In college, my classmate who was also an English major in in a lot of the same writing pop fiction classes I was in said he would never submit his work to an online journal or magazine because of the lack of recognition he'd get, and he would rather have his work memorialized in print (he sounds arrogant, but he was a really humble guy, a great writer, and our university's poetlaureate) I've had 3 of my shorts published in print. I'm looking now and I've realized that a lot of journals and magazines are switching to ePublishing. One had been around since the 1960s but in 2011, switched to an online magazine. The way I feel is "a publication is a publication; SOMEone liked your work well enough to have their organization associated with it!" But I keep thinking about what my classmate said and I hesitate. Thoughts?
I don't see "a publication is a publication," personally. There is a big difference between landing something in The New Yorker vs. an online pop-up literary journal. That being said, there are some pretty prestigious online publications like Blackbird and others. I don't really see that journals are switching to an online-only approach, leaving print. I'm not say it doesn't or hasn't happened, but I'm not seeing it as any sort of big trend. I have seen more publications adding an online component. I don't mind my work being published online, but I do like to be aware of what publishing in a certain place means in terms of the path I am on with my writing. Because, again, not all publications are created equal when it comes to both online and print. As for your friend and his comments, sure, it's nice to be in print, but it doesn't quite memorialize your work. If anything, having your work online could potentially reach more readers (this is something that also comes down to who is publishing your work). I was in a really big print publication not too long ago. It felt really good, but then it was over. A new issue comes out and your great story becomes old news. My story from this publication is also online as well as having been in the print version, which I see as a good thing. That being said, I have a friend who had a piece published just online for a well-known journal and more than one agent reached out to her as a result. I want to publish and write stories that will get noticed. I think being smart about where you submit is important where this is concerned. I also want someone to be able to google me and be able to see some of my work. I don't restrict myself to only submitting to the big dogs, but I do want an acceptance to feel like an accomplishment and something I worked hard to get. Man, are they hard to get.
I'm kinda biased towards print. This may be because I started writing before e-publications were really a thing, but I still have the feeling that the internet's kind of a fad. Not that the internet itself will ever go away, but pretty much everything on it, aside from a few exceptions, has a pretty short half life. Putting things on the internet is cheap, so it's easy to have a business that starts with little capital, has low standards of quality, sucks in ad revenue with click throughs, and can disappear with very little risk to the people who started it. Brick and mortar establishments that produce physical things, though, are something that people kind of have to put more effort into to make a profit, and to me that means a higher standard of quality. I'm not saying that I'd tun my nose up at electronic publishing, but print publishing holds a bit more gravitas in my opinion. Plus, holding a wad of paper that someone paid you to put your name on is kind of nice.
