— About Pif —

Pif was founded in October of 1995 as a small fiction and poetry magazine with a circulation of around 500 readers. Since then it has become "The Starting Point for the Literary e-Press" and grown into three separate literary sites, Pif Magazine, Pilot-Search.com, and Zine-X.com. Pif currently has 75,000 original readers and 1 million impressions per month. The average reader returns to our sites 12.5 times per month.

Pif Magazine is the oldest part of the company. This monthly journal contains original short stories, micro fiction, novel excerpts, poetry, hypertext, creative non-fiction, memoir, book reviews, zine reviews, interviews, and other literary commentary. It features work by writers like Rick Moody, Amy Hempel, Robert McDowell, Deena Larsen, David Lehman, Douglas Bauer, Michael Joyce, and Michael Cunningham. It focuses on introducing readers to original literature and commentary in an electronic format, maximizing hyperlinks, hypertext, electronic artwork, audio, video, and other useful technologies.

Pilot-Search.com was created in April of 1998 and quickly became the Internet's largest literary search engine. Pilot-Search is a free, online search engine that includes over 10,000 searchable links. With over 250 categories Pilot-Search covers Book Reviews, Interviews, individual writers like Raymond Carver, Ghost Writing Services, e-Text, MFA Programs, Screenwriting Contests, and other literary topics. Pilot-Search links to the internal pages of big sites like Salon, Project Gutenberg, and the New York Times Book Review, but it also links to the pages of smaller sites like Georgejr.com, Scribendi!, and the E-Script Workshop. Each day in the Featured Pages section, Pilot-Search spotlights five worthwhile articles or sites. Pilot-Search's goal is to be the first place users look to find the Web pages most relevant to their literary searches.

Zine-X.com was created in January of 1999. Zine-X is a banner exchange for zines and other literary minded sites. This is normally a very difficult circuit for advertisers to tap into, but Zine-X enables advertisers to post their banners on hundreds of small literary Web sites and track these impressions from one system. Zine-X was created to unify literary zines and to multiply users' exposure to the literary Web.