I’ve been submitting to literary journals since 2012 and been lucky enough to be published in quite a few different ones. Each time, I like to share the news. However, over the years, as I’ve been updating my pages with each publication, I’ve noticed what a transient life literary journals have, especially the smaller ones. Some have quietly faded away entirely, taking my work with them. Others only include their most recent issues on websites or their stores, and my earlier stories disappear into the black hole of their archives somewhere. And a few just change their website, their sponsors, the types of material they publish, or sometimes just the naming conventions of their pages. These circumstances all lead to dead links.
Every so often, I do what I can to update my main page of publications. There’s little I can do for all the blog posts over the years, though. And so they become almost a record, an echo, of what used to be. An archive of the near-past.
For other writers, I highly recommend keeping a PDF copy of all your publications, when possible. This way, not only is there some “tangible” proof that you were published in that particular publication, it’s an additional way for others to access your work once something has disappeared into the ether.
Sometimes, however, a story or poem is only published in hard copy, or I don’t have a chance (or forget) to print a PDF version from a web-only publication. When they disappear from public, I am a little sad that they may not find a new audience again since so few publications take reprints and the competition is so fierce for these limited spots. I find myself holding a mini-burial for them in my mind (as over-dramatic as that sounds) whenever I delete another dead link from my website.
The only thing that will never change is change itself. Life, and the literary world, moves on. It is what it is, and I find that the way for me to face it is just to keep writing more, to hopefully put out more interesting things for my readers to enjoy.