Promoting Lit In The Digital Age: Electric Literature Co-Founder Lindenbaum On The Menu

Since it's Friday, we're consumed by thoughts of a relaxing weekend ahead, when we can walk away from our computers for a few hours and read something else besides blogs and online news -- something like a book. After today's mediabistro.com Morning Media Menu podcast, we're thinking of getting our hands on a copy of literary journal Electric Literature. This morning, hosts Jason Boog of GalleyCat and AgencySpy's Matt Van Hoven welcomed Electric Literature co-founder Scott Lindenbaum, who talked about the magazine, which publishes five short stories every quarter. "We are trying to use new media and innovative forms of distribution to make sure that those stories are delivered back to the popular culture in the digital age. And we want to make sure that literature remains vital," Scott said about the project. "So in order to do that, we kind of adopted a new distribution system where we distribute to the iPhone -- we're the first literary magazine to the iPhone. We also distribute in every digital form for all ereaders from Kindles to all ereaders in every file format." Electric Literature also publishes in print, using a service called Print on Demand, which only publishes copies of the magazine by request for subscribers and one-time buyers. This system saves the pub around $5,000 in publishing fees, Scott said. "In using Print on Demand, [we] don't have a print run at all," he said. "When a reader orders a book, that book is custom printed for them. So every book that is printed already has a home...so we can take that $5,000 that any other magazine would have used on publishing and split it up five ways and pay five writers $1,000 for their stories and have the printing costs shouldered on the back-end." Also discussed: how a short story published on Twitter helped boost Electric Literature's Twitter followers and brand recognition. If you want to learn more about Electric Literature, Scott will be at mediabistro.com's eBook Summit on December 15 and 16. You can listen to all the past podcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321.

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Promoting Lit In The Digital Age: Electric Literature Co-Founder Lindenbaum On The Menu

Amanda Ernst

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Amanda Ernst