Why Carve Won't Have an iPad App Anytime Soon

In early 2011, I sent this email to our fans and followers, letting them know that we were breathing new life into Carve after our yearlong hiatus, and we were moving forward into the digital age with full abandon. Kindle! iPad! Apps! We wanted to do it all.

I spoke too soon and made the mistake of not doing my research. (Bad Editor!) It’s been a year-and-a-half since that email, and obviously no iPad app is in sight.

Why?

The first reason is cost. They’re insanely expensive. The price quotes I got in 2011 were eye-bulging. I quickly became discouraged. I set the idea on the back burner and instead focused on getting our annual anthologies on the Kindle and in iBooks, which was far less costly. (Success! Download an anthology today and we’ll love you.)

I had a brief spark of renewed hope for an iPad app when I went to the 2012 AWP conference in Chicago this past March. There was session on creating iPad apps: “Behind the Scenes of Implementing a Successful iPad and Tablet Publishing System.” I thought, Great! I’ll find some lit mags that have done it successfully and learn their formula!

Wrong. The session was little more than a poorly-done sales pitch. Most of their clients were big-name publishers—think Time, Newsweek, USA Today—and when pressed for hard numbers on how much it would cost to get an iPad up and running for us little guys, the small press mags, the answer was “in the ballpark” of $10,000. The room groaned and moaned.

So they clearly didn’t know their audience, but there was also a simple truth: apps aren’t cheap. It’s a new, booming business right now, and developers are a hot commodity. The laws of supply and demand are going to keep those prices up. There’s a reason low-cost, non-profit magazines don’t have an app. They just can’t afford them. This will slowly change in time as prices lower; in fact AWP has just announced the iPad edition of their “Writer’s Chronicle” publication. But the AWP is a subscription-based magazine. We are not.

The second reason is viability. After the AWP session I’d pretty much given up hope. But I still wanted to develop an iPad app, I just couldn’t. But that desire quickly dissipated after I read this article on boingboing.net, tweeted by Submittable sometime last month: “Why Tech Review is Ditching Its iPad Edition.”

Tech Review spent $124,000 on developing their iPad editions and sold 353 iPad subscriptions. Whaaaa…? Unless they were priced at $351.27 per subscription, that was a terrible, terrible investment. So what happened?

This article makes the case that not only are iPad apps expensive to create, they’re really not very useful. From the Tech Review editor Jason Pontin himself:

But the real problem with apps was more profound. When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, “walled gardens,” and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens. For readers, none of that beauty overcame the weirdness and frustration of reading digital media closed off from other digital media.

Now, granted, literary magazines aren’t news publications, and our stories and prose probably don’t feature a lot of links. But digital media is increasingly social and open. The success of an app, on the other hand, is dependent on a user staying within the app.

After reading this article, I realized the problem wasn’t just money—it was figuring out what people would do in a Carve app. Our stories are free to read online. What would an app offer that they couldn’t already get on our website? What kind of awesome features could we tout other than “Read our stories! On here!…..Instead of over there….?”

I had lots of ideas about creating interactive multimedia bonanzas that would hypnotize everyone. But I also realized we’re a small operation and our strength isn’t in multimedia, it’s in short stories. So I realized, it’s just not meant to be. We won’t be publishing an iPad app anytime soon. In fact, we’re going the other way and will soon be launching a premium print edition with more to read than just the stories. Choosing print over digital? Well, I’ll leave that explanation for another blog post.

The Editor Speaks at AWP2012

Earlier this year I attended the AWP Conference in Chicago and served on a panel for “A Year in the Life of Electronic Publishing.” It was a fantastic experience, and I got to meet the good folks behind a number of other online lit mags: Escape Into Life, Cortland Review, and Cellpoems. We’re all online journals and we face unique challenges and opportunities using the electronic platform as our medium of distribution.

Eric Smith is the brainchild behind Cellpoems, a publication that sends a new poem straight to your cell phone via text message once a week. Their unique approach began just a couple years ago and they have been growing strong since.

Guy Shahar founded the Cortland Review, one of the first online poetry publications way back in 1997, and it has since transformed into a multimedia journal that publishes audio and video of poetry readings, interviews and a candid look into the daily lives of select poets.

Escape Into Life, the project of editors Matt Dye and Jason Reynolds, is a unique journal that blends the lines between visual arts and literature until it becomes a work of “Visual Poetry.” They’ve recently updated their site and are adding more work to their collection.

The Cortland Review, being the videophiles that they are, filmed our panel session and have just published it on their site. It’s embedded here in its entirety or you can jump direct to my portion of the presentation which starts at the 3:26 mark. (Thanks to Guy Shahar for his efforts in producing and intercutting the video with our respective presentations.)

Since the conference we’ve updated the Carvezine.com website, so the clips of the site are now outdated. Still, you can gain some insight as I give a brief overview of the history of Carve, explain my vision for the magazine and its future, and detail an outline of the successess and struggles we had in 2011.

(Sorry that I talk a little fast - it was exciting but a little nerve-wracking to speak to such a large audience.)

Thanks to everyone who attended. Did you attend the panel session at AWP? If so, let us know in the comments!

The Perils of Being a Literary Magazine in Dallas, Texas

Dallas, Texas. It’s generally believed the three most common activities here are eating, shopping, and driving.Being a literary magazine based in Dallas, Texas is no easy feat. Dallas is a wonderful city, with more to offer than most people give it credit for, but the fact is the three most common activities here are eating, shopping, and driving (presumably to go eat or shop). Unlike the artistic spheres of New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and L.A., Dallas lacks a vibrant literary culture.

This is not to say we don’t have our organizations dedicated to expanding the reach of literary arts. We do, and they’re doing great work. The Writer’s Garrett is a year-round, full-service literary center dedicated to fostering reading and writing in the local community. They host workshops, conduct informative panel sessions, and have the CAMP program which allows community writers and leaders to work together. I have participated on panels and as a mentor in the CAMP program. Wordspace Dallas also features salons, workshops, and literary readings, several of which I have attended. I’ve been a workshop presenter at the Highland Park Literary Festival for three years. The leaders of all of these organizations have worked tirelessly, and I’m thankful for their dedication.

But admittedly, I can’t help but crave seeing more for Dallas. Attending the AWP Conference for the first time this past February/March in Chicago was eye-opening. I met writers who knew editors at both big and small publishing houses. I met people who had started their own small presses and had part-time employees working for them within a couple of years. I was astonished at how many writers had tapped into their communities as a main resource to help with funding and manpower.

As the editor of an online magazine based in Dallas, networking and using the community as a resource had rarely crossed my mind. In retrospect, it feels like sheer luck I managed to stay in touch with so many writers (and my teacher, Kristin) from my creative writing classes at UT Dallas. And I know now that what kept us glued together for so long was, in fact, Carve. I took over in January 2007, after I had graduated the previous month. I reached out to my former classmates to ask them to volunteer as readers, and in turn we created our own workshop group to keep us focused on our own writing. Throughout the past five years, we continued to maintain what we started with Carve as I worked full-time and so did they. Growing Carve and expanding our literary community was a distant, faraway thought that I rarely indulged in.

AWP Chicago 2012.But then AWP happened. I left AWP with a vision: I want Dallas to become a literary hub, with universities that produce some of the best writers, schools that encourage creative writing, maybe even a publishing house. I want Carve to become a staple of Dallas - despite our identity primarily as an online magazine.

We have creative writing programs peppered throughout our schools and universities here in Dallas, but we don’t have anything threading them together. We don’t have enough literary agencies or small presses to convince people it’s worth it to stay in Dallas and shop around your book rather than move to New York or Boston and schmooze with the big-name agents and editors.

I’ve found myself in a curious predicament: being an online literary magazine with an international audience and yet envisioning a more local appeal. My dedication and committment to Carve will never wane. (My abrupt, year-long hiatus in 2009-2010 that I truly regret taught me that.) But in moving forward with ventures for Carve I’m also looking for ways to bring more to Dallas’ literary arts scene. It’s exciting and daunting, but I’m determined. And I know it will be a lifelong pursuit.

A sample of our awesome staff of readers.One thing that I did learn at AWP, however, was that we’re quite lucky to have an extensive staff of volunteer readers. While I recognize we lean female-heavy (we’re actively working to diversify our staff), these readers are top-notch. We published some of our best stories in 2011, and I believe it’s due in large part to their careful eyes. I’m thankful for their contributions and dedication, and I think it speaks to the desire for there to be a stronger literary network here in Dallas.

I love Dallas, having grown up here. And I love literature, having surrounded myself with it since I was in elementary school. It’s perilous, yes, being a literary magazine in Dallas. Many people I meet have no idea what it involves or what it is exactly I do. (They often think I publish my own work, which I then have to explain is not exactly custom in the lit world.) But it’s also exciting, because there’s so much opportunity for growth. We can create our own identity. We can try new things and take risks. I’m truly esctatic to move forward with Carve and help create a more vibrant, widespread community here in Dallas that truly values and encourages the literary arts.

But just how will we do it? We have lots of ideas, but we’re still refining and developing them. We plan to strengthen our own network here and develop more events that will bring the college and local writing communities together. We’ll be rolling out ideas, new features and events throughout the year and even into next year. We hope you’ll come back soon to find out more about them and our attempts to make Dallas a little less perilous for writers.