Part One: Love It or Leave It! By Doug Lawson April 17, 1997 Here's how it started: A couple of years back, before the launch of HotWired, Salon, and yep, even before good old Tripod as we now know it, I had this idea. Why not get a bunch of good writers together and make a literary magazine? Obviously, I wasn't the first person to come up with this idea. Literary magazines have been around for a long time. I didn't have a lot of money, though. Printing a magazine was out of the question. And who was going to buy some little magazine they never heard of? So I put my magazine online, for free, and the first issue of The Blue Penny Quarterly was born. It was clunky, readable only on a Macintosh, and for a long time it was available only on America Online. People looked at me kind of strangely — bad enough I was putting out a literary magazine, and giving it away, at that. But an electronic magazine? Who was going to read that? Only geeks were on the Internet, went the theory; they'd probably only read geek things, if they read at all. Nowadays, of course, geek has gone chic, and phenomenal numbers of people are reading things online (Hey, you are). Blue Penny went on to become one of the first online magazines to carve out a space for high-quality literary writing on the Internet, and as such it got some decent attention. It was well-reviewed in many computer and writers' magazines, it won Web awards, it got our writers some good attention, and it even got me a day-job creating and editing electronic and print publications. (It even continues now, without me, under another staff. Go figure.) But I think BPQ originally did well for one simple reason: I really loved what I was doing. I was on a mission to bring writing that mattered to an online audience. Nothing was more important to me then putting that thing together. I tracked down writers, sat down with them at the laptop, showed them what their stories could look like online. I talked up the possibilities of online publishing — Hey, you can actually correspond with people who read your work! You can get read in New Zealand! In Antarctica! I spent long nights at the laptop, figuring out what this HTML crap was, and what I could do with it. I'm still on that mission at The Blue Moon Review. Making an online magazine now is a lot easier, though, in part because a lot of people are doing it and in part because the technology is far more flexible. If you can make a home page, you're only a few steps from making a magazine online. And now you no longer have to tell everyone how to get to it, what software to use, and so forth — even car dealers have Web pages these days. Of course now, the challenge is to stand out from the crowd and get noticed. But attention-getting gimmicks aside, in my mind, the small online magazines that are truly successful, and worth reading, are still those put together by editors and staffs who are addicted to their own subject matter. Want to publish a good magazine online? Get addicted. Stay addicted. Love your subject enough to breathe it, day in and day out, and everything else will fall into place. Part Two: Putting Your First Issue Together: What Do You Need To Know? Doug Lawson now edits The Blue Moon Review with the same staff who used to put together Blue Penny. He's a contributing editor to CrossConnect, a Producer at Gameshows.Com, and his collection of short fiction "Patrimony of Fishes" will appear this summer. In his spare time he tries to figure out how to work the VCR. right column content OTHER ONLINE LIT MAGS Entelechy: by Flat Earth Media, founded by Computers/Internet columnist Steven Horn. Fiction, poetry and columns. Black Street, Yellow Moon: a bimonthly e-journal publishing poetry, short fiction, visual art, and opinions. eSCENE 1996: a yearly anthology of the best online-published short fiction. Web del Sol, Locus of Literary Art: dedicated to bringing contemporary literary art to a wide audience.