Bill Caraher |

The last few months have been a rocky one for the publishing business. From the unexpected demise of The Gettysburg Review to the roiling discontent about the uncompensated use of published books to feed LLM (large language models), it’s been enough to cause even the most committed advocate for the value of writing and reading to despair. So many of the issues facing the publishing “industry” these days revolve around how we value both creative work and the workers in creative “industries.”

We often regard creators and their accomplices in contradictory ways. On the one hand, their work is meaningful, important, and inspiring. In fact, its role in the production of human-like large language models appears to confirm its role as a humanistic foundation on which contemporary society stands. As important work, it deserve (and requires!) protection and compensation whether through the enforcement of copyright laws or more broadly the ethical treatment of creators and those who support their efforts.

On the other hand, there are those who regard such foundational work as a luxury or even as not work at all, but as the expression of our very humanity. The nature of creative work as fundamental to our humanity makes commodifying creative work always a bit of a compromise. There’s no doubt that creators, editors, and publishers deserve to earn a living from their work, but creative work will always overflow the limits of the market economy.

At NDQ, we feel these contradictory appraisals acutely. We not only feel the pressure of doing important work and treating the passionate products of our contributors with respect and care, but we also feel the pressure of not existing in a market driven world where there are rarely enough resources to support our efforts.

These realizations have formed the backdrop to our work with students at NDQ and informed how we understand not only the technical side of publishing a little magazine, but also the human side of working with authors, collaborators, and editors. In some ways, the technical side of editing and publishing is easier. It involves hitting specifications, making deadlines, and managing workflow. Technology, from electronic submission portals to almost instantaneous communication through email, has made our work more efficient and cost effective. Working with a publishing partner has helped us leverage economies of scale and highly skilled (and streamlined) processes and workers.

The human side of editing and publishing is more difficult to manage, but in some ways is more important for making sure that little magazines continue to exist in a time that is hostile to their survival. Part of what this requires is communicating clearly our situation so that an author understands what they’re getting themselves into when they submit to this (or any) journal.

Here are three things that I wish all of our potential contributors knew about the human side to what we do at NDQ.

First, we’re effectively all volunteers. We have no full-time staff and the modest compensation that we receive neither reflects the energy that we devote to this publication or, more importantly, the time. In other words, this journal is very much edited and published by people who believe in its important, but who are not professionally compensated. Our poetry, review, fiction, and non-fiction editors are very good, but they’re also very busy.

Second, we are backlogged. In fact, we’re so backlogged that we periodically turn off poetry and non-fiction submissions. We’re backlogged not only because we edit this journal with our slivers of free time, but because we don’t charge a reading fee and we allow for simultaneous submissions. This is the trade off. We get behind, but you there’s minimal cost to the submitters who can also submit elsewhere.

Third, anyone can download two free issues (volume 85 and issue 87.1/2) and browse our archive. This would give a prospective author a sense for what the Quarterly is like. I’m regularly surprised that submitters don’t know anything about NDQ and haven’t taken he time to read an issue. This makes it impossible to set expectations.

Of course, these things won’t guarantee that an author and our editors will see eye-to-eye, but I do hope that they help build some sympathy for the human side of how the Quarterly operates. This means understanding that a magazine like NDQ isn’t a fully professionalized operation. It continues to exist and operate because people believe in it. We want to publish contributors who believe in it as much as we do, and we hope that this helps them understand (even if they don’t always embrace) the delays, glitches, and occasional rough spots in our editorial processes.

After all, despite the importance of the market in helping creators make a living from their work, there remains another less market driven side of what we do. Part of what allows little magazines like NDQ to continue to exist and even thrive is our shared commitment to creativity despite the relentless pressures of our modern world. This manifests itself in our authors’ willingness to understand the Quarterly‘s situation and to put up with a process dented and damaged by funding cuts and austerity. It also appears in our editors’ efforts to support our authors’ work. In other words, the success of NDQ isn’t so much about process, practice, professionalism, or markets, but about the human side of editing and publishing.

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Bill Caraher is editor of NDQ. He makes mistakes and is overextended, but thanks to his remarkable cadre of editors and contributors continues to somehow make NDQ continue to matter.