Some NDQ News

One of the challenges that has preoccupied me since my return from my summer research trips involves North Dakota Quarterly. As readers of may recall blog know, for the last 7 years, we have had a publishing partnership with University of Nebraska Press. This summer, we learned that this publishing partnership would not be renewed for financial reasons. This is obviously very disappointing, in part, because I have enjoyed working with UNP over the last seven years and, in part, because NDQ remains financially imperiled at what is likely to be a very difficult time for the arts.

That all said, I’m trying to come up with a strategy to sustain NDQ beyond its 100th volume. At present, I have three main goals.

1. Resources for the next 10 years. Little magazines like NDQ are not designed for profitability. They require a constant investment of time, energy, and funds. Fortunately, NDQ has the time and energy from an amazing group of editors and an amazing editorial board, what we need to focus on for the next year or so is the funds. This means fund raising both within the institution and from outside the institution to ensure that we have a decade worth of expected support.

2. Sustainable and Resilient Practices. One thing that I learned from the rather abrupt increase in the cost of producing, publishing, and distributing NDQ is that we need to make sure we have the capacity to step into any of these roles should they become unavailable. We have the ability to produce NDQ in-house and the institutional resources to publish it, but managing subscriptions, printing, and distribution remain challenging. It may be that our most productive way forward is to manage production and publication in-house and find partners to handle circulation. This would shield us from some of the volatility in the publishing industry.

3. Set New Expectations. One of the more interesting things that I’ve encountered from our authors is that we have a staff who manage all aspects of the Quarterly. This has sometimes led to awkward misunderstandings and expectations that we have more capacity to serve our authors than is currently possible. As one example, we continue to distribute paper copies of our magazine to our authors. While this is a nice perk and something that I enjoy doing, it is an expense that might not be in the best interest of the Quarterly in the long run. I not only might discourage our authors from becoming subscribers, but it also gives them unrealistic expectations as to the resources we have at our disposal.

Of course, these goals are simply mine as editor and may not reflect the goals of the editorial board or my fellow editors. To figure out our next steps, we’ll need to conjure a sense of a shared vision for the Quarterly and discern whether these priorities are consistent with that vision. 

In the meantime, I’m also trying to pull together a list of NDQ accomplishments over the last 7 or so years. We want to tell potential supporters about the continued development of the Quarterly as part of English Department’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing Certificate, our efforts to develop our archive, and our book series. 

It’s taken me a while to get over the gut-punch of disappointment from UNP, but I think I’m starting to feel like there are ways forward to ensure that the Quarterly survives and thrives into its next one hundred issues.