Jordan Lapp2007 was a rough year for short fiction. Readership of literary magazines was shrinking, even among the traditionally strong genre markets. Readers of science fiction and fantasy flocked to fully immersive video games, and older readers turned to non-fiction either as required reading for their jobs, or simply to get an edge in the marketplace. Readers, like music listeners, had come to believe that there was so much content on the Internet available free of charge, that they shouldn’t have to pay to read good fiction. No one had yet figured out a business model or a format to adapt to this scary new medium.

The picture wasn’t entirely bleak. In one area, people were reading more than ever. Blogging was starting to take off. In 2006, Wired magazine estimated that 57 million Americans were reading blogs, with some 12 million of them writing their own. I – like many budding authors – was writing my own blog, “Without Really Trying,” that had attracted somewhere north of a hundred readers, which really wasn’t bad for an unknown, barely published author. While my blog was destined to fade into obscurity, I’d learned a few very important lessons on blogging in general. The Internet’s most popular blogs like Boing Boing, Engaget and Gizmodo, all had one thing in common – daily content.

So if more people than ever were reading, how come they weren’t reading fiction? At that time, it seemed like short fiction magazines had simply migrated onto the Internet with little thought of the dynamics of the medium. “Issues” were now electronic, but still launched quarterly, so readers would only return to the site every three months, which is a lifetime in Internet time. Small wonder that magazines like Noctem Aeternus, Grendel Song, and Serpentarius sprang up and then disappeared after only one issue. As I am writing this, City Slab, an online horror magazine, has just closed its doors. It was obvious that traditional business models were on lifesupport. What was needed was a magazine that could combine the best of blogging with an old-style short fiction market. In effect, the short fiction magazine was dead. Long live the short fiction magazine.

EDF launched in July of 2007 with one simple mission: get people reading short fiction again. We would feature a new, easily digestible short story every single day. It would be of flash fiction length ( 1000 words or less ) so that it would appeal to the short attention span of the average Internet surfer. Finally, Camille and I made the decision early on to avoid one of the most common pitfalls of the short fiction magazine – though we were both writers, Camille and I would never publish our own work in the magazine. Was our format revolutionary? Though there were magazines like 365 Tomorrows who published new fiction daily, we were the first to draw all of our content from writers’ submissions. And the response has been incredible. We had 200 subscribers before we opened our doors, and growth was exponential. Today, we have nearly 1,500 RSS and e-mail subscribers, averaging over 10,000 unique readers a month.

If you’ve been to the site, you’ll have noticed the clean lines and uncluttered design of a front page that focuses on the day’s story, and that’s all that most readers will ever see. However, if you look behind the scenes, you’ll find a highly specialized engine for processing large volumes of submissions. EDF’s publishing schedule is one of the most aggressive in short fiction, especially for staff members who volunteer what little time they have away from their families and the ever-present day job. We get an average of seven stories a day, of approximately 500 words each, which works out to 105,000 words per month. That’s a rather large novel. We have to personally respond to over 200 story submissions, deal with reader inquiries, and promote the magazine. And that’s in addition to actually editing and publishing a new short story every day. All that simply would not be possible without a huge administrative back-end written by webmaster Steven Smethurst. Stories are automatically filtered, formatted, and e-mailed at the press of a button. Thanks to his work, Camille and I have been able to focus on what really counts – editing good stories.

There have been some ups and downs. In September, slush reader Scott Cosby left us for health reasons, and we lost another reader to the pressures of life. Though we’ve since had great readers like Davina Colpman and Hillary Degani step to the plate, there were some hairy moments there when we thought we might drown under a tide of slush. We were very nearly victims of our own success. Still, despite the work load, in November 2008, we managed to help launch Every Day Poets, our sister magazine headed by Managing Editor Oonah V Joslin with support from Nicholas Ozment and Constance Brewer, and though there have been a few bugs, the launch has been mostly successful. We now have the technology ( if not the manpower ) to launch several magazines if someone were to step forward and volunteer to head them.

In recent years, many more ezines have sprung up. From magazines like Residential Aliens, run on a shoestring by Lyn Perry, to British magazine The Pigmy Giant, it is now evident that all one needs to start a successful ezine is blogging software and a will to give back to the short fiction community. Is this a good thing? I can’t help but go back to the comparison to the music business I made earlier. In our analogy, large short fiction venues take on the role of music labels. They are threatened, but able to survive given a willingness to adapt to the new medium. Authors, on the other hand, especially new authors, are likened to independent musicians. Since the days of Napster, new bands like State of Shock and Fall Out Boy have been able to get their message out through online sources. All of a sudden, these bands are getting fans as far away as Vietnam. Such is the advantage in publishing online.

EDF has offered an opportunity to authors to gain exposure from a large audience. Their short story has become an ad for their writing, the try-before-you-buy free sample that gets readers hooked on their work. We’ve had reports of authors getting eight hundred click-throughs to their web pages on the day their story goes live at EDF.

Though its exponential growth has slowed, EDF continues to gather new readers. People want to be a part of a successful venture, and we are exploring further avenues to attract investment in order to increase our rates. We see growth through partnership with traditional book publishers, and through growing our forums.

This book represents the very best of our first year in operation, and we hope it will eventually become a collectors’ item. You are welcome to read it straight through, or to pick it up, open it to a random story, and let it take you away for a couple of minutes. Such is the power of flash fiction.

 

Jordan Lapp is the managing editor of Every Day Fiction.  He is a member of both the Codex and Spec 24 writing groups. He recently won first place in the prestigious Writers of the Future contest. In 2007, he decided to combine his love of blogging with his passion for fiction and became a founding member of Every Day Fiction.  He blogs at http://www.jordanlapp.com/withoutreallytrying/.