Photograph by Vincent Migeat / Agence VU

Why on Earth would you start a literary magazine? You won’t get rich, or even very famous. You’ll have to keep your day job, unless you’re a student or so rich you don’t need a day job. You and your lucky friends and the people you hire—if you can afford to pay them—will use their time and energy on page layouts, bookkeeping, distribution, Web site coding and digital upkeep, and public readings and parties and Kickstarters and ways to wheedle big donors or grant applications so that you can put out issue two, and then three. You’ll lose time you could devote to your own essays or fiction or poems. Once your journal exists, it will wing its way into a world already full of journals, like a paper airplane into a recycling bin, or onto a Web already crowded with literary sites. Why would you do such a thing?

And yet people do, as they have for decades—no, centuries, though cheaper printing in the eighteen-nineties, Ditto machines in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, offset printing and, in the past two decades, Web-based publishing have made it at least seem easier for each new generation. In 1980, the Pushcart Press—known for its annual Pushcart Prizes—published a seven-hundred-and-fifty-page brick of a book, “The Little Magazine in America,” of memoirs and interviews with editors of small journals. “The Little Magazine in Contemporary America,” a much more manageable collection of interviews and essays that was published in April, looks at the years since then, the years that included—so say the book’s editors, Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz— “the end of the ascendancy of print periodicals,” meaning that the best small litmags have moved online.

They have, and no wonder: that’s where the readers are. Ander Monson’s quirky journal DIAGRAM (poetry, essays, and actual diagrams) reported forty thousand unique visitors per month in 2014. No print-only litmag could give a poem the viral power of Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke,” which circled the Internet over and over after its appearance in The Awl_._ Web publications, in Monson’s words, no longer seem like “poems written on dry-erase boards”; they seem “as material, as real, as durable, as professional” as the print magazines that—supported by subscribers or by universities—carry on, from Bitch to the Yale Review. It’s not that we don’t need or read print mags so much as that we might not need many more of them—not when we can get so much (and kill fewer trees) thanks to screens.

The story of how little mags went digital can be found by reading through the first and the last few essays among the twenty-two in Morris and Diaz’s volume. You’ll find other stories, too, some of which Diaz and Morris may not quite realize that their book has told. Read their volume cover to cover, and you could get irked by the Oscar-night-style thank yous, and by the self-praise: “We have continuously brought critical minds and creative imaginations together”; Bitch “has interviewed … people we genuinely admired, love, and want to talk to”; and so on. You might also note the surprisingly weak correlation between operating a literary magazine and writing clear, cliché-free prose. Lee Gutkind, the editor of Creative Nonfiction, says he succeeded by “thinking out of the box with a worldview and marshaling the power of the people” as his journal “moved from idea to reality.” Alaska Quarterly Review, its editor says, “continues to serve as a frontline crucible,” perhaps melting down obsolete infantry.

And yet these aspects of the weaker essays reinforce the point that all of the stronger pieces makes: every issue of every litmag requires people to do “the copyediting, the layout, the negotiation,” as Carolyn Kuebler, of Rain Taxi and New England Review, puts it, “the planning and organizing and get-it-done work.” Such people may or may not write sparkling sentences, but if you yourself write sparkling sentences you have to depend on them—and you ought to respect them—if you want those sentences to get read.

Still, having a crack production team, elegant pages, and a balanced budget isn’t enough to get those sentences in front of readers: for a literary journal to succeed, now as in 1974, when Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Smith launched Ontario Revie__w—or, for that matter, in 1802, when Francis Jeffrey and three of his friends launched Edinburgh Review, whose famously harsh (and long) review-essays examined the literary production of the day at greater length, and with more seriousness, than the magazines that had come before—you have to do something that hasn’t been done well before. You can use several different measuring sticks to say whether a litmag “succeeds”: longevity, financial stability, influence on new writers, number of readers, number of imitators launching journals very much like your own. But all these kinds of success come down to whether your journal brings something new to its scene.

It helps if you and your friends are actually creating a new kind of verse or prose—something that existing institutions and their standards of taste will not accept. Bruce Andrews calls his magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which ran from 1978 to 1981, a “mobile bandwagon, not a fortress or a monument.” Thanks to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and to its sister journals in D.C. and on the West Coast, anyone who takes contemporary poetry seriously now knows about the “language poets,” whose hard-to-read new styles rejected both capitalism and clear prose sense. Their early poetry—and their theories about it—could never have appeared in The New Yorker or Poetry back then (though they do now): they needed the space their own magazines could provide.

And their success shows why little magazines matter more, and work better, the stranger and newer their goals. A little magazine, as Jonathan Farmer, of At Length, explains, “depends on creating a community,” and that community has to have some raison d'être, aesthetic or ideological or ethnic or geographic or even generational: part of the point of the great online journal Illuminati Girl Gang, run by the alt-lit poet Gabby Bess, is that its poets and artists speak to, for, and about feminists who are barely out of their teens.

What a new litmag should not be is simply a farm team: we already have plenty of those. If you don’t have a particular aesthetic, a way of reading, or a kind of writing you want to promote, you might seek editorial experience or a venue for your design sense. Maybe you just want to boost your friends. (“Art, if it doesn’t start there, at least ends,” W. H. Auden wrote, “In an attempt to entertain our friends.”) Maybe you like having projects to share with friends (they may not be your friends after you fight about the cover for issue four). But why—other than personal acquaintance—would a famous writer with many other possibilities give you her work? Why would a reader who can choose so many other magazines choose yours?

If you do have defined goals or a clear aesthetic, then you’ve got a reason to attract writers and readers and donors who aren’t your friends—though they’re less likely to turn you down if they know you personally, at least a little. Keith Gessen says that n+1 started because “we were in New York, where things can take on a momentum of their own,” but he doesn’t address the source of that momentum; the least convincing of all the propositions in this volume is the idea that, thanks to the Web, it no longer matters where you live. The advantage of life in a cultural center has not vanished, though it has diminished. You can start a Web journal, publish your friends, and ask better-known writers for contributions, but it helps if you’ve met them; and, if you want to meet them, it helps if you live, or used to live, in Toronto or San Francisco or New York.