<p>Okay, so I am now in charge of my school's Literary Magazine.</p>
<p>Over the years the number of editors had become smaller because people have left the school, gone off to college etc. So there are only a few of us left. </p>
<p>Students in the school have not submitted a single thing. We need a full mag in three months!!!
Do you have any ideas on how the staff and I can get more students to send in their work?</p>
<p>We do not have a school paper, so they can not advertise for us. Announcements for stuff like this are zippo in my school.
So what can I do?
Contests? what?</p>
<p>Yes, contests. I’m assuming you don’t have the budget for a monetary contest (though $10 for best poem of the month and $10 for best story wouldn’t be much). Try giving something away or having the winner pictured on the cover.</p>
<p>Put out posters, set up a website, advertise for email submissions, ask the school if there’s a way to make announcements, ask your friends to tell their friends, get some English teachers to offer extra credit for anyone who makes it in (or, if they won’t do that, just to tell their class about it).</p>
<p>I was thinking about stuff like that. My fear is that my school will not approve the prize thing(I was thinking of homework passes, gift cards etc but in my school if you want to do stuff like this it takes months to get it approved my the admin.)</p>
<p>We have a few, the majority left our school because of the lack of an artsy environment.</p>
<p>The few who are left and could submit stuff are too shy and the rest work for the magazine and are not allowed to sumbit a lot of their own work.</p>
Advertise optional anonymity; they can use pen names.</p>
<p>
When it comes down to not having enough to run a magazine… Who’s to say they know who a certain author/poet is who uses a pen name and an unknown email address?</p>
<p>I tried to tell them they could do that and they were all still saying no. They want to and they do that but as soon as they are about to drop off some work they freeze up (I’m talking about multiple people here). So pen names are allowed, yet they are still scared.</p>
<p>For the second part,
they could do that. I never thought of that before. But if we have a mag full of pen names it would not be approved by my school’s admin (they have to approve our mag before we send it off to the printers).</p>
<p>But I thank you for your ideas.
they are very good.</p>
<p>Don’t have them “drop it off.” Create an email address (example: [school initials]<a href="mailto:litmag@.com">litmag@.com</a>) where people can submit. It would probably make the process easier for you guys, too.</p>