This year marks the 10th anniversary of the storySouth Million Writers Award. Hard to believe only a decade ago online magazines were so looked down upon by the literati that we had to start our own award to honor online-published fiction. Now online publishing and ebooks are all the rage. Go figure.
I'll be writing more about the award in the coming weeks, but until then I wanted to share a list collected by author Robert Laughlin. Robert went through the archives of the last nine MWA award cycles and collected those magazines and journals which have passed into the great literary afterlife, both in the last year and in the last ten years.
The reasons for this vary — sometimes the editors lost interest in their magazines or no longer had the free time to donate. In a few instances, editors passed away. Others shut down their magazines in fits of angst and anger at whatever injustice they believed was keeping their magazine from reaching wider audiences. Others were shut down by their corporate owners because they didn't generate enough revenue (yeah, I'm looking at you, Sci-Fi Channel, now known by the disease sounding name of Syfy).
WARNING! BLATANT PRODUCT PLACEMENT! In case you're interested, I touch more upon the nature of online magazines in the introductions to my two recent anthologies of MWA stories: Million Writers Award: The Best Online Science Fiction and Fantasy, which focuses on SF/F stories, and Million Writers Award: The Best New Online Voices, which highlights non-genre stories. The anthologies also collect stories from some of these defunct magazines (and are available in ebook editions for only $2.99).
So what happens to the stories which weren't collected in anthologies or reprinted elsewhere? Hard to say. Some of these journals can be found in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Maybe some day a reader will stumble up a long-ignored story and bring it to the attention of the larger world. But I also know that some of the stories published in these dead online magazine are gone forever. When I was editing my MWA anthologies there were several stories I wanted to reprint but I could no longer locate either them or their authors.
Such stories now exist only in the minds of those who once read them.
Now that we're done with such a depressing thought, here are the lists. Please note that all of these magazines and journals are named because they placed at least one short story on the listings of MWA notable stories of the year. If there are any errors or missed online magazines, please add them into the comments below.
MWA JOURNALS THAT CLOSED IN 2012
- Cezanne’s Carrot
- Dark Sky
- dispatch litareview
- Dragonfire
- The Dublin Quarterly
- elimae
- Girls with Insurance
- In the Snake
- kill author
- LITnIMAGE
- Lost Magazine
- Night Train
- (parenthetical note)
- Rough Copy
- Saltimbanque Review
MWA JOURNALS THAT CLOSED BEFORE 2012
- 3711 Atlantic
- 42opus
- 5_Trope
- Aberrant Dreams
- Abjective
- Absent Willow Review
- Afterburn SF
- Alsop Review
- Arkansas Literary Forum
- Arriviste Press
- Atomjack Magazine
- Baen’s Universe
- Big News
- Blithe House Quarterly
- Bosphorus Art Project Quarterly
- Bullfight Review
- Cautionary Tale
- Cherry Bleeds
- Conversely
- Coyote Wild
- Crime Scene Scotland
- DayBreak Magazine
- dead drunk dublin
- deathlings.com
- The Deepening
- Demolition
- Dogmatika
- The Edge of Propinquity
- Edit Red
- Eleven Bulls
- The Exquisite Corpse
- Fantasy Magazine (merged with Lightspeed Magazine)
- Farrago’s Wainscot
- Fawlt
- Fiction Attic
- Fiction Warehouse
- Fiction Weekly
- Figdust
- FlatmanCrooked
- A Fly in Amber
- Fortean Bureau
- Gator Springs
- Gowanus
- Green Integer Review
- Hardluck Stories
- Helix
- The Hub
- The Infinite Matrix
- Infinity Plus
- Ink Pot
- Kennesaw Review
- The King’s English
- Lamination Colony
- The Land-Grant College Review
- laurahird.com
- Lit Rag
- Lone Star Stories
- Me Three
- MWU: Muslim Wake Up!
- Nerve
- Newtopia Magazine
- Noneuclidean Café
- Outsider Ink
- The Paumanok Review
- PERIGEE: Publication for the Arts
- Pindeldyboz
- The Pittsburgh Quarterly Online
- Plaztik Press Literary Magazine
- Poets & Artists
- Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k)
- Potion
- The Quarterly Staple
- Raging Face
- Reflection’s Edge
- Rouse
- Rumpus
- Salon.com (listed b/c they no longer publish fiction)
- SCIfiction
- Serendipity
- SFReader.com
- Shred of Evidence
- Small Spiral Notebook
- Socialist Review
- Southern Gothic Online
- Southern Hum
- Spoiled Ink
- Steel City Review
- Susurrus: The Literature of Madness
- Taint
- Thieves Jargon
- Thirst for Fire
- Three Candles
- Thunder Sandwich
- Tryst
- Twelve Stories
- Velvet Mafia
- Verbsap
- View Unplugged
- Weekly Reader
- Writers’ Bloc
- You Must Be This Tall to Ride