issue by issue. We accept what we love and put together a tasty combo each issue from what we have. There is not any style that would not be appropriate. Literary horror, intelligent children's stories...we love to find great writing in any flavor. I am always surprised that the percentage of essays we receive is smaller than the number of poets. Wouldn't you think there would be more memoirists than poets out there?
Q: Why "food verse"? Tell us some of the more imaginative ways that your authors have handled this topic. What don't you want to see?
A: We say for the Food Verse Awards that we want poems with "food as an ingredient." The poem doesn't have to be about food, although it can be. It just needs to use food wisely, even if the poem is about politics. I make a lot of bad food puns playing with the name Literal Latté (stimulating careers, caffeinating minds). I hope the poets do a better job than I do! We just decided it would be a fun award to run as we were in so many food joints and had a foodie name.
Q: Who screens the contest entries, and what criteria are uppermost in their minds?
A: One of the great things about contests for writers is that the magazine must pick a winner from what they have. That means they can have a better chance of success than in a general submission pile. I think it is important to have one person do the first screen of all the contest entries so that there is a level playing field. For a contest you are picking not just the best work, but the best within a limited group. My mom or I do the first screen on contests. She was an editor at Dell when I was a baby and we think very much alike. It is weird. After the first screen we go through again and again. Looking for lyrical language, unique visions, pearls of any sort. We are purely looking for quality and creativity. When we accept something and it turns out the writer has never or rarely been published, we are thrilled. I find that it is the writing that sticks with me that works best. If I read a pile of maybes and come back to them a week later and find that one is still vivid in my mind, that means a lot. I think if the work is sharp, it sticks!
Q: How many submissions do you receive for each contest, how many make it to the final judges, and how many are offered publication?
A: We receive 100-400 submissions per contest. It really depends on the year and the contest. The short short and food verse are inherently smaller groups, self-limiting in their particular natures. That is why the prizes are $500 instead of $1,000. But considering we accept 1% of submissions in general, it ups your chances. Even in a large batch, I am committed to taking at least three (first, second and third prize) and frequently do honorable mentions as well, from that group, so the writer's chances are enhanced. If I strongly feel two pieces tie, I will split an award to give both credit. Usually about ten make it to the final stages of deliberation. That's where the agonizing starts. All pieces are considered for publication, so sometimes something that doesn't win or get honorable mention still gets published as it satisfies us, or harmonizes with other work, in a different way.
Q: What's the best advice you ever received as a writer? As an editor?
A: I am really not a writer although I write the occasional review or essay. Jeff is the writer in the family and I am the editor. It is a great balance. Probably the best advice I get is from Jeff who always makes me keep going no matter how much I want to flag!!
Q: What other literary journals or contemporary writers would you recommend to writers seeking to get published in Literal Latté?
A: I don't think reading other specific litmags or writers prepares one for getting published in Literal Latté. What is important is keeping a balance. Reading—exposing yourself to classics and contemporaries—as you keep writing and sending out. It is probably as enlightening to read the things that are not like us as things that are. It is important for me as I read manuscripts too. To keep reading many other things, varied things, so I keep perspective. It seems to me that asking what to read to prep for Literal Latté is like asking who they should date to prepare them for dating one particular person. No one date will prepare them, but many will, giving a broad spectrum of what is out there. What they want and don't want. Need and don't need. If you read enough, you will get a better sense of where your work fits in and how. And where it doesn't fit. If you think it fits in Literal Latté, I hope we hear from you!
Winter 2009-2010
