CUTTHROAT’s Online Only Issue
What’s the issue with CUTTHROAT‘s online only issue? I posed a few questions to Pamela Uschuk, editor-in-chief, about why, the decision-making behind this, and what it might indicate for the future of CUTTHROAT (does going online mean no more print?). Her resonse gives some great insight into how a magazine is run and all the behind-the-scenes people and work required to maintain a quality publication. Here’s her response:
“I can tell you why we made the decision to publish one online edition and one print edition per year. The reason is mainly monetary, but there are side issues worth discussing.
CUTTHROAT is largely unfunded, so Bill Root and I pay to publish this magazine. We receive so many worthy submissions in poetry and short fiction, we felt that printing one issue a year didn’t allow us to publish enough of these wonderful submissions.
CUTTHROAT is truly a labor of love.
None of our editors/staff is paid – except for the judges we hire to judge our national literary prizes. All work is volunteer, and our editors work hard, reading through a mountain of material for each issue.
For the present, we decided that the best option for us is to publish one print edition (this past year’s issue ran to 180 pages!), and to publish one online edition per year. Because we don’t have to pay for reproduction of art work inside the magazine, this online edition allows us to feature visual artists as well as writers.
We choose one guest fiction editor each year to edit the online fiction submissions. This year’s guest editor was William Luvaas. Our poetry editor, William Pitt Root, edits for both online and print editions each year.
The future of CUTTHROAT is bright. We are all committed to publishing this magazine for the long term. We are old-fashioned and love the feel of the print edition in our hands, so we have no plans to to to an entirely online format. We are lucky, each year, to have interns to help us out with logging in submissions, creating data bases, mailings, etc. We also have two terrific web designers, Laura Prendergast and Kevin Watson, who help me maintain our website and set up the magazines.”
Volumes 3 and 5 of CUTTHROAT are available online in PDF format.