Happy 2025 everyone!
This is the 10 year anniversary of Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine
We want to start off the year by looking back at everything we accomplished in 2024 and share some of our goals for the year ahead:
THE MAGAZINE:
In 2024 we released four new issues and published 350 pieces from 181 people from all over the world. Copies appeared on the newsstand in Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, indie bookstores, and airports nationwide.
https://www.doorisajarmagazine.net/where-to-buy
If copies have sold out near you, then you can buy past issues of the magazine in our archive
https://www.doorisajarmagazine.net/issues
While we saw a steady increase in sales, this past December was very rough for us. We put a blog post explaining that the truck driver delivering Issue 33 Winter 2024 to the Northeast was in a fatal accident and all the copies were destroyed. We still want to set something up for their family, but our contacts are away for the holidays, we haven't any info yet. We will keep everyone posted when we hear back.
We scrambled to mail out more copies, and we were hoping for a miracle that they would be stocked in time, but sadly we missed the holiday season. The only store that has physical copies in the Northeast is the Lofty Pigeon in Brooklyn (because we hand-delivered them).
You can still order the Winter Issue through our website:
SUBMISSIONS:
2024 was our best year for submissions ever! This past year we had 1,534 people send in 4,591 pieces. In 2023 we had 942 people send in 2,757 pieces. (That's almost 600 more people and about 1,800 more pieces!)
We almost had submissions from every state in the USA (except for Wyoming and North Dakota). And we received pieces from 45 countries!
Don't forget that our submissions are free and open all year long! Send us your best today!
https://www.doorisajarmagazine.net/submissions
There were only 4 days in 2024 when we didn't receive a new submission. So in 2025, we want to have something new to read every single day.
We're still processing submissions from 2024, and once we've going through everything (probably in February or March), we'll have a seperate post detailing our acceptance rates.
EVENTS:
Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine attended a number of in-person events in 2024 including AWP, The Rainbow Book Fair, the New York City Poetry Festival and the Brooklyn Book Festival.
The first day of the NYC Poetry Festival and the first half of the Brooklyn Book Festival were tricky because the rain kept people away. Even with the rain, we sold more copies than we had in previous years.
It's always great to share what we do with new people. Something we've seen happen year is someone will pick up a copy of the magazine for the first time and we see their faces light up when they instantly connect with a poem, story or art piece. It's those little moments that inspire us to keep going!
We won't be at AWP in Los Angeles this year (but we hope everyone who is there has fun!)
We're still waiting on the other festivals we attend to open up for registration, and we'll keep everyone posted once we have our tables locked down.
We have more details about our event's page
https://www.doorisajarmagazine.net/articles/door-is-a-jar-festivals-events
YOUTUBE CHANNEL:
We started a YouTube channel to highlight our contributors from each new issue.
This year we had 5 reading events. The first one had contributors from Issue 29 Winter 2023. Since then, we've been consistent with having new reading events the same month as the new releases come out.
All of the videos from our Winter 2024 reading event are now up!
As of posting this we have 97 videos and 97 subscribers.
Please be sure to like our videos and subscribe for updates
https://www.youtube.com/@DoorIsAJarMag
The next reading event will be in March, followed by readings in June, September, and December.
For 2025, we're thinking about expanding to include interviews and videos about what makes a strong submission.
SOCIAL MEDIA:
We saw growth across the board on all of our social media platforms
X (Twitter): 28,415 [We're a little bummed about the mass exodus from Twitter. At our peak we had more than 30K followers. And according to Brecht De Poortere's Magazine ranking, we had the 30th most Twitter followers out of more than 1,000 accounts]
Bluesky: 2,800
Threads: 2,651
Instagram: 2,579
Facebook: 1,190
Please follow us on the social media of your choice
SUBSCRIPTIONS:
We want to give a special thank you to everyone who is subscribed to our magazine.
We offer digital, print, and gift subscriptions.
The digital subscription is an amazing value at only $9.99. A single digital copy of the magazine is $3.99, and with a subscription you get full access to our digital archive valued at $131.67
With the print subscription, you get 4 copies mailed to you AND get full access to our digital archives. A print subscription is $39.99 (plus shipping and handling). In stores, copies sell for $12.99, so getting 4 in stores would be $51.96 (not counting sales tax). And including the access to the digital copies, it increases the value $183.63
Please subscribe to Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine today so we can continue putting out excellent creative works from all around the world
With all that said, we're very excited for what our 10th year has in store for us, and we want to wish everyone a great 2025!
Kind regards,
-Maxwell Bauman M.A/ M.F.A.
Door Is A Jar Owner/ Founder/ Editor-In-Chief