Volunteer-run Exclamation Mark Literary Journal

Volunteer-run Exclamation Mark Literary Journal launched in Calgary in February with weekly online publishing and a goal of eventually making the leap into print. Little Rock helped make that first physical issue affordable, and it has since sold more than 100 copies worldwide and landed on shelves at Alberta bookstores.

“We’ll start with how we got the idea for our literary magazine: As writers ourselves, we often felt something was missing in the literary scene. A plethora of established literary magazines publish beautiful, thoughtful, and artful writing (in other words, good writing), but not always the kind that makes us exclaim mid-sentence, laugh out loud, and gasp as if we’re on a roller coaster. So, on one completely ordinary Saturday, we came up with the idea for Exclamation Mark Literary Journal: a literary magazine aimed to make readers stop, gasp, laugh, or — possibly — have a heart attack.

You see, people really liked our idea a lot: in just three months, we’ve hit a few milestones. We published our first online issue, were listed by the CBC and the National Media Awards Foundation among famous Canadian literary magazines, received 200+ submissions (which means hours of reviewing submissions!), and built a growing community of readers (currently 250+ subscribers). But there was one thing that felt out of reach: a print issue.

To be honest, we were really, really, really intimidated. As a tiny, volunteer-run literary journal, the thought of having physical copies sounded expensive and complicated. We contacted print shops across the province and, just as we’ve expected, the quotes confirmed our fears—one even quoted us $125 to print just ten black-and-white copies of a 24-page issue.

Then we found your business.

The first thing that caught our eye was the pricing. It was so affordable that we thought it was too good to be true. Fifty copies for about $2 each? There had to be a catch!. (P.S. There wasn’t). Second of all, the options for printing were abundant (9 paper types!). After happily playing around with all the choices, we landed on our favourite (Matte cover and 70# Uncoated Text). Last but not least, the team was incredibly friendly and helpful: Just hours before printing, we realized we’d misspelled a contributor’s name, but the team at Little Rock quickly helped us fix the mistake, and the copies came off perfectly. 

The results were totally fantastic: the copies look professional, the paper felt nice, and we all did that at an affordable rate! Our readers are clearly impressed too: Our inaugural print issue has sold more than 100 copies to readers around the world—including customers as far away as Greece and Lebanon. Having a professionally done print issue also helped us secure an official ISSN from Library and Archives Canada (ISSN 3111-0614), surpass 5,000 website visits in our first four months, and place our magazine in bookstores across Alberta (You can find us at Shelf Life and Audreys Books). For a literary journal just started this February, printing that first issue made everything feel real (Go search “Clagary literary magazine” online and you’ll find us as right there as the “only online-first literary publication in the city”), and Little Rock Printing played a significant role in making that possible.”

Robert Hills