What Happens When You Mail 30 Writers Free Lit Mags?

Here’s the thing about indie lit: it’s full of problems everyone complains about and almost nobody has the time, money, or spreadsheet stamina to solve. How can lit mags get more subscribers? How do they get submissions that actually fit what they publish? Good editors lose sleep over stuff like that. With the rest of the Chill Subs team, we decided to run a weird experiment and see if it helped solve the intractable problems facing the industry. We are nothing if not ambitious.

So we got in touch with The Georgia Review.

We had a concept of a plan. Honestly, we just figured if you can name five lit mags off the top of your head, The Georgia Review is probably one of them. They were interested in the same challenges we were: widening their reach. Plus they were right up the road, and they had a closet full of back issues just sitting there.

Together we landed on an elaborate scheme built around those gorgeous, coffee-table-worthy books. Yes, books. The kind you hold in your hand to be reminded that a lit mag can be a thing of beauty and not just another open link in your browser.

So we thought, what if we gave away copies for free? Mail these backlist issues to writers, let them see for themselves how stunning and substantial they are, and maybe—maybe—a few of them subscribe.

And since we were sending these to writers, the GR editors wrote long, craft-focused letters to pair with each issue: why they chose it, what they look for in a manuscript, how they actually read a submission. Surely that was the thing that would turn a curious reader into a better submitter.

We actually pulled it off. It also didn’t work as expected.

Here’s everything we learned.

The experiment
The plan was simple, which is usually how trouble starts. Thirty writers, ten per genre. Three mailings, each with an honest-to-god letter tucked inside. Ninety backlist issues in all, with a discount waiting at the end for anyone who wanted to subscribe. Chill Subs announced the experiment in our newsletter—22,000 readers at the time—and the spots filled in under three minutes. Another 1,527 people joined the waitlist.

The receipts
First, the whole ledger—shared with The Georgia Review‘s permission—because transparency only counts if you show your own work. If you run a lit mag and you’re wondering what it would take to try this yourself, this is a decent ballpark.

What it cost:

The cash outlay was modest—the real cost was time. Those letters didn’t write themselves, and any lit mag considering this should budget for the editors’ hours as the main line item.

What it returned:

So: if the goal was “mail beautiful magazines, receive subscribers,” the experiment flopped. Spectacularly. Zero of the 30 participants subscribed during the campaign.

But if the goal was “make a lot of writers suddenly care about The Georgia Review,” the story gets more interesting. The giveaway produced a 1,500-person waitlist, a 5% newsletter bump, a nice Instagram spike, and a few submissions.

The experiment was great at making noise, not so great at making money. Indie lit in a nutshell.

The gift worked. The ask didn’t.
When we surveyed participants after the experiment, the power of the gift came through loud and clear. Lily Kelting put her issues on display: “Now they are out on my coffee table, so at least a handful of people in Pune, India will know it’s a well-designed and quality mag!”

The subscription offer? That got lost. The discount went as a postcard, and after three months of thoughtful, personal messages, it barely registered. “Was I supposed to subscribe?” Chris Clemens asked. “I don’t have time to read what I’ve got.” Paulina Pinsky pointed out a timing problem: “If there had been follow-up from the initial copy, or if I’d been reminded, I would have submitted.”

The goodwill was there. The nudge was just too subtle. We could have built an easier path to subscription—anything more than a single postcard after three months of personal letters. Next time, we’d design the offer to be as thoughtful as the gift. We’d run the whole thing again to prove it out.

Writers loved the editor letters
If anything overdelivered, it was the GR editor letters. So many writers told us the letters changed how they think about submitting work—which, honestly, is not a sentence we expected to write about a giveaway.

This is the part where our “give people free magazines” plan turned into a tiny craft class.

Across the three mailings, GR‘s editors—Amy Bonnaffons (fiction), C.J. Bartunek (nonfiction), and Noah Baldino (poetry)—wrote what amounts to a free, deeply personal seminar on how editors actually read. Submission guidelines are usually generalizations. These letters were real craft talk, grounded in specific examples and addressed directly to writers in the Chill Subs community.

Baldino, on why an emerging poet’s restraint caught his eye:

“What’s kept on a poem’s edge speaks, I think, to discernment—a quality crucial to both a writer and editor.”

Bonnaffons, on what makes her pull a story out of a queue of 10,000 yearly submissions:

“About 25% of the stories I’ve advocated for in acquisition meetings have been debuts, several of those by writers without MFAs. … So while we do want your best and most polished work, we’re especially excited by work that takes big swings, that feels alive and full of potential.”

And Bartunek, opening the very first mailing with the thesis of the whole experiment:

” ‘The best way to get published in a journal is to familiarize yourself with the journal first.’ The Georgia Review‘s Winter 2001 / Spring 2002 is an opportunity to REALLY familiarize yourself with GR‘s legacy of publishing compelling nonfiction—the issue is a retrospective of essays spanning 1947 to 1996.”

We’re not the only ones who noticed. The letters stuck with participants even though they didn’t move anyone to subscribe.

“Their reflections made me realize I had to become even more cognizant of the care that submitters put into their work… I’ve become a lot more open to risks; I’ve been sending out weirder poems to more journals. Weird is always fun.” —a participating poet

“The final letter on crafting poem packets helped me understand how to read my own submissions the way I read for the magazine I run—which sounds simple, but I know I’m not the only one to overlook my own writing that way.” —Elaine Braunshweiger

With GR‘s blessing, we’re sharing those letters in full—a sample of what landed in participants’ mailboxes, worth your time whether or not you ever submit there:

Fiction: Amy Bonnaffons on the Spring 2024 issue
Nonfiction: C.J. Bartunek on the Winter 2001/Spring 2002 retrospective
Poetry: Noah Baldino on the Spring 2024 issue

Read all three. Somewhere in there is the answer to the question submissions guidelines always struggle to answer.

What the experiment revealed
Thirty free spots gone in under three minutes, a waitlist fifty times the capacity. The appetite for print is there—what we’re all still trying to solve is the part where readers become subscribers.

Shipping outside the US ran three times the domestic bill for a fraction of the issues; we could have tripled the giveaway by staying home. We didn’t, on principle—writers abroad shouldn’t be on the hook for postage when nobody else is—but there’s no honest version of “print for everyone” that survives contact with an international shipping invoice.

In trying to give away a limited number of magazines, we built a list of fifteen hundred writers who wanted the exact thing we were offering. And then we never wrote to them again. The people who didn’t get in were the real prize, and we left them hanging. Oops.

Sometimes results only show up after the fact: zero subscriptions during the experiment, three in the six months after. Judged on a typical three-month clock, this was a flat failure. Generosity, it turns out, keeps worse time than a marketing calendar.

The ledger
We set out to solve a subscription problem, but instead we rediscovered what indie lit actually runs on: attention, goodwill, and editors willing to take time to talk about how they read. Thirty writers got beautiful magazines. Fifteen hundred more signed up for The Georgia Review’s newsletter. The thing that stuck with people wasn’t the discount—it was three editors treating strangers like writers worth talking to. The subscription math still doesn’t work. Nobody seems to have cracked it yet. But if the gift is what people remember, maybe that’s the part of the ledger worth protecting. Assuming we can figure out how to keep those editors fed.