Defunct E-pubs
 

Per Contra's server seems to have vanished, and with it, all the poems published there. What would you call the status of a poem that was published, but only electronically, on a site that no longer exists? Should it be considered "previously published"?

That’s an excellent question, Martin. At least half a dozen E-pubs which had poems of mine are now defunct. I sometimes wonder if I can find homes for those poems again. Also, I’ve been putting together a manuscript and wonder what I’m supposed to say on the acknowledgments page about those poems.

I hadn't noticed. But not only is the site gone, but my poems don't show up in Google.

I suppose the poems are previously published, but as a practical matter you can claim they weren't.

But Martin E, I think when it comes to a manuscript you would want to include the acknowledgements just to show that your poems have been recognized by other editors as worthy.

Roger (Bob) - Yes, that makes sense.

I just plugged http://percontra.net into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/ and retrieved a bunch of issues.

I doubt an editor would bother doing that, since it's not searchable.

I would just be upfront about the situation to the editor, and let them decide.

It's really a shame that Per Contra didn't keep its old issues online. The cost of doing so is negligible, and if you are willing to accept an assigned domain name, it is literally free. As a general matter, the potential of perpetuity always struck me as the main selling point of online publication over paper.

I'm sorry to hear this. Per Contra published a number of my poems a few years back & the editors were kindly & dedicated.

I particularly remember their tribute to Daniel Hoffman which appeared shortly after he died.

If it helps: I've started saving on-line appearances in PDF format so that, if they do disappear, I have a permanent record of their existence.

Just thought I'd share the option, since it's a risk faced by anyone who publishes on line.

Useful link, thanks Julie. Not searchable? I stuck my name into Contributors' and it went to the bio with a live link to my only contribution some years ago.

(Sorry, I meant not searchable via external search engines like Google.)

Sometimes, and I hope this is one of those times, an online pub's disappearance is temporary. For example, I thought kaleidowhirl had disappeared into the ether, but I saw recently that it's back online, though not active.

A sadder thought: Prompted by this thread, I poked around my Duotrope records and found that about a third of the places I've had poems are closed, "on hiatus" (which often in practice means dead), or "believed defunct." It's hard to keep journals going, and I'm grateful to editors for their work.