How I Harnessed Flickr to Get Mad Submissions
When Professor Emerson told us we had a little over a month to get enough submissions to fill up the inaugural issue of our online literary journal, I was a bit overwhelmed. The online literary journals we’ve looked at in class, like Blackbird and Drunken Boat, have around 30 to 50 works per issue. And since it’s very unlikely that they elected to showcase every submission they received for the issue, it’s likely they had around 60 to 100 individual submissions. Now where were we, an unknown student inaugural journal, going to find 100 people to submit their photos, art, sculptures and film to us?
The answer turned out to be Flickr, an image and video hosting site that serves as a networking community for photographers. Anyone can set up a Flickr profile, from a Parisian fashion photographer who wants to host her portfolio to a mom in Illinois who wants to post pictures of her kids. In fact, even I have my own Flickr site, laureninspace, where I post pictures of my knitting, daily outfits, and anime conventions I attend. Overall, millions of users host more than three billion photos, according to Flickr’s latest figures.