Where We Came From and Where We’re Going: A Lunate Ramble

Quite recently, someone messaged us to say that they’d received a copy of Lunate vol. 3, ‘which was a surprise as I hadn’t ordered one.’ It was a surprise to us, too — even more so as, once we’d combed through our order history, we couldn’t find their name or any record of an order. They went on to say that they had ordered and received a copy of Lunate vol. 1, but were concerned that there might be a glitch in our system. They concluded by keeping things cryptic and saying that they weren’t sure if they’d been charged twice. (Hmm. If only there was some way to check..?)

Anyway, this caused us a little concern, not least because we did get a couple of orders wrong for our first two volumes and, as a result, we’d worked especially hard on the logistics of vol. 3, ensuring that our Crowdfunder pre-orders and post-publication online orders were sent out correctly and in good time. But in that moment, we panicked. Had we unwittingly sent out a bunch of orders to the wrong people? We checked our postage history (we buy our postage online and we retain the documents) but we couldn’t find this person’s name in those records. How had they managed to receive a copy, then? We asked for more info — could they perhaps share their address with us, or a photo of the packaging? Anything that might help clarify the situation for us. But we didn’t receive a reply.

We’re still none the wiser. And, with all of the multiple and varied challenges we face in running our journal, it’s these kind of small-scale, but undeniably weird, events that serve to baffle and irritate. They happen more regularly than you might imagine, but, in keeping with our avowed stance to keep this stuff behind the scenes, you wouldn’t know it. You really don’t need to see us gobbing off on Twitter about how people aren’t sticking to our submission guidelines. (You certainly don’t need to see, as we did to our horror a couple of years ago, a literary journal hounding a competition entrant out of their circle and off Twitter just because they had been ‘caught’ emailing people to vote for their story.) Not cool. The worst kind of indignant posturing. But, we cannot deny, it kind of blows our tiny minds when, for example, we get sent poetry or flash fiction (lots of both in the past few weeks) or work that no one with any sense of moral decency would want to read, let alone publish. (We have often alluded to the work we receive that features misogyny, female objectification and sexual violence.) We — deep breath — genuinely don’t know how to respond when a writer asks us if we’ve made our minds up about a submsission they sent a year or more ago when we make it clear in our guidelines that if we haven’t accepted your piece within (depending on the call) a fortnight, it’s not for us.

We’ve come to characterise these odd little occurences as ‘customer service mode’. It’s almost as if the complainant is asking for the manager, and it’s become the one thing absolutely guaranteed to make our blood boil and cause us to question why the hell we bother. Because, ultimately, what we’re doing here is supposed to be a bit of fun. Yes, we take it very seriously. Yes, the writers who trust us with their work deserve the utmost respect. Yes, it’s really hard building and designing a cool website, managing the socials, cheerleading a Crowdfunder campaign, planning and managing the logistics of a submission call, reading and editing, working with our writers, working with the printer, learning how to use Adobe InDesign to ensure our print editions are properly typeset, getting dozens of orders into the postal system… But, when all is said and done, we do what we do because we love it.

And because we’re clearly a little bit mad. But, having worked to build ourselves a little bit of space in the literary firmanent, and still in possession of dreams that take us into it a little bit deeper, we can’t give it up. Not yet, at least. We’re still, we like to think, getting somewhere.

There was a point to this…

Oh, yes.

To go forward, perhaps we have to go back. To understand who we are, and who we might yet become, we should perhaps remind ourselves of who we once were. If you’ve joined us recently, as many of you have, you might not know that our initial stock-in-trade was flash fiction. In 2019, when we began, and into the next year or so, we made a connection with the flash scene that saw us, for a prolonged period, publishing new work online sometimes up to four times a week. Incredible, on reflection. In time, we moved on, our aesthetic developing into something more distinct, knottier, weirder. We came to relish what we would often call the longform short story. And, by the time we made it into print in the summer of 2022, we were open to work of significant length: vol. 3 of Lunate contains an 8,000 word story.

So, we feel we’ve settled. We’ve found our place, we’ve found our people. That second element is hugely important to us.

Next steps, then? Ah. Well. That’s the tricky bit, for sure. Let’s start with what we’d like to do. What we’d like to do is stick around, hunker down, grow a bit. We’d like to publish a vol. 4 before the end of the year, we’d like to make solid plans for a vol. 5 and a vol. 6 in 2024. We’d like to publish vol. 4 entirely on a commission basis, approaching a half dozen or so of the writers on our hit list to see if we can curate an issue that will really make readers sit up and take note. But we’re not sure if we’re going to able to…

Regular readers will have seen us commit to a perhaps unsettling level of transparency. But, we still feel that no ill can come of sharing our bottom line logistics. We were invited recently to take part in a session for the annual summer school run by our alma mata the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Amongst the many insightful questions we were asked, one stood out: ‘How did you go about monetising Lunate?’

(Someone get us a chair! Quick!)

In short, we didn’t, of course. And we still don’t. Lunate is a money pit. And, at the very least, sharing some of the numbers that follow will help any prospective literary journals just starting out, and, at best, we hope, further foster a sense of kinship and communality between us and, well, you, dear reader.

We printed 200 copies each of our first two volumes, which we published in August 2022 and in January of this year. This was, in hindsight, overly optimistic, but everyone we interacted with had been so kind and so into the idea of a print volume that we thought 200 copies seemed about right. Let’s just say that there are plenty left of both of them if you should want to purchase copies — and if you can afford to, and have an interest in the journal, please do consider it. The writing is superb, the authors are good people, and every penny we get goes straight back into the journal. In a political culture that rather undervalues literature, supporting independent publishers is a radical act of artistic defiance.

Anyway, with a writer’s fee of £75 and printing costs of about £300, we’re out of pocket on those first two issues. We reined it in for vol. 3, printing only 100 copies. With rising print costs and an increased writer’s fee of £100, vol. 3 cost us about £1000 to produce. Buouyed by an unexpectedly successful Crowdfunder campaign, we managed to sell the remaining copies within two weeks of publication. Factoring in additional costs (not least the postage we’d completely forgotten when doing our Crowdfunder sums!), we sort of broke even on this one. Er… result!

Hmm. But that leaves us in limbo, still. We not generating any cash, and so, as things currently stand, each volume becomes a frantic runaround. (We more than understand, of course, that underpinning all of this is something that can’t be ignored: life right now, for most of us, is a bloody struggle and no one has any money.)

So, for a fourth volume, we have two options. One, a second Crowdfunder. Two, we seek funding help. We’re not at all sure about the former; people, understanably, get very weary of helping to raise money. And the latter is something we’re on with, but arts funding in the UK, as everyone know, is a joke.

Let’s see, eh? Let’s let vol. 3 settle and let’s see what inspiration comes knocking.

This is not a cry for help, by the way. Consider it… a sharing. If you’re reading it, it’s likely that your care about what we do and, as such, we feel a certain responsibility to keep you up to date with what we’re up to and the outside influences that might contribute to our next steps. We plan to stick around; we’re just working out how we do that. (We will spare you for now yet another run through the exhausting demands of our Real Lives, suffice it to say: there are just three of us and there is No Time.)

As ever, we can’t thank you enough for your ongoing support. And if we’ve sent you a copy of Lunate by mistake, we can only apologise, and we hope you enjoy it.

Gary Kaill
Co-founder and Editor