Why bother

This here online litmag has been around for six years, and nearly fifty thousand people read each issue. But now and then, people still ask us the same old question: “What is…’fail… better’?”

We heard it most recently at last month’s Associated Writing Programs convention in Austin, from a writer who happened by our table at the publishing fair. We started to give our standard answer: “It’s a literary magazine that features the finest fiction, poetry, and visual art.” But we looked out at a sea of tables staffed by hordes of editors of scores of periodicals that till the same field... And we caught ourselves in mid-answer, wondering, What makes failbetter.com different from this quarterly, that review, such-and-such journal... and what makes it better?

Certainly we run top-notch stuff, as you’ll see when you flip through the virtual pages of this, our twentieth issue, which features an unusually eclectic mix of fictionists and poets, the AbEx-gets-happy paintings of Shawn McNulty, and Margo Rabb’s intriguing interview with one of our literary heroes, Anne Tyler.

But again: what sets us apart?

Well, this is an online literary magazine—and one that’s not only, we think, the best of that lot, but fast becoming the most-read too. And while we don’t mean to cast aspersions on our peers who print, our readership dwarfs that of nearly every publication that shared the hall with us at AWP. Add the fact that failbetter.com is easier to find, and costs less—indeed, costs nothing...

So we are distinctive. And we said so, and explained exactly how, to our inquisitive friend, last month, in Austin.

But then he asked us another question: Why do we do this? Why do we bother? And again we paused to ponder.

Of course, we could claim we’re in this for the fame, the fortune, the chicks… or the boy toys. But in the end, our answer is the same as it should be for anyone else in the litmag game: We do this because we love it. And we think we do it well.

That’s why we bother.

TD

P.S. – As our readership grows, so too does our staff: Mary Donnelly has joined us as Poetry Editor, and Caitlin Johnson as Fiction Editor. Both Mary and Caitlin went above and beyond to help make this issue a success, and we're grateful to have them on board.