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CONTACT: Writer’s Digest Names PifMagazine.com and Pilot-Search.com Among the Best, Despite Strange HistoryMay 24, 2000 | Lacey, WA (INB) – PifMagazine.com and Pilot-Search.com are two of the best literary Web sites on the Internet, according to Writer’s Digest. "And to think we did it without ever holding a face-to-face staff meeting," commented Camille Renshaw, Senior Editor of Pif. This month PifMagazine.com was ranked number sixteen in Writer’s Digest’s "50 Best Markets for Short Stories" (June 2000). Writer’s Digest commended Pif as "a showcase for quality poetry and short fiction by new and emerging writers." This spring Pif published its first print issue, The Best of Pif Magazine Off-line, and reviewers are already saying the book is "worth a read, something that will make you want to get everything the magazine has put out since the beginning" (Amazon.com). In its Best of the Web issue (May 2000), Writer’s Digest recognized Pilot-Search.com as being among the best and most useful literary search engines. Writer’s Digest emphasized Pilot-Search’s "more than 11,000 writing links," applauding its variety of categories "from anthologies to zines, views and MFA programs." "We’re thrilled to receive this kind of praise from the literary community," said Richard Luck, the founder and Technical Director of Pif. "Clearly the magazine’s story is a strange one, but I think it will prove to be far more typical in the future as more art is published in cyberspace." Luck was referring to the fact that he and Renshaw have never met in person despite entering a legal partnership more than two years ago. "The fact that we’re consistently winning more praise from the media speaks to the consistent quality of literature our readers are submitting. Clearly in the modern technological world readers perceive my need to meet Rich – and the rest of Pif’s staff – face to face as on par with their need to hold dead tree flakes when they read. Everything about literature – the way it’s written, read, and edited – is changing," said Renshaw. "It’s kind of crazy though, isn’t it? There’s a guy across the country who I’ve emailed a dozen times a day for over four years – and we’ve never met." Pif was founded in October of 1995 as a small fiction and poetry magazine with a circulation of around 500 readers. Since then Pif has become "The Starting Point for the Literary e-Press" and grown into three interconnected literary sites, Pif Magazine, Pilot-Search.com, and Zine-X.com with over 100,000 readers and a million impressions per month. This fall Yahoo! Internet Life named Pif as the leader of "THE NEXT WAVE," and in the Foreword to the 1999 edition of The Best American Poetry, Editor David Lehman named Pif "the hot new on-line literary magazine." |