Want Attention on Social Media? Submit to These 26 Literary Magazines
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Enshittification
15 min read
The article directly references this term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe how platforms degrade over time. Understanding this concept provides crucial context for why social media algorithms have shifted from follower-based to recommendation-based feeds.
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Filter bubble
14 min read
The article discusses the shift from follower-based feeds to algorithmic recommendation systems. The filter bubble concept explains the broader implications of these algorithmic changes on information discovery and why 'Old Social' worked differently than 'New Social'.
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Little magazine
12 min read
The article focuses on literary magazines and their struggle with social media. Understanding the historical context of little magazines—small literary publications that have existed since the early 20th century—provides perspective on why these publications are 'slow, thoughtful, resistant to the churn of trending topics'.
Hey friends,
It’s been almost two years now since we sent out our last post around social media strategy for writers and literary magazines which seems…kinda insane! Especially because this remains one of our most popular posts out there:
Honestly, did such an excellent job on that one that everything in there is still relevant today. And alongside that, there have been more…erm…shall we say developments in the social media world.
We’re living through what calls the demise of “Old Social.” As it pertains to the indie lit world, well…for years, when a magazine had, say 10K or 20K or whatever-large-number-you-can-conceive-of-for-lit-mags-K followers, one could reasonably expect that 5-10% of them would see any given post, often more.
A Mini Case Study
I’ll take the example of ONLY POEMS (the lit mag I co-run with my husband, Karan). If we were around during the “old social age”, with our nearly 55K followers on Instagram now, that’s a guaranteed 2000-6000 people who’ve opted in to seeing our stuff actually seeing it every time we post and engaging with it also (because, remember, these are folks who’re already followers so highly likely they’ll engage in terms of liking, commenting, sharing, and the big one…actually tapping the link in bio to read!).
Today, with “New Social” in full force (Karten defines this as a recommendation-based feed as opposed to a follower-based feed), these numbers are still achievable, and wildly higher numbers are also achievable, BUT there’s a caveat. With what we’ve noticed at ONLY POEMS, because of how “New Social” works through nearly all social media algorithms, in order to reach “Old-Social” reliable numbers, we need to create content that is more, well, coded for viral-ness. I’m sure there’s a stupid-ass actual term for that, but I just…can’t be bothered. I hate that this is the case now, but that’s the world we live in and unless we all want to pack our lives up and head off-grid, we gotta try and learn the ropes just a little.
With ONLY POEMS, I feel we’ve been able to strike a decent balance. Thankfully, we still have great traction. And yes, part of it is that we do post stuff that goes viral—the algorithm-friendly content that gets us in
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