Publishers Lunch
NY
Magazine has an "exit
interview" with Jessa
Crispin about the closing of Bookslut. (Her publisher, Melville
House, is holding a "wake" for the site this Friday.) "Running
it takes a lot of time, and it makes no money so I've been pouring money into
it for 14 years. We always were trying to figure out ways to keep it going. I
had a meeting with my managing editor and we went through all these ideas and
nothing seemed viable and we said, 'Oh, we should just close it, shouldn't
we?" Crispin adds, "The only reason why Bookslut was interesting was
because it didn't make money, and when I realized the sacrifices I was going to
have to make in order for it to make money, it wasn't worth it. It used to be
you could get an advertiser for a month; now it's all directly linked to how
many pageviews you get."
More broadly, she notes: "We didn't make money, we weren't a major
influence, and we didn't launch great writers into the system. And yet it gave
me my entire life. It introduced me to everyone who's important to me at this
point."
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