Prison newspapers and periodicals provide a more accessible vehicle for prisoner-authors than do books. Writing a poem, report, or article usually requires much less investment in time and effort than writing a book. An editor of a book of prisoner’s poetry observed:

A major motivation of those writers {prisoners writing novels}, however, was profit. People in prison wrote novels to make money from them. Some actually did.^

This editor contrasted writing novels with writing poetry. Writing poetry, which many prisoners do, arguably has worse prospects for paying writers than does writing novels. However, almost all authors of both novels and poetry don’t even make enough money to support themselves. Prisoner-authors, like other authors, don’t have good prospects for reasonable pay for their work. Prison newspaper and periodicals enable prisoners to be authors while requiring less of the poorly paying work of writing.

Newspaper and periodical publication lessens an author’s costs of marketing work. Newspapers and periodicals usually have an established base of readers and ongoing, institutionalized processes for attracting new subscribers. A new book, especially one that a first-time author writes, faces a much greater challenge of attracting readers. A single-author book also offers worse opportunities for mitigating market risk through content with diverse forms, voices, and values.

Prison newspapers and magazines historically have supported more prisoner writing and prisoner-authors than has book publishing. From 1798 to 1988, self-identified prisoners and former prisoners wrote about 950 books.^ Assuming an average of 200 pages per book, the total pages was about 200,000. Over roughly half this period, the number of pages published in prison newspapers and magazines was about a million. Newspaper and magazines publish a much higher number of different authors per page on average than do books. The number of prisoner-authors who have been published in prison newspapers and magazines is thus much higher than the number of prisoner-authors who have authored books.

Books are relatively unpropitious media for bringing voices of prisoners and former prisoners into the public sphere. Prison newspapers and prison magazines historically have been more important than prisoners’ books for disseminating diverse prisoners’ perspectives on their prison experiences. Prison newspapers and magazines, however, have largely disappeared since the mid-1980s.