Not long ago a friend of mine gave a reading, after which she was approached by the editor of a prestigious print magazine. Admiring one of the poems she had read, he asked if he might include it in a future issue. She was flattered, but explained that the poem had already been published. He asked where, and she told him: a relatively young journal that publishes twice a year—online.

"Oh," he said. "Don't worry. That doesn't count."

Most of us share the goal of finding a good home for our work. But where is that home nowadays? Where will our work "count" and have the greatest readership and impact? Creative writers stand at the edge of a digital divide. On one side: the traditions of paper. On the other: the lure of the Internet. As glossy magazines die by the dozen and blogs become increasingly influential, we face the reality that print venues—despite their traditional connotations of prestige, permanence, and physical craft—are rapidly ceding ground to Web-based publishing.

Yet many of us still hesitate to make the leap. "Online journals just seem so evanescent to me," one poet confessed in an e-mail. "They continue to multiply madly, so it's hard to distinguish any from the crowd. Who reads them? Are the editors literate? Are they all just out of MFA programs? I can't defend these suspicions with facts. I feel, privately, as though my work—if published online—would drop into a black hole. I'm no Luddite, but I still hanker for hard copy."

I would have agreed with this sentiment six years ago, when I was just out of graduate school and beginning to submit my work. Online journals were a pale imitation of print, marred by amateurish fonts, garish backgrounds, and the lack of editorial accountability. Even as recently as three years ago, I still would have agreed—online journals were where you sent the misfits, the work that couldn't quite make it into print.

Today, I wholeheartedly disagree, in part because the technology has evolved. In the heyday of Yahoo, Web sites were indexed by category. Search for "poetry magazine" and a journal came up only if the editor had taken the time to seed the appropriate HTML meta tags. Now search engines catalogue the entire verbiage of a page—if someone Googles your name, up pops your poem or story or essay. For every reader who tracks down the Kenyon Review [3] in his local bookstore, there are ten who don't have access, don't have money, or need a medium they can surreptitiously read at their office desks.

In other words, modern writers are increasingly defined by the work they have available online. Those serious about developing a career have to think about managing that virtual dimension. And the most powerful, direct way to do so is to engage the medium—read online journals, evaluate them, and send them work you're proud to have associated with your name.

If you're not convinced, don't believe the hype; believe the numbers. Since Bruce Covey launched his online magazine, Coconut, [4] in 2005, he has monitored visitor traffic. "A new issue of Coconut gets about ten thousand unique page views in its first two weeks," he reported recently. "Readership has increased with every issue. We have readers in Japan, Korea, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, the Philippines, Qatar—all over the world."

Today's best online journals offer innovation as well as visibility. Linebreak [5] pairs each poem with an audio file—the poem as read by another poet. Drunken Boat [6]bills itself as a multimedia journal that curates sound and video alongside poetry and prose. No Tell Motel [7]features a new poem five days out of every week; Anti- [8]includes twenty "feature poets" beyond its biannual publishing schedule. Even journals that mimic the conventions of a print format—such as Memorious, [9] Valparaiso Poetry Review [10], and Mezzo Cammin [11]—use their Web sites to provide easily accessed, well-organized archives. Slate [12] has even created the Fray [13], a virtual space where readers can publicly respond to poems and essays.

One journal frequently cited as a leader among online venues is Blackbird [14], which is hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University. Each biannual issue includes poetry, prose, nonfiction, reviews, and features, formatted in a warm color palette with sepia-toned photographs, which visitors can explore using easy-to-use navigation bars. It doesn't hurt that Blackbird is among the few journals, online or print, able to offer honoraria to its contributors.

Senior editor Mary Flinn recalled one of the inspirations for the magazine's foundation, a process that began in 1999: "I remember a comment by Don Lee, then editor of Ploughshares [15], to the effect that Ploughshares was offering all of its content online because our job—as editors and publishers—was to find as large an audience as possible for the authors that we publish, and the work that we love." In order to maximize the content's reach, Blackbird offers the text of each poem as well as an audio recording. The editors are determined to give their authors not only a wide readership, but also a degree of permanence: "One of our advantages is having the archive available whenever you come to the journal. No hunting for back issues in the back stacks," Flinn says.

The notion that Web-based journals are easily launched—and are therefore easily abandoned—is central to the reservations of many writers. No one wants her poem or story to be corrupted by spam or broken links. And we've all heard horror stories about a journal that has simply disappeared—and all of its content with it. But is it really any different from a print magazine that folds, leaving all its copies to molder in someone's garage? If your work is solicited by an online journal, consider applying a little top-down pressure for the benefit of all contributors. Before submitting, ask the editors about their plans for preserving past issues, whether it be through long-term domain ownership or a system such as LOCKSS, an initiative of Stanford University that provides libraries with digital preservation tools.

For some writers, the question may be, "Why bother? If there is any disadvantage to publishing online, why not stay in the realm of print?" When I began lining up gigs in support of my first book, Theories of Falling, I thought the most meaningful connections would result from disciplined legwork—the query letter, the complimentary copy, the friendly follow-up e-mail. I quickly realized the process was more like catching eels with your bare hands. Opportunities are slippery little suckers; you're at the mercy of spring breaks, distracted hosts, unspoken quotas. Sure bets fell through. "Maybe" silently drifted into "No."

So when prospects came out of the ether—an invitation to read in Michigan, a nomination to the Georgia poetry circuit—I was shocked. In particular, my work seemed to be finding a toehold among undergraduates. Soon, my curiosity chased after my gratitude. Where were these people encountering the poems? Over and over came the answer: online.

One professor explained that he regularly asked his workshop students to bring in poems found "in the wild." Given that this generation of kids doesn't brush their teeth without Twittering the fact, it's no great surprise that "the wild" is digital. After a third student brought in my work in the space of two years, the professor grew curious.

I've started to appreciate that publishing online isn't just an issue of picking sides within the industry. It's an opportunity to grow your readership on a grassroots level, to reach people who have never bought a small press book or a literary journal in their life. From undergraduate to graduate teaching assistant, GTA to professor, professor to chair of the visiting writer series—sometimes an opportunity snakes upward like Jack's vine, sprung loose from the tiniest bean.

Once you're open to publishing with online journals, you can learn promotional techniques from the journals themselves. Steven D. Schroeder, editor of Anti-, sees social networking as a natural extension of the Web's potential. "Since the journal is online, most of my marketing is online as well," he says. "I have a personal blog where I post frequent updates on the journal and a Facebook group of several hundred people, which I update whenever there's new content at Anti-."

A critical advantage on the Internet is your ability to foster seamless flow from site to site. Placing teasers for your Web site in the contributor-bio section of a print journal can look a little strange, but including a link in an online biographical note is a smart move that places the purchase of your book only a click away. And many writers use blogs to centralize links to online work—a kind of digital curriculum vitae.

The barriers are coming down. Selections from online magazines are now regularly included in the Best American Series of annual anthologies. Online editors can nominate their contributors for the Pushcart Prize. The National Endowment for the Arts permits up to half of one's qualifying publishing credits to be from online journals (though that stipulation has a "separate but equal" quality that, I hope, earmarks it as a transitional phase on the way toward unconditional acceptance).