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Writing magazines like The Writer and Writer’s Digest were always a staple of Writing when I was growing up. My great uncle, who wrote children’s fiction in the pulp era, kept copies of The Writer on his coffee table. Much better than the traditional coffee table books.

Writer’s Digest was always solidly for beginners. Even back through the pulp era, their issues targeted the beginners and promoted vanity presses. The Writer always was a level up.

But with the internet, the landscape’s changed. It used to be that I could go into Barnes and Noble and they would have an entire bookcase of books on writing craft. Granted, most of them were for beginners.. Today, when I went inside, it was two shelves. Mostly old books like Stephen King’s On Writing, Strunk and White (new edition, illustrated), and Donald Maass’ book on emotions. Even StoryFix’s Story Engineering has disappeared from the shelves, and that was popular for a long time.

Mostly, the problem is that beginners can easily find the same content online. Every developmental editor sets up shop, does a blog on writing tips, and draws them right in. Notables are K.M. Weiland and StoryFix. Anne Allen and Janice Hardy also blog this way, but don’t do the developmental editing side.

The Writer is currently on hiatus until 2024. The company appears to be discontinuing print editions and going to streaming (includes three other magazines). That’s sent alarms blaring for me.

Several years back, I regularly picked up Paleo Magazine at the grocery story. It was a beautiful magazine with full color photos, gluten free recipes–and better still, they always had breakfast recipes. That’s often tough to find. Breakfast is the neglected stepchild. They also had the usual nutrition articles, decent and well-researched. Those articles were more thoughtful in their approach; they didn’t use the “This is the superfood that will add years to your life” or “Lose 10 pounds for the summer body” marketing.

One day, they announced they were going online. The reason was the environment. The editor said in good conscience he couldn’t continue using paper. Reading between the lines, paper costs were going up and they probably weren’t selling well because the articles didn’t hit the diet emotional points. Online meant the entire library of recipes could be accessed.

Cost was also pretty cheap compared to the magazine. I think I paid $15 for the year. No new recipes came out in that year. They did produce more articles, but it felt like not much effort was put into them. Also, we got more new articles at the beginning but as the year wore on, the magazine stopped publishing them.

At the end of the year, I ended my subscription because I was pretty sure the magazine was headed out the door. They folded a year after that. Very likely, at the price the magazine cost (would be 14.99 today), the only way they could have kept an audience was to focus on the diet culture. I respect the decision not to, and it was one of the reasons I bought the magazine. But in a brutally competitive world of sound bytes, it got lost in the chaos.

The Writer may suffer a similar fate in the next 2-3 years. For many years, it knew it’s audience. I’ve been scanning through the older issues. It catered to all writers, and changed when the world changed. Early issues included how to write for radio, then that evolved away. There were also articles on writing for the theater. But mainly, it was on the craft of fiction.

However, they could also be slow to change. The photo covers that adorn today’s issues were slow to come in. They still used the digest style covers long into the 1980s. All those years, even into recent times, they’ve tried to be a little bit of something for everyone. The problem though is that magazine page count went down, so it often felt a little superficial. Just didn’t allow for the depth writing needs. The earlier issues had dense articles…lots of words to read, filling a whole page. The newer ones had pretty graphics taking up a lot of space. I know that’s the audience, but combined with the loss of pages, it leaves little room for depth.

So they’ve been falling behind, unable to compete with the developmental editors giving away tips for free. Beginning writers are notoriously strange with money when it comes to writing. They throw three grand or more at a developmental editor for the “promise” of publication. throw money at Amazon ads, and balk at a writing course that costs $300 that would actually improve their chances of publication. They’ll take one that’s $75 and be happy to get an agent tell them they use too many commas in their query (yes, that happened).

A bizarre world we live in….