We know a lot of poets who love holding books in their hands, actual books with pages to turn and dog-ear and scribble notes upon. That’s something that doesn’t happen with digital poetry journals.
Given that we fund this operation ourselves, we’ve set it up so it doesn’t make us bankrupt. Website hosts and domain names and submissions systems do add up in cost, but it’s doable for a small journal like ours. Digital publishing allows the dissemination of poetry to anyone who wishes to read it, which is an amazing gift. We love to think about the fact that some kid in high school in Indiana can read us just as well as a poet-farmer in rural England or an urban dweller on New York’s Upper West Side. The variety of submissions tells us that our digital reach is doing exactly what we’d hoped: offering a place for poetry to people from multiple layers of society whether from a home computer or a shared computer at school or in a library.
But we still have a gap. There are those who do not like using digital platforms, who love the smell of paper, whose eyes feel strain when they read on a screen. And that is why we have made an account on CreateSpace and are working to get our winter edition available to purchase in print form on March 15. This is a learning exercise for us, so bear with us as we figure this out. If this works as we hope, we’ll be able to offer future editions through CreateSpace as print versions. We don’t have a price point yet and that is one of the things we have to learn.
Any money that might come in from this venture will have to go right back into the cost of running Gyroscope Review, so until such time as we make a profit (a long-shot for poetry journals, but we can dream), please know we aren’t paying ourselves. People who don’t work in this field may not know how hard it is to come up with a sustainable model that pays everyone when a journal is still trying to gain a decent audience. Our main goal is to make poetry available to all and we hope that is your goal, too, if you submit to us.
We look forward to this next chapter of Gyroscope Review. We’ll keep you posted.
P.S. Our current reading period is open until March 15! Keep ’em coming. Guidelines here.
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