Why Magazines Fail
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There’s big trouble in the world of little magazines. In the last two years, an alarming number have vanished into that second-hand bookshop in the sky. Ambit, Agenda, The White Review, The Cardiff Review, Popshot, Bad Form, The Moth, bath magg, Honest Ulsterman and Five Dials all ceased publication since 2023; each leaves the world a little quieter, a little poorer.
The ‘little magazine’ – we’re not talking about Carp Fishing Monthly, but The London Magazine’s kindred spirits; the kind of journal that prints poems and literary fiction – has always had a fragile existence. Their circulation rarely reaches 2,000, and is usually closer to 200. ‘The little magazine is one which exists, indeed thrives, outside the usual business structure of magazine production and distribution; it is independent, amateur and idealistic,’ as the poet and critic Ian Hamilton put it in his study, The Little Magazines. Theirs is a world of ‘small resources, small respect for the supposed mysteries of “how to run a business”, small appeal outside a very small minority of readers’.
But their loss is no small matter. When Ezra Pound wrote in 1930 that ‘the history of contemporary letters has […] been written in such magazines’, this was not just puffery. Through his own ties with the likes of The Little Review, Poetry and The New Age, Pound ushered into print ground-breaking writing by H. D., Yeats, Joyce and T. S. Eliot. (Eliot’s own influential magazine, The Criterion, had a circulation of around 400.)
‘The commercial magazines have been content and are still more than content to take derivative products ten or twenty years after the germ has appeared,’ Pound wrote. A century on, nothing has changed: little magazines cultivate major talents who would otherwise go unpublished, building up their reputations before commercial outfits reap the fruit of their daring. When I spoke to Ambit’s final editor, Kirsty Allison, she voiced the same complaint: ‘Ambit’s job had largely become talent-spotting for the industrial publishing complex, yet it wasn’t remunerated within that context.’
The White Review had a good record of finding fresh meat for the ‘industrial publishing complex’. The most high-profile casualty of the post-2023 cull, it introduced readers to Sally Rooney and Claire-Louise Bennett before either had published a book. The magazine ‘relied on Arts Council England funding for a substantial portion of its annual budget between 2011-2021’, but when later funding requests were unexpectedly rejected, it was left high and dry, as its team explained in 2023, announcing an indefinite ‘hiatus’.
It’s a familiar story. Publishers that build public funding into their business model are put in an impossible position when the money is suddenly yanked away. Earlier this year, the small Bad Betty Press resorted to online crowdfunding to cover its running costs, after its latest Arts Council application was rejected.
When it comes to public arts spending, the UK is one of the stingiest countries in Europe. Most European governments have increased the amount they spend on culture per capita since 2010; the UK has not, instead launching a programme of swinging cuts. Between 2010 and 2023, the Arts Councils’ core government funding decreased by 18% in England, 22% in Scotland, 25% in Wales and 66% in Northern Ireland; meanwhile, local government revenue funding for culture in England decreased by 58%.
Asking why so many literary magazines have been closing, I’ve seen the same reasons crop up time and again: falling advertising, shrinking subscription figures, fickle funding and above all rising costs – paper costs, postage costs, the general cost-of-living crisis.
‘It is, to say the least, a depressing time to be a fan of literary magazines,’ wrote Amy Mae Baxter, in a 2023 Guardian article. The founder of Bad Form (a magazine for writers of colour), she spoke for many editors in her exasperation. ‘The cost of printing magazines has grown astronomically… Well-meaning people are always keen to suggest ideas about how to fund the magazine. “More subscription content!” Who’s going to write it? I have a full-time job. “Take on more advertising!” Who wants to read a literary magazine that’s full of ads? And “why not just cancel the print issue?”, which always makes me sad. Print editions of literary magazines are important. For unpublished, radical writers, they can be life-changing. They give weight to voices that are all too often ignored by the mainstream publishing industry.’
She concluded on a hopeful note – ‘As long as I can, I’ll be printing issues of Bad Form.’ Bad Form printed its final issue just one year later.
Too often magazines die with not even a whimper, let alone a bang; they make no public announcement at all.
Not all that long ago, small magazines seemed to be booming. The Independent (which scrapped its own print edition in 2016) began the last decade by publishing a guide to a ‘fresh breed of literary magazines’ set to shape the 2010s, each aiming to fill that ‘empty slot on the bookshelf between your pristine copies of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and Granta’.
Of the eight magazines listed as The Independent’s new wave – Litro, Popshot, Five Dials, Ambit, Gutter, Stingray, The Drawbridge and Pen Pusher – seven seem to have stopped publishing new issues, with Pen Pusher folding mere weeks after the feature was published. (Gutter, a beautifully designed Scottish biannual, is the lone survivor.)
I say ‘seem to have stopped’, as it can be hard to know when a ‘hiatus’ is permanent. Too often magazines die with not even a whimper, let alone a bang; they make no public announcement at all. As an insomniac with too much time on my hands, I used to make a hobby of visiting ‘zombie’ magazine websites, left running like eerily lit shop windows for long-empty branches of Woolworths. As late as 2022, the Edinburgh Review’s homepage was still chirpily advertising its ‘extraordinary new issue’ (published eight years previously) and continued to do so until the URL was hijacked by a Russian online casino.
Litro’s website is still selling subscriptions at £44 a year, which it claims will buy you a ‘quarterly print magazine’. Judging from its online shop, it published just one issue in 2022, then one in 2023, and none since. I wrote to ask about this erratic schedule, but received no reply. So it’s tempting to add it to the list of post-2023 casualties – but there are signs of life, after a fashion. Its American offshoot, Litro USA, puts short stories online from time to time. And Litro’s website is advertising paid ‘Masterclasses’ for Autumn 2025, including one called ‘Monetize Your Writing’. Oddly, the fee for this is not listed. I clicked ‘join the course’ and was redirected to a 403 Error page.
It seems a sad decline for a magazine which once printed 12 issues a year and boasted a staggering circulation of 100,000. Founded in 2006, Litro was handed out for free to commuters at train stations, its name winking at Metro’s similar distribution model. But, post-pandemic, that model was no longer secure – as evidenced by the gutting of now-weekly Evening Standard.
If an enormous circulation can’t guarantee long-term survival, perhaps joining a magazine group might. Is there safety in numbers? When I asked Ambit’s Kirsty Allison if anything could have saved her magazine, she guessed it might ‘have continued to exist in quarterly form as part of a larger stable carrying the possibility of wider distribution and advertising’. Well, perhaps – but joining a large stable didn’t save Popshot.
Declared ‘the new face of British poetry’ by Prospect magazine in 2010, Popshot reached far more readers than most of its longer-established peers. Colourfully illustrated on every page, publishing young writers and aiming at a young readership, it was founded as a one-man operation by Jacob Denno (who went on to become a copywriter for Innocent, writing those blurbs on the back of their fruit smoothies). Denno ran the magazine for nine years before selling it in 2017 to the Chelsea Magazine Company (CMC) and standing down as editor. At the time of the sale, it was one of the UK’s most widely read ‘little magazines’, with a circulation of 6,000.
CMC appointed a new editor, Matilda Battersby, who ran Popshot until it closed in 2023. ‘I wish I had known that it wasn’t going to survive,’ she tells me. There were upsides to CMC’s ownership. It could use the group’s art director and marketing team, while shared distribution meant Popshot appeared in places poetry magazines are seldom seen, from airport bookshops to WHSmith. With just one person on the editorial team (Battersby, part-time), it was possible to run the magazine ‘at fairly minimal cost for five years’.
Battersby loved the work, but there were tensions which came from being absorbed into a large commercial outfit. ‘It felt like [Popshot] was very low-priority for the business, like it was always a fight to make sure it was getting a seat at the table… I don’t really know why CMC bought it, as it didn’t have a huge amount of commercial potential.’ Its unique layout wasn’t compatible with advertising. Nonetheless, ‘It had a really passionate audience, people who absolutely loved reading it, who would post about it and write about it… this really strong community around it meant that we had leverage whenever there was a discussion over whether it was worth continuing with.’
If Popshot was CMC’s ragged Cinderella, from the outside it was seen as a rich part of a major money-making operation; the conflict inherent in that left Battersby feeling uneasy. ‘We didn’t pay people, which is awful… We actually got a lot of criticism for that at the time, and I spent a lot of my time apologising to people for that fact. We had ‘guest’ – which essentially meant established – poets and authors for every issue, and we did pay those people. It was a little bit awkward.’ It’s very common for small independent poetry magazines not to pay contributors, but rare for those owned by large commercial outfits not to offer a fee. With one foot in each world, Popshot was in an unusual position.
It had been eaten by a big fish – which was in turn eaten by an even bigger one. When Telegraph Media Group bought CMC in 2023, Popshot was quickly killed off. ‘When it was bought by the Telegraph group, essentially the magazine didn’t fit,’ says Battersby. ‘The other magazines in their stable were about pretty houses and gardens, independent school magazines, that sort of thing, for a very particular audience. We were this scrappy little literary magazine that was fun, funky, and had quite a young readership.’ (I contacted CRC to ask about the reasons for Popshot’s closure, but did not receive a reply.)
No-one would expect a commercial magazine empire to keep a small literary journal running out of charity. But eyebrows were raised when Hamish Hamilton – one of the wealthiest literary presses, part of Penguin Random House – announced it was scrapping its magazine Five Dials in 2023. Five Dials seemed like it would endure forever: it had a glowing reputation (publishing everyone from W. G. Sebald to Ali Smith), a stable owner with sympathetic interests, and low production costs (no print edition, just a PDF). With no urgent reason to close, it declared it was ending its 16-year run to ‘make space for all the new talent’. In the current landscape, this felt a little like a hospital announcing it would close down to make space for all the new patients.
When Ambit was listed alongside Five Dials as part of that ‘fresh breed’ in 2010, it was already very long in the tooth. Founded in 1959 by Martin Bax (who edited it for decades), Ambit had an illustrious history; over the years it had J. G. Ballard as fiction editor, Carol Anne Duffy as poetry editor and Edward Paolozzi as art director. It published early work by a then-unknown Deborah Levy and Max Porter.
Kirsty Allison was its final editor. ‘I’m still heartbroken by the loss,’ she tells me. She paints a grim picture of the workload involved in editing a traditional literary magazine in the 21st century, trying to promote serious writing in ‘the nigh-on illiterate media mush, tarting about in a time starved, content-logged universe where postage and paper and living costs skyrocket, while miraculously presenting everything on a 360 digital and social landscape for discoverability…’
She says she ‘created a strong archive’ for the magazine, which is no longer available. ‘I mourn the loss of those resources when the cord was pulled, because Ambit felt like it belongs in the public realm – but that’s the reality of most publications. You publish, you move on. You publish again. If you’re lucky, you make it to the classics list and hit the canon, otherwise it’s just passing entertainment. I would have liked longer at the wheel.’
Two years on, she is clearly still hurt by the magazine’s closure. When I ask if there is anything she knows now that she wishes she’d known when she joined Ambit, her response is snarky: ‘Not to be impressed by board members with paintings on their walls worth more than the annual budget… Nor to believe publishers who say they may step in to rescue you!’
Rather than government subsidy, Ambit largely relied on private donors. ‘It was pocket money, a lot of it, but the key sponsors passed away, and I was informed the University of Pittsburgh stopped buying our archive as soon as I took over,’ says Allison. ‘We lost revenue streams over Covid and it needed more support than the board and I could provide… Suddenly there was a hole, which hit us all with hard choices… Then Martin Bax died, and his wish was for Ambit to end. In a way, that was fitting. It was always a unicorn – a child of the golden era of print and collaboration.’
That’s all a little magazine really needs: one bloody-minded poet with a stapler.
Agenda had much in common with Ambit; both were a rock-solid part of the literary landscape – until suddenly they weren’t. Both were created in 1959, both published their final editions in 2023, and both were seen as synonymous with a famous founding editor. While Ambit had the forward-looking, Pop-art-loving Bax, a man of catholic tastes, Agenda had William Cookson, who launched Agenda with Ezra Pound’s blessing and continued to champion the early 20th-century modernism of Pound’s circle in its pages until his death in 2003.
‘William never used computers,’ his co-editor Patricia McCarthy later recalled. ‘[He] cycled to the typesetter who spoke very little English on his butcher’s bike with hand-written poems tucked inside a dog-eared folder.’ McCarthy worked with Cookson for the last five years of his life, and continued editing the magazine on her own (with one assistant handling admin) for the next two decades.
As ‘a “team” of only two,’ she wrote, ‘the task of running the whole thing does become somewhat draining, especially with no funding, or very little.’ It must have seemed like a life-line when the University of St Andrews offered to take over the magazine in 2023; it was to be edited by one of the university’s most celebrated professors, ‘backed up by a whole team of qualified helpers’. But that professor – the award-winning poet and novelist John Burnside – died suddenly in 2024. The university decided not to appoint another editor, leaving Agenda in limbo.
The Dark Horse – ‘Scotland’s Transatlantic Poetry Magazine’ – has always been independent. Its editor, Gerry Cambridge, ‘first had the idea for it as an isolated, and rather poor, poet living in an Ayrshire caravan,’ and has kept it going almost single-handedly ever since. Why has it endured? ‘I’m not sure. Sheer thrawnness? And a certain fascination for me at “having a (literary) voice”, coming as I do out of a tradition – as Second Generation Irish – of the working class voiceless.’
The Dark Horse’s circulation is ‘in the mid to high hundreds’, though one issue that featured a piece about cancel culture sold more than 1,200 copies. ‘It seems that readers want to get to grips with “edgy” subject matter in which poetry is worth arguing over,’ Cambridge tells me. ‘Perhaps we have been more willing to take on subjects considered “controversial” by other little magazines. A certain contrarian streak has been part of the magazine’s outlook since the beginning.’ Over the years, he’s noticed ‘the increased possibility of volatile responses to anything one might say or publish. Many editors, I can imagine, find this unpleasant,’ but his willingness to dive into thorny topics gives the Horse a distinctive identity. ‘I don’t particularly enjoy it, but I have a certain bloody-mindedness fostered by many years, in the early days, of literary isolation.’
The magazine relies in large part on Creative Scotland’s funding – although ‘if it all came crashing down,’ he wrote in 2020, ‘I think I would continue to publish the magazine, however austerely, perhaps stapled like the earliest issues, yet full of top-quality writing I could advocate for wholeheartedly. Making a memorable artefact is deeply satisfying, but so is being a participant – however modest – in the annals of the poetry publishing story.’ Perhaps that’s all a little magazine really needs: one bloody-minded poet with a stapler.
Revisiting the interviews I’ve conducted for this piece, I’ve come to suspect that it isn’t really funding or institutional backing that decides a magazine’s fate, but the determination (and health, and age) of the flesh-and-blood people behind it. If they have the energy and desire to keep on, the magazine will continue. And if they don’t – well, who can blame them?
‘Burnout is a very real prospect,’ says Rebecca O’Connor, who edited Ireland’s art and literature quarterly The Moth from its first issue in 2010 to its last in 2023, publishing the likes of Jacob Polley and Jack Underwood. To run a literary magazine, ‘you have to be prepared to work long hours for no pay, for the first few years, and to have other revenue streams,’ she tells me. ‘The creative stuff is huge fun – the commissioning, editing, layout, design – but be prepared for all the drudgery, the admin, accounts, marketing, sales, etc. I had no idea [in 2010] that The Moth was going to become something so all-consuming. I know now how hard it is to juggle running a business with writing and raising three children.’
There was little external support. ‘We didn’t actively seek Arts Council funding until ten years in, and our application was rejected, but I think we had a lucky escape,’ she tells me. ‘It can stymie you creatively, you’re less agile as a business, bound by their terms and conditions.’
The Moth found financial success on its own terms – but for O’Connor, success was exhausting. ‘I’d had a few years of feeling fed up, like I was trapped in that cycle of publishing, with all the admin and postage that that entails. And those three months between publishing the magazines seemed to be getting shorter as I got older. Also, I was frustrated that I didn’t have enough time to write. No head space. So while the magazine was actually profitable, it was sapping all my creative energy.’ She ‘pulled the plug’ on the magazine, but continues to run prizes for poetry and fiction under the Moth brand, in a tie-in with The Irish Times.
For some small poetry magazines, such pay-to-enter competitions are the main source of revenue, and attract far more entrants than the magazine has readers. To struggling editors, closing the magazine but keeping the lucrative prize might seem to have a grimly inevitable logic to it. At the very least, it would mean you didn’t have to read so many submissions.
And there are many, many submissions. Even for tiny magazines with shrinking readerships, they seem to be growing exponentially, hastened by websites such as ‘Chill Subs’, that offer tips on using online platforms to bombard magazines with simultaneous submissions. Editors at larger magazines are inundated. Matilda Battersby tells me that during her five years at Popshot submissions per issue increased tenfold, from 300 to 3,000.
The Dark Horse’s Gerry Cambridge agrees: ‘Covid led to a huge increase in the number of submissions to magazines, if my own experience is anything to go by, at exactly a point when many editors were least able, psychologically, to deal with them.’
The critic David Collard, in his recent book on poetry, A Crumpled Swan, pins this phenomenon on the writers’ changing attitude towards these magazines: ‘In the past, emerging poets might have subscribed to and supported a particular magazine which reflected and aligned with their practice, and would do so for a long time in the hope or belief that they would, eventually, appear in its pages. But those poets are today more likely to fire off submissions in all directions in the hope that one may make its mark. So the editors are faced with more and more submissions while their long-term, committed readership declines.’
Perhaps we shouldn’t judge the health of the small-magazine culture by the closures, but the new arrivals.
Michael Schmidt – who has edited the poetry journal PN Review for more than half a century, since it was founded in 1973 – echoes Collard’s comments. ‘The main challenge is finding and retaining readership,’ he tells me. ‘The number of magazines that have closed down in two years indicates a tremendous supply of journals; I should imagine the combined readership of all the closed-down magazines would not have equalled the subscribership of, say, the original Poetry Review [1912]. Given that so many “readers” are now actually poets wanting to place their work, and that the big industry now is Creative Writing, it really is a changed world.’
Does he have any advice for someone starting a magazine in 2025? ‘Don’t. Or if you must, then have an editorial vision about poetry, about the art of poetry, and its history as it predicts a direction. It’s also useful to have a relationship with a publishing house so you can back your bets on the big track.’ (Alongside PN Review, Schmidt also edits one of the UK’s largest poetry-book publishers, Carcanet.)
I began this article by quoting Ian Hamilton, who didn’t see surviving for decades as an inherently good thing. ‘Ten years is the ideal life-span for a little magazine,’ he said – with some degree of self-justification. His own magazine, The Review, ran from 1962-72. Still, it might be wrong to judge success by its longevity. Wyndham Lewis’s radical vorticist magazine BLAST is still talked about to this day. It ran for just two issues (1914-15): does that really mean it ‘failed’?
Perhaps we shouldn’t judge the health of the small-magazine culture by the closures, but the new arrivals. This summer Faber poet Declan Ryan and former TLS poetry editor Alan Jenkins launched Free Bloody Birds. A slim, stapled-together pamphlet of poems and essays, it’s heavily influenced by Hamilton’s The Review. (In fact, the editors met while Ryan was writing a PhD on Hamilton.)
‘We’re not worried about trying to make a big splash,’ Ryan tells me. If it’s possible for a magazine to be aggressively modest, Free Bloody Birds is that magazine. ‘It’s not trying to make money, or make any grand claims, it’s not campaigning about anything. It’s really just a little haven for the work. You can have a look if you want, then get on with your day. So much of the world is about trying to grab your attention. It’s quite nice if you can just be there, quietly, in the corner. We like the idea of it being a small, word-of-mouth thing.’ Despite his best efforts, it quickly found a readership: the first issue’s initial print-run of 150 quickly sold out; it has since been reprinted.
By contrast, London poet Max Wallis’s new magazine, The Aftershock Review, certainly aims for the big splash. Describing itself on the back cover as ‘an intervention – a rupture in the poetry publishing scene’, it’s an A4 brick of poems (and nothing but poems), in a BLAST-ish magenta colour scheme. With contributors including Sam Riviere and Hugo Williams, it is devoted to confessional poetry about trauma. The idea clearly struck a chord with readers: this spring, its crowdfunding page raised £6,546 in a matter of weeks, which – buoyed up by a £32,368 grant from the Arts Council – not only covered running costs but paid for billboard advertising.
Other green shoots from the past year include Folding Rock (large and expensive-looking, dedicated to Welsh fiction) and The New Cambridge Chapbook Review (a zine-like pamphlet of academic criticism, keen on Prynne-esque modernism).
For the sake of full disclosure, I should mention that I have some skin in this game. This June, I was practically barricaded into my own flat by cardboard boxes containing 1,000 copies of The Little Review No 1, the first issue of my own small magazine. Puckish and pocket-sized, it prints a handful of poems, fiction, some quite savage reviews, and assorted ‘Insolence & Triviality’ (the latter has its own section on the contents page). Twelve weeks later, it’s almost sold out; I’m down to the last box of 75 copies. If journals as different as The Little Review, Free Bloody Birds and The Aftershock Review can find a readership, there’s clearly still an appetite for small magazines. Now, where did I leave my stapler?
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Tristram Fane Saunders, 32, is a poet and recovering journalist from London, currently working as a Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. He edits The Little Review, an irreverent magazine about poetry. His poetry collection, Before We Go Any Further, was shortlisted for the 2024 Seamus Heaney Prize.
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