It’s Harder and Harder to Be a Magazine on the Internet—Please Help

As we hurtle toward the end of a dismally eventful year (yes, we live in interesting times), those of us in what remains of America’s independent media are poring over budgets past, present, and future with one thought in mind: keep going.

Literary Hub turned ten this year, which is basically forty in website years (but not 44, thankfully), and inasmuch as it’s been an ugly and convulsive decade in the broader world, it’s been pretty bad for online media, too. Sadly, all of us still here on the internet in 2025 rely on billionaire-driven tech platforms to find our readers, and your average Silicon Valley “thought” leader is way more concerned with his luxury bolt hole than the fate of a website about books. In fact, I would go so far as to say that our digital tech overlords value most of us only insofar as we contribute actual human content to their voracious AI slop maw.

Look, the digital ad model was never a great one (incentivizing as it always has the clickbait-iest of content) but now that AI is summarizing everyone’s work, it’s much, much worse. (Don’t get me started on AI’s environmental costs.)

Nevertheless, we persist, and we do so without compromising our editorial integrity. To that end, here are some things we don’t do:

We don’t chase algorithmic virality (though it never hurts to have the word porn in a headline)
We don’t juice our traffic or subscriber numbers
We don’t use AI (though it’s harder these days to avoid it on the aforementioned publishing platforms)
We don’t ever buy followers or emails
We don’t steal other people’s work to make money

And here are some things we do:

Feature the best books published today
Amplify the best living writers
Provide resources for aspiring writers
Amplify the smartest (and most esoteric!) nonfiction out there
Cover ongoing efforts to destroy book culture in the United States
Have fun doing it!

We are a collection of (human!) book-lovers who work tirelessly to preserve and celebrate that which makes us all too human: the essential and eternal need to tell stories (the very same stories that AI tech companies have been stealing for a decade).

And we need your help to keep doing that. Over the last few years our membership program has become an increasingly large percentage of our annual revenue—which is great—but we need to keep growing it. As the things that matter most are valued less and less by the people in power, it is only through individual contributions from readers like you that any of this—an independent media, by humans, for humans—can survive.

Please help if you can.