Literary Websites: A Long List

This post will consist of a list of literary websites and a short description of what they offer/what is unique about them. My main interest is less in grasping their content than in understanding their “business plan” or “special approach” or technical backend. Because this list could become long, you’ll have to click the more button. Here’s a review of several litmags that will serve as a starting point. Here’s a more comprehensive index to browse through.

1. Wordtrip. PHPBB bulletin board lit site. Noncommercial, different genres plus chat.
2. Identity Theory is a nice looking php site that hosts some old weblogs, publishes original fiction, nonfiction, has a manual submission process, lots of robert birnbaum interviews.
3. Bookninja, a blog style site with some odds and ends (contests, humor, cartoons) and a quicktopic bulletin board.
4. Circle Magazine: frames, email submissions, Main page with archives. Print/web editions. Confusing unstructured TOC. Generally high quality content. 1-2 issues a year.
5. Lick Magazine graphically oriented literary ezine, with shorts, eccentric navigation and flashy visual styles (helped by Raspil Iverson’s visuals). This is straight HTML, hand-coded, though most of the work really went into the layout, not the code. No CMS, but doesn’t publish frequently.
6. ProseToad, a quarterly straight-html site, with poetry/fiction/essay/mix. Nonprofit. Email submissions. Forbids derivative works and republishing on the web. Lots of content/amazon partner/functional design. Iffy content.
7. StorySouth, quarterly regional mag with nice front page. Straight HTML, “pretty”, nonexclusive publication, email submission, looks like high quality stuff. Maud’s old haunt.
8. Cosmoetica , straight HTML, provocative poetry lit, lots of iconoclasm. Original poetry too.
9. ProseAX, a difficult to navigate straight HTML site. No more issues, stuff by Kenneth Champeon.
10. Storesonline.net
11. Clean Sheets, an erotic fiction site. Updated weekly. Email submissions. straight HTML, “current issue” and archives. Soemwhat hard to navigate, but all in all, very well run. Mediocre content.
12. Brevity Magazine , a first class first person (usually) personal essay site. Nice layout, publishes rarely, well edited. No CMS. Dinty Moore’s the editor.
13. Intertext, an ancient totally online small litmag. Around since 1991. 3 or 4 issues a year, with different editions (txt, pdf, some ebooks). Simple html, but well laid out and thought out. Good navigation, straight HTML (probably), edited by Jason Snell, nice “Best of” page.
14. Serial Text , James Stegall’s collection of web novellas/novels by various writers published in sonewmedia. straight HTML. Not a litmag per se.
15. Strange Horizons is a nicely laid out litmag , group editing, published weekly. Worth looking into more.
16. Underground Window , nice lit mag with emphasis on poetry. Several poems by one poet on a single page, monthly format. Straight html.
17. The Valve– a group literary weblog. Literary version of crooked timber, with some of the same people. Memberships, unclear what submission policy is, but controlled by pmachine php expression engine cms and rather pretty.
18. Fiction Warehouse . Contests, issues every month or two. Nicely laid out. It has a nice litmag list of their own.
19. Pindeldyboz, a biweekly litmag. Looks nice, lots of content. The main way to browse is through the archive index.
20. Writer’s Focus, a collaborative writing project.
21. Bud Parr and company launch metaxucafe.com , a literary blogging/syndication site. Key Features: Tag Clouds, Built in Forums, Reposting of blog posts from elsewhere. Good concept and execution. The coolest thing about it is the sitemap listing members by subject and geographical region. Here’s an about page, and member posts are syndicated on the front page. Hey, that guy stole my playbook! (a little). It’s run on Expression Engine/pmachine.
22. Fan Fiction, a bunch of derivative works created from well known novels/TV series/movies. Sometimes can be entertaining.