If you’ve spent any time at all trying to publish your fiction or poetry, you’re probably familiar with the phrase “no reprints”. Alternatives include “previously-unpublished work only” and “original submissions only”. However they choose to phrase it, an extraordinary number of literary magazines seem to have a real hang up about being the first publication to print a piece.
Given the short shelf-life of literary magazines, this seems a little unfair. Sell a story to a magazine and, once that issue has been archived, there’s a good chance that no new reader will ever set eyes on it again. Your work is doomed to obscurity, and with so few publishers willing to accept reprints, it’s likely to be an uphill struggle to place it anywhere else.
Why, then, do so many magazines insist on this practise? There are some logical reasons behind it, which we’ll explore now. As a publisher that’s more than happy to see reprints, however, we think these reasons aren’t terribly convincing.
Rights conflicts
When an editor handles a story or poem that has already been printed elsewhere they usually have to take the writer’s word for it that the first publisher is happy for it to be reprinted. It would be a nightmare scenario to go to print with a piece and then receive an indignant message from another publication saying that they thought they had exclusive rights to it for several years yet. For this reason alone many magazines choose simply not to take the risk.
That said, few and far between are the publishers who take exclusive rights in perpetuity to a piece of fiction or poetry. If it’s been some time since the piece was originally published the chance of any conflict is minimal.
It’s not “fresh”
Some editors worry that their readership might have already encountered a particular piece before, and thus may feel like they’re not getting value for money when they see it reprinted. Readers, the thinking goes, have an insatiable appetite only for fresh and original literature.
Given the number of people who read literary magazines, the chances of an overlap of this kind are extremely small. On the few occasions where it has happened to us, we’ve found that readers universally love seeing one of their favourite pieces get a new lease of life.
Search engine friendly
Duplicate content on different websites can be bad for your search engine ranking, with Google demoting sites that have similar content. This is enough to deter some editors from reprinting work, especially in online magazines.
Realistically, though, the amount of web traffic most lit mags get from search engines isn’t huge, and reprinting a piece is unlikely to cause much damage. Indeed, a reprint that performs well may even help make the original publisher more visible.
Everyone else does it
Many publishers accept only previously-unpublished work simply because that seems like the done thing. Perhaps they haven’t really thought about it as an editorial policy, or perhaps they simply want to appear that little bit more exclusive.
This is, of course, a pretty weak reason not to consider reprints. It’s the same thinking that leads to magazines refusing simultaneous submissions, or making a host of other strange requests that seem to date from 20 years in the past.
Send us your reprints!
As you can see, we don’t think these reasons for refusing to consider reprints hold much water. Some of our absolute favourite stories have been reprints, and it would have been an immense shame to miss out on bringing them to a new audience for any of the reasons above.
If you have a story or poem that, published once, now seems doomed to moulder away in a drawer, it might be time to bring it out. Dust it off, tidy it up, and send it along. We love reprints, and we’re keen to give brilliant works of fiction or verse another shot at life.