From Joanne Merriam:
Hey everybody. Between my full-time job, managing Upper Rubber Boot and having some sort of approximation of a life, I am finding it is just too much to continue editing 7x20. After four years, too, a fresh perspective would probably benefit the publication. Accordingly, I'm looking for somebody to take it over.
7x20 is a Twitter zine, which means it is published only to Twitter. We have about 3,000 followers. I follow back everybody who isn't obviously a bot or an SEO marketer. Based on my knowledge of Twitter reading patterns, tweets are probably read by about 1/3 to 1/2 of our followers every day, although this is really difficult to get reliable data on.
Posts are limited to 140 characters by their system, and in addition to that, I require people to include their name or Twitter handle at the end of their submission (so that if people retweet it - over which I have no control, and which happens frequently) the attribution for the work isn't lost. This limits the character count even more. I accept very (very) short stories, six-word stories, American sentences, cinquains, and an awful lot of haiku (haiku, senryu and related forms are the most commonly written things that comfortably fit the character count), both literary and speculative. There's no pay, but since the work is so very short, and we also tweet a bio that promotes (and hopefully sells) the author's books, and we accept reprints, nobody has complained about that. The zine also makes no money, and this is a non-paying "for the love" kind of gig.
It's not terribly onerous. I get several submissions every week, unless I explicitly ask for more, and post new work week-daily (that is, daily except for weekends). I read and answer submissions, and plan and schedule posting of work (which I use hootsuite to automate, so this is not a daily task for me), about monthly, and it generally takes me 3-6 hours to get through everything.
Sometimes (and this is more time-consuming, but lots of fun) I troll through back-issues of publications that publish very short works (eg Four and Twenty, Heron's Nest, etc.) and reach out to the authors of exceptional pieces to ask them for reprint rights and invite them to submit. The zine is well-established enough now that the occasional call for submissions is all that's needed to receive enough quality work to keep it going.
If you have an afternoon a month to devote to it, and an interest in very short forms, this could be for you! Email me off-list (here at joannemerriam@gmail.com) with your editing experience and your experience with Twitter. Thanks!
Joanne Merriam
http://www.joannemerriam.com
Editor, Seven by Twenty: http://twitter.com/7x20
Editor, Upper Rubber Boot Books: http://www.upperrubberboot.com/
Most recent release: Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days
http://www.upperrubberboot.com/apocalypse-now/
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