How to Start a School Literary Magazine With $0
You do not need money, design software, or permission from a committee to start a school literary magazine. You need a deadline, an audience, and this eight-step plan from a working editor.
The first school literary magazine I ever touched was fourteen pages long, stapled at an angle, and printed on a library copier that jammed on page nine of every single run. We sold it for fifty cents to cover the paper. It sold out in two lunch periods. Twenty years and thousands of contest poems later, I still believe that crooked little magazine did more for the writers inside it than any workshop I have taught since, because it gave them the two things young poets almost never get: a real deadline and a real audience.
If you want to start a school literary magazine and you are waiting for funding, a faculty committee, or a teacher to hand you a plan, stop waiting. Here is the plan.
What a School Literary Magazine Actually Needs
Strip away everything optional and a school literary magazine needs exactly four things:
- One editor willing to chase people down in hallways. That is you.
- A deadline that does not move. Deadlines are the entire technology of publishing.
- A way to collect work: a free form, an email address, or a shoebox outside the English office. All three work.
- A way to put finished pages in front of readers: a copier, a school website, or a wall.
Notice what is not on the list. Money is not on the list. Design software is not on the list. A staff of twelve is not on the list, and honestly a staff of twelve will slow you down more than it helps. Every failed school magazine I have watched die (and I have watched several, up close) died of committee, not of poverty.
The Eight-Step Launch, From Nothing to First Issue
Give yourself ten weeks. That is enough time to do everything below and short enough that nobody loses interest.
- Recruit one faculty adviser. Not a boss, an umbrella. You need an adult whose name makes the front office comfortable. English teachers who quote poems from memory are your best bet. Ask in person, with a one-page plan in hand.
- Name the magazine in one sitting. Do not run a school-wide naming contest, it will eat three weeks and produce a pun. Pick something short you can say out loud without wincing.
- Set the publication date first, then work backward. Announce the date before you have a single submission. A public date is a promise, and promises get kept in a way that intentions never are.
- Open submissions with a two-line call. What you want, when it is due, where to send it. Poems, short prose, and art. Cap poems at one page each so you can actually print them.
- Recruit two co-editors, maximum. One who loves reading and one who is organized. Three people can decide anything in twenty minutes. Seven people cannot decide on pizza toppings.
- Read everything against a written rubric. Before you open a single submission, agree on what you are scoring: freshness of image, emotional honesty, control of language. Writing it down first means that when you turn down your friend's poem, the rubric said no, not you. This step saves more friendships than any other advice on this page.
- Edit with the author, never at the author. Suggest, do not decree. More on this below, because it is where most young editors go wrong.
- Launch loudly. A reading at lunch, a table with copies, contributors reading their own work out loud for the first time in their lives. That launch moment is the whole reason to do this.
Getting Submissions When Nobody Knows You Exist
Your first call for submissions will get four responses, and two of them will be from the co-editors. This is normal. The fix is targeted asking, not louder announcing.
Make a list of ten students you have personally seen writing: the girl who annotates song lyrics in the margins of her chemistry notes, the boy who posted one poem online eight months ago and never mentioned it again. Ask each one directly, by name, for one specific piece. Direct asks convert at something close to eighty percent. Posters convert at close to zero.
Second tactic: give people something to respond to. A blank call for submissions is terrifying, but a prompt is a door with the handle already turned. Post one strong prompt each week of the submission window. If you need starters, the prompt archive at What the Window Saw is built for exactly this kind of borrowed spark, and prompts about place tend to pull the most entries from first-time writers.
Third: ask teachers to offer extra credit for a submission, accepted or not. Some purists hate this. The purists are not editing a magazine with four submissions.
Editing Your Friends Without Losing Them
Here is the scene you are dreading. Your friend hands you a poem that is almost good, and you have to say so. The trick is to edit lines, not feelings, and to show rather than lecture.
Say the poem ends like this:
I felt so alone that night, / sadness filling up my heart / like it always does.
Do not write "cliche" in the margin. Offer a trade instead:
That night I set the table / for two, out of habit, / and ate standing up.
Same loneliness, but now it lives in a gesture the reader can see. When you hand an author a concrete alternative, you are not criticizing them, you are showing them the ceiling of their own poem. Most will take the trade, and the ones who refuse have at least seen what revision looks like. While you are at it, learn the vocabulary of the craft yourself: knowing why a line break lands, which is really a question about enjambment, lets you explain an edit instead of just insisting on it.
An ugly magazine that exists teaches more than a beautiful one that never ships.
Design, Printing, and the Zero-Dollar Issue
Free browser design tools have templates that will make your issue look professional in an afternoon. Pick one typeface for poems and one for titles, then stop choosing. The most common design mistake in student magazines is decoration: clip art borders, six fonts, poems printed over photographs. White space is the most expensive-looking design element in the world and it costs nothing.
For printing, the school copier is your press. Twenty double-sided pages folded and stapled is a forty-page magazine. If the school will not donate copies, a digital issue posted as a single clean page on the school site costs literally nothing and reaches parents too. Do both if you can: screens for reach, paper for the moment when a fifteen-year-old holds their first published poem in their hands. That moment does not happen on a screen.
The Mistake That Kills Most First Issues
Three years ago I advised a school whose magazine had, on paper, everything mine never did: a budget, a design student, an adviser with release time. It never published. The editors kept pushing the date because the cover was not right, then the fonts, then the order of the poems. By spring the seniors graduated and the folder of accepted work is still sitting on a shared drive somewhere, perfect and unread.
Meanwhile the crooked fourteen-page magazine from my own tenth grade year ran for a decade after I left. The difference was never talent or money. It was that we treated publication day as immovable and quality as improvable. Issue two is where you fix issue one. There is no other way to fix it.
So when week nine arrives and the issue feels thin, ship it thin. Eight good poems, honestly edited and actually distributed, beat thirty poems in a drafts folder every single time.
Your Masthead Is a Credential
Here is the part nobody tells student editors: reading a hundred submissions will change your own writing more than writing a hundred poems will. You start seeing your own cliches from the judge's chair. You learn that endings are where poems are won. You develop the specific, slightly ruthless eye that every strong poet eventually needs to turn on their own drafts.
That eye is also exactly what contest judges use, which is why editors so often become strong entrants. If you want to feel the other side of the desk, send one of your own poems to a monthly contest that scores every entry across five criteria, creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme, and study the breakdown when it comes back on the 30th. Seeing your own scorecard once will sharpen how you write feedback for your contributors forever, and the craft lessons in the academy give you shared language for your editorial meetings.
Start the magazine this term, not next year. Somewhere in your school is a writer who has never shown anyone anything, waiting for a door with the handle already turned. You are holding the handle.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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