[image description: A copy of my and my friend Harmony’s zine, Kill the Gatekeeper. It’s a black and white xeroxed cover with the title hand stamped in white blocks.]

A couple of months ago, my friend and fellow writer Harmony Cox were talking shop about writing. Which, inevitably, turned into a giant rant about literary magazines, the publishing industry, and editors.

The thing is, it’s kind of difficult to find real hard truths about all this stuff because even if someone wants to write about it, it’s not like an editor or magazine you’re ranting about is going to be keen to publish that rant. Even if you submit the essay elsewhere, it’ll be difficult to get published because publishing is pretty nepotistic, so the editors probably know each other. And editors are often writers too, so editors don’t want to publish something that would piss off an editor elsewhere.

On top of that, writers fear that airing their grievances with the editors, magazines, and publishers that have pissed them off will disincline other publications from working with them.

At the end of the day, you end up even more frustrated because you’ve been dealt some sort of ridiculousness from the publishing industry and you can’t even warn people about it on a wide scale. And because of that, the ripoffs and harmful practices in the publishing industry keep happening. Their worst practices go unchecked.

That’s why Harmony and I created the Kill the Gatekeeper zine (a zine is a homemade booklet if you’ve never bought one!). We got tired of having our valid critiques and concerns of the industry we love ignored while problematic practices in the industry abounded. By making a zine, we decided to take matters into our own hands in our own humorously irreverent way. If you’re a writer, you’ll definitely relate. Complete with collage art and essays from both of us, issue 1 of Kill the Gatekeeper is 18 pages.

We plan on publishing the zine quarterly and we’d love for you to get a copy of issue 1’s limited run. It’s $5 and if you’re in the US, shipping is just 75 cents! You can still purchase a copy if you’re outside the US. I’ve got a page of global forever stamps just for you.

Or if you’re local to Columbus, Ohio, you can buy a copy at BookSpace Columbus, which is open every Friday at the ILLIO space in Clintonville at 13 E. Tulane in Clintonville.

Buy a copy in my Etsy shop. I’d love to hear what you think!