Adam Robinson—
Michael FitzGerald, one of the co-creators of Submishmash (I’m still basking in its awesomeness), put up a few notes justifying a $2-$3 submission fee. Overall, I agree with what he says, especially the point that paying $3 will make writers pay more attention to what they’re sending. It’s often clear that people are writing their best work and submitting — before it’s even a little good.
Is a $3 fee the filter we need?
Michael’s got a very convincing argument. I got just under 100 submissions for the print issue since we announced the call to submit last week and I got maybe two or three orders for mags. The whole time I was watching the submissions pour in I was thinking to myself that it was really cool that all these people wanted to contribute to the print issue, but how many of them had actually plunked down the cash to purchase one? I get that there’s a lot more practical places to spend your ten bucks these days. But if you’re a writer who actually cares about the publication you’re submitting to, and you want to see it survive, I don’t see anything standing in the way of dropping a couple bucks to see that someone gets paid for what they do. I really want to hear other writers perspectives.
you write a story/poem and it’s good, really good, you think. you think, i’m sending it to 10 places i like, because 10 is the minimum number of really having a good chance at getting it published. you think, do i have 30 dollars to spend?
of course, yes, there’s nothing wrong with your magazine getting that 3 dollars. and it probably will make you think twice, that 3 dollars times 10. but who will it keep out and who in? and, can you retrofit the internet to make it work like the mail? is the internet is the internet, like this blog, because it’s [potentially] free? will group A magazines charging just carve out niche B of magazines that don’t? and which kinds of talent will go to A and which to B?
oh, and oh yeah– you spent X hours working on your story/poem. i mean, hard hours [hopefully]. now you are spending 30 dollars on it. 30 dollars and what will you get back if it’s published? 30 dollars and breaking even, discounting your hard hours? no dollars and losing, still discounting your hard hours? who gets to lose, you, the magazine, both?
I wish that instead of charging money they could distribute shame units. So you would be allowed to submit to a journal you had never read and had no intention of buying only if you were willing to undergo 5 units of shame. And you could submit more than once a year to a journal if you would agree to feel like a real heel for one hour. Maybe we could form a committee of shaming. We could investigate the weaknesses in people’s self-regard and then use them to help poets and writers behave decently.
Hi guys. (Adam, thanks for noticing.)
Yeah, Joseph, I agree. It could carve out niches. But to some extent the existing system is already doing that.. print, online, closed. But filters have been around in book publishing forever. Essentially agents (or small pubs like PG) act as filters. Most NYC publishers demand you go through an agent, others let you send in the ms. I think it’ll work the same way with lit. journals. The more in demand the editor(s), the more they will need a filter to keep submissions manageable and continue putting out quality work. Right now, good editors basically get penalized for putting out quality journals and books. Once they do something impressive, their slush pile mushrooms. (I know I’m suggesting slush piles aren’t good things. I’m a writer; I like the idea of my work being something more than a bit of slush. But this is the reality.)
The other option is just to keep one foot in the pre-internet and allow for both snail mail & $3.
I won’t pay a fee to have someone read my work on principle. Publishers need to manage to make money off their publication. If reading submissions is too troublesome for them, then just publish by invite only.
If my writing can’t make an editor pay attention to me, than 3 bucks sure won’t.
Why send it to 10 places? Send it, first, to 3. Or 5. Budget the 10 submissions over the year. Know the market. How much do painters spend on materials? Is it right that publishers are the only ones who have to invest money to create writing that gets read? And then pay the writers? Writers rue the perfect world, and lambaste publishers who don’t pay. Someday we might get to an economy that values VSF, but until then, it’s publishers who shoulder the burden.
It makes perfect sense, and is still a VASTLY better deal then the major dollars I have wasted over the years with the post office and office supply stores (lets see, 8.5 x 12 manila clasp envelopes, quality paper, postage, the ubiquitous SASE). What did the post office do with all that money???
I’ve tried submishmash and I LOVE IT! Tracking of what I have done, who has it, etc. etc. VS. once things are dropped off with the USPS — wow, who knew? —
And do you really trust plain old email these days? What do you have in your spam folder? Are you sure what you are emailing is getting where it is going?
Submishmash is great, and as long as I have faith in my words, I think the fees make perfect sense. Keep the print places printing, and keep the wana-bees from flooding the editors with all of their unpublishable crap that they typed up from their jr. year journals that were in parent’s basements…
Hell, my agent takes 10% from me and doesn’t really do squat.
– Steve Saroff, MontanaVoice.com
hey, michael. one reason submishmash sounds so cool is that it helps imagine other systems. does the internet work like nyc publishing? can it? are there other possible economies?
I can understand what you are saying Chris, but I think it is the editor’s job to make their publication so compelling that people think they have to read it. Even if that means no open reading and just asking writer’s you know will attract an audience to submit work. In other words, it is great if writer’s want to support you, but I don’t think any publication can be viable if they mainly rely on other writer’s to keep them afloat.
Brendan,
I don’t think it’s about getting their ‘attention’. I think it’s a matter of making their jobs possible. And “reading submissions” is a constantly changing job, esp. if your publication takes off (which on the internet doesn’t mean sales). Reading 50 submissions a month is a very different undertaking than reading 1000. I think the filter (Post office or whatever) is about keeping their jobs manageable, not a writer getting anyone’s attention.
both sides shoulder the burden. who’s time/money is more valuable? neither. both. and who cares, when you are talking art? but if you are talking economy, then that’s that.
Playing devil’s advocate, here are a few reasons why I disagree with the idea of charging for submissions:
1). It creates a class system. Writers who could not afford to pay the fees would be excluded – sure, $3 doesn’t sound like a lot for someone making $30,000+ a year, but for a grad student making $12,000 a year, $3 sounds like a meal.
2). The whole idea is backwards: instead of writers getting paid for their work, writers actually have to pay people to publish them? That sounds nuts!
3). Editors who are concerned with “mushrooming” slush piles need to learn to become more discerning readers. Having been an editor at various literary journals, I can attest that it takes approximately 96 seconds (being wildly generous) to determine whether a piece is worthy of further consideration.
4). Marketing is part of a successful business plan. If one wants to run a literary journal, one should be prepared to engage in marketing, publicity, advertising, etc. Charging writers for submissions sounds like a lazy way for journals to make money. Seems like they should be doing THEIR job, which includes creating a marketing plan, rather than asking writers to do their job for them. Making money is the responsibility of the publication, not the writers.
Hello middle class, glad you can afford 3 bucks for a chance. Some really great writers can’t and I don’t know if that’s hard to believe.
If not for the internet and free, I would’ve never found and read half the face-smacking goodness I have. why can’t we change up the game? Charge in time, in creativity, anything but money? Recycle. Trade. Keep it in the fam. Something.
Joseph, Yeah, we think so. It’s all changing so fast, but so far most technologies have been focused on the ‘creator’ (writer, artist, musician, movie maker, etc). Which has been amazing, right? We’ve all benefited from this. So much easier to writer, to research, to get to the publisher. But the next wave will empower curators (editors, gatekeepers). This might come in the form of crowd curation (voting, like buttons, simple traffic analytics), but will also be some new paradigm for individual nodes of gate-keeping, empowering indie publishers with a way to put out great art and survive.
What are we doing? Why?
Hey Chris.
1) We paid $3 to the post office forever. Grad students still managed. I sent out more when I was a grad student than I do now, though arguably I felt richer in grad school than I ever have in my whole life.
2) Maybe they’ll be able to pay writers if they have a way of dealing with submissions. Right now, no writers get paid and publishers are going out of business.
3) 96 x 2000…
4) I don’t think they’ll make money on this. They will just get high quality submissions and at more reasonable incoming rate. But again if they have more time, they will actually be able to market better and make a better publication, which markets itself.
the internet is weird. it’s so big, for one thing, and has room to both create a class system (perpetuate capitalism) and sidestep it. and this is more weird: blogger, youtube, whatever, are all avaialble to anyone with a computer, and on them you can pretty much do whatever you want, trashtalk the govt/corporate america–even walking all over copyright is mostly ignored–but they are all corporate entities themselves. allowing people free expression, more or less, makes money.
To me, it’s point 4 that’s most appealing. The fallout from instant submissions is what Genoways should have been talking about.
Yeah, I just don’t have any kind of tolerance for the attitudes that make this work. Money goes to the writer. Money goes to the writer. If you’re going to pay contributors it MIGHT be acceptable to charge for submissions, and I’m not absolutely against those who do it, but in the end I’m already pouring hours and hours of my life into the void in hopes that one day I might get some readers, even a book, even a small check.
There’s an attitude in “indie lit” that puts the publisher ahead of the writer. It makes me ill, and I say that as someone who publishes writers and intends to continue. Writers who don’t give their money to lots of magazines, especially EVERY SINGLE MAGAZINE THEY SUBMIT TO, even though writers are poor and magazines aren’t usually giving any money back, except possibly through pay-to-play contests, are supposed to be baaad, baaaad little boys and girls. We appeal to community to justify these demands. Do the publishers who talk this way insist on buying the work of everyone they publish? Do they write checks to these writers?
I value writers over magazines. Money goes to the writer.
And, as Christopher says, it’s just not that hard to deal with a lot of submissions. You can reject most stuff fast as hell.
Relating to what Brendan says above, every time publishers complain that people aren’t buying their magazine when they submit, it really makes me doubt their confidence in their product. You don’t see Clarkesworld or whatever bitching about this stuff because they’re too focused on making a publication people want to read and pay for. The fastest way to lose my interest and support is to demand them. Running a magazine on the money of writers who hope to one day get inside it isn’t only an unsustainable business model, it seems deeply unsatisfying — I want to write stories for an audience a little broader and deeper than this comment section, with all love and respect.
idon’t understand the question here. you mean my ‘that’s that’? i mean that if we are talking economy then, i don’;t know, no one’s really too much in the black. as is now, publishers put up the front money in the hope they migth make it back in sales. same as galleries maintaining the space in the hope that they will sell paintings. writers [or artists] put up the labor (and create the actual content of books/galleries) in the hope of their own return. i suppose it makes as much sense to have writers pay in in cash up front as any other way, but what effect will that have, is all i’m wondering.
Brendan,
I don’t think anyone is suggesting this as a way to keep a publisher afloat. It will just make their jobs manageable and allow them to both continue putting out quality publications and allow for new work to come in.
I just got Annalemma # 6 in the mail. It’s slick & beautiful. (Though, Chris, cut 1 story and make the font bigger for old men like me). But this magazine shouldn’t change. It’s exactly what indie publishing should be unique, rich, and full of smart engaging writers. The only thing he could do to make this more ‘compelling so people have to read it’ (i.e. sell the thing) is put Brittany Spears on the cover. And I guess if feels like that’s the way publishing is going if something doesn’t change.
i am going to argue that being willing to spend 3 dollars does not mean you are a better writer, just that you are more willing to spend 3 dollars.
in undergrad i thought the advanced fiction workshop meant everyone would be much better at writing than they were when we were all in the beginning fiction workshop.
they were for the most part just more serious about being mediocre writers.
which is an asshole thing to say, but i still stand by it.
but as someone who reads slush, yeah, having a way to filter it would be awesome. i just am not convinced that this is it.
I agree Mike. To be honest, most publications I have seen that start to demand that those who submit buy their product end up folding. I have seen this time and time again since I began writing. Neil Clark of Clarksworld started off as a bookseller and launched Clarksworld having an audience of readers to some degree already in place. He also wisely chose to both pay well (thus attracting good writers) and do the thing in a small enough way that it was sustainable.
Mike: I agree paying the writer something is essential. But it’s not happening now. And I’m not suggesting submission fees as a way to make money for publishers. (At the amount I’m suggesting, I think it would slow the rate of even the best known indies to 5 or 10 a day. Which is still huge.) But if they had more time to focus on creating a publication that could make money, I think most of them would love to pay their writers.
I don’t think any publisher goes into small press publishing thinking about anything other then supporting the kind of work and its authors that they like.
also, yeah, i haven’t been submitting much while here in grad school, but i have zero income. i’m sure i could figure out a way to swing it, but i can say that the idea of having to pay 3 bucks would bring on some small panic attacks about how many groceries i could buy vs how many poems i could send out. i’d probably just wait til i had a job or start saving to submit. which sounds melodramatic, but it’s also not far from true.
p.s. by ‘huge’ i meant workload.
Well, you know all my anxieties. I’m just wondering, in terms of who’s time/ money is more valuable, who’s getting the better deal. I’m questioning the value of literature, I guess. Who cares? And also, oh great, writers get to sit around all day dreaming up stories (brainstorm, draft, revise, edit, submit) while publishers bust ass to edit them, publish them, promote them, pay them. And 80% of the stories are bullshit nonsense, and the writers are complaining that response times are too long. It’s amazing that, pre-internet, writers didn’t demand SASE’s to send their work to publishers.
That’s a good point.
Yeah, I don’t think it would be a way for a publication remain viable, but it would be a gesture of support. Like, “I understand that this costs money and I want to be a part of it so here’s a couple bucks for your time.” I’m speaking only for print here. I think it would be lame and unjustifiable to charge a submissions fee for something an editor is going to post online for free. And if a publication charges for submissions I think it would only be fair that the writers in that appearing in issue get paid. That way it’s more of a contest with a purse at the end of the road.
And it seems kind of pointless to make a publication with just writers who you know are going to attract readers. Sure, it may be the most reasonable way to make money but then you’re just publishing more of the same, not really doing anything to elevate the writing of unknown and emerging writers who may be just as, if not more so, talented. And if that were the case with all magazines then there wouldn’t be a point in writing at all as only the same 50 or so people would get published ad infinitum.
What do you think?
Michael. I don’t think you need Brittany Spears. I think the real key is having writing that really and truly excites people. Not everyone, but at least some people. A little marketing also is a good thing. Give copies to the right people. Make people talk about it. Print out 100 extra to give away at a convention. I am not saying I have the answer, but sometimes I have had the experience where editors complain that no one is buying their product, but upon investigation I find out that they are not really selling it. One editor I had this experience with, where they complained about no one buying their books. I looked at one I was in on their website, and it didn’t even list a table of contents. So though there were a lot of good writers, no one even knew about it.
Well, if I were putting together a publication, I would start out with mainly people who have some kind of audience, cruel as it may seem. Then I would start adding more unknowns. But who is going to buy something that is all unknown writers? I realise that in an ideal world people would ignore the names and just look at the writing. But an ideal world this isn’t.
thanks adam.
and i am not against charging, especially if you’re magazine is the sort with a paid staff and they need to be compensated.
but overall, as much as it sucks to wade through hundreds of pieces by writers who have so obviously never read a thing you’ve published, regardless of the fact that the issues are cheap and also that you publish things online or that there are samples available, what i am saying is it’s frustrating and sometimes you think that people just assume they have a right to be published. but so what. at one point most of us probably just desperately wanted a publishing credit. this is not my argument. my argument is what i already said before.
3 dollars is fine. but it’s not a filter for better work and may at times cause people who are actually really great writers that you would love to publish to not submit to you. and that’s a thing i am not so much excited about.
It’s just not that simple, Mike. Of course money goes to the writer but why is it that people always lose their shit when someone dares to suggest money should also go to the editor/publisher. Without money, we cannot give you a place to submit your work. Suggesting a nominal fee for submissions is not about putting the publisher first. It’s about trying to find some way to make overwhelming submission queues and impossible economics more sustainable. We’d make a whole lot of money if we charged a $2 or $3 submission fee. I see a lot of.. short sightedness in some of these comments because back in the day when we had to print/stamp/post a submission with an SASE we didn’t blink at the $3-4 we spent each and every time.
My co-editor and I put our own money into the magazine, work a ridiculous number of hours to put out a good product, and have relatively few people buying it. That’s frustrating. We choose to do this so there’s no need to cry about it but god, If 1/10 of the people who submit each month subscribed for one issue or bought one book, we would be able to break even and do so much more. It’s not about confidence in the product. It’s about reality. The argument that a publisher who complains about people not buying their product is not as focused as a Clarkesworld is just… insulting.
As a writer I have no problem paying a small submission fee. American Short Fiction requires it and that’s fine by me. There are concerns, of course, because if such a fee starts at $3, it will eventually become $5 and then $10 and soon it will be all Narrative all the time. Such a fee might not be reasonable for some writers and that’s also something that needs to be addressed but on the whole, I don’t think this idea is terrible.
Then why not just ask 5 or 10 people whose writing you like to submit material?
Your comment is kind of naive.
Roxane: Actually, there are many many places I never sent material to because I couldn’t afford postage. And paying for postage anyhow is not the same as giving the money to the magazine. Because if I give someone money to read my writing and they publish it, it still seems like vanity publishing.
I totally agree that small presses and editors should be supported. But it shouldn’t be mandatory for the writers to do this.
Heaven forbid we give money to a magazine. Of all the nerve.
I don’t think a $3 fee translates into vanity publishing if everyone pays it.
The truth is that I’m not a staunch advocate for instituting a submission fee but I would like to see more writers paying attention to the economics of publishing, putting more thought into where they submit and why, and pitching less of a fit when publishers try out new economic models.
But submission fees have been around for as long as I can remember. Isn’t it then like a contest which asks for money?
I guess it also depends on what kind of writers the publication wants to attract.
The only writers any magazine wants to attract is good writers. In a perfect world, some of those writers might also want to read the magazine where they so much would like to see their work.
doesn’t make sense. you can’t belittle writers their efforts and then make your bread and butter (even if it’s intangible bread and butter) off of those efforts. i mean, you can, and i get it, your frustration, but jeez.
Yeah, and I don’t even agree with myself, but it felt good.
I think it is certainly true that many if not most writers don’t spend as much time as they should on their work and just carpet it bomb it out to a million places whenever they finish a draft. It seems likely that writers would be more discerning about their work and where they send it if they had to pay money. That said, 3 bucks a submission does add up quickly, especially when most magazines don’t pay. Hmm.
Adam, you sound a little burned out by the biz side? I am one of those weirdos that enjoys editing/proofing the work of others. Hit me up.
Whoops, that was for Adam, not for Sasha <3
I think the most interesting angle that’s come up is that writers are, in fact, not readers… Maybe this is what needs to change. Shouldn’t writers be voracious readers? (This is an honest question, I am not a writer. Never will be. I am a reader. I assumed all writers were readers. My wife, a writer, is a reader.)
Is the current system a reproduction of other hegemonic systems? Isn’t the pay to play system even more of a reproduction of other hegemonic systems?
Right now, the focus of authors seems to be quantity. This is evident in the growing slush piles, the scatter shot submissions, and the flash fiction bonanza (of course, I love me some flash, but (as pointed out in another post by Roxane) I want longer stories too). It seems that every writer is trying to pad their CV with a million pubs. This is not true for all, but the system almost requires this. You cannot simply publish one or two great stories a year because they will be buried by the flood of the publishing world. This is a systematic failure. Maybe the seed of this flawed system is that you must have the quantity to get a job in academia (academia as big business is a topic for another time.)
I think authors need to support the literary enterprise, but not through submission fees. Submission fees are dangerous as they can balloon and then we start to see exclusion (more so then is already at play).
Support the enterprise by buying magazines. I’m all for 10 subscriptions a year. Or a system that pushing subscribing authors to the front of the slush pile (of course, you’d have to have a way to do this without letting the editors know or you’d get into weird bedfellows sort of issues.)
Well, that does seems to be another thing that’s happening, which seems less interesting for readers, writers, and the publisher. I don’t think unadulterated nepotism has every produced amazing work. But maybe that’s a solution. I personally hope not.
Money should be going to everyone involved here. Publishers and magazine editors do valuable work that is essential to the whole enterprise.
I’ve never heard a single person ever claim you should buy everyone magazine you submit to. What people normally say is that you should subscribe to a few magazines of your choosing to help support the whole enterprise. If you don’t support magazines, they fold and then there are less venues for work and your work will get less readers, etc.
I’m not sure how you expect money to go to writers if no one is giving any money to the publishers…
Thanks Ani! I just might. But I think I’m more offended by the idea that publishers aren’t doing all they can to make themselves solvent, and that that’s the only reason to charge a fee. I enjoy editing too, but that’s only a small portion of the work involved.
$3 per submission: totally fair and reasonable. $20 per submission (http://www.narrativemagazine.com/node/360): brutal.
I’m not sure where the line is. I guess $5, maybe.
Chris, I think you’re right on the money. It would just be a gesture of support. A much better way to go would be to put a donate link up on the homepage — but that has never worked for me.
Why is it not good for readers?
I wonder how many magazines Hemmingway subscribed to.
i said it above and i’ll say it again here, to you, my friend. 3 bucks is not a quality filter. it just means they are more willing to pay. which, again, is fine, so long as we call it charging for submissions and understand that only people willing to pay 3 bucks will submit. which is also not at all a bad thing. but it is a thing.
Yeah, Adam, I don’t think that’s worked for anybody. I see those all the time and unless you’re aggressive about it, like that’s the ONLY thing you see on the front page, it becomes something that’s so easily dismissible.
I will never pay a submission fee. When I can afford it I buy subscriptions to magazines I like, but fuck me if I ever PAY someone to publish my own stuff.
Yeah, I was thinking something along these lines when I read the original post. It’s a shame (hardy har har) that money always seems to be the first solution – and almost always the last. I’d rather support a journal by buying their journal or by buying their books than by buying the publisher’s time. Can totally understand the frustration tho. How many submissions do you get a month, Adam (or anyone) if you don’t mind me asking?
1) the NYer is pretty good example of what happens when you go to the same stable of writers over and over.
2) Maybe this is unique to me (and nice example of my ego)? But I’m a writer and reader. Most of us are. We read the publications we want to publish in. If they just publish their friends, I doubt I’d subscribe. But maybe most writers are bigger people than me.
Who said they’re not readers? What do you mean?
“And 80% of the stories are bullshit nonsense, and the writers are complaining that response times are too long. It’s amazing that, pre-internet, writers didn’t demand SASE’s to send their work to publishers.”
Dude, go take a dip in the tub and calm down. Wow.
Well Sasha, your comment seemed to be making it a comparison between two writers (writer a is willing to pay, writer b isn’t, doesn’t mean either one is a better writer). I agree with that. But I was suggesting that the SAME writer might put more work into their submission if they know they are paying money. They might be less willing to toss it into the slush pile without properly editing and revising. I would guess that most writers are more careful with their contest submissions than their free online submissions.
But maybe the difference wouldn’t be significant.
Also, if a publication can’t stay afloat when it’s not even paying its contributors, then I think that publication should just not exist. If I do work I’m either going to get paid for it, I’m going to give it away free, or it’s going to sit and rot in my filing system. I’m not going to pay someone for my own work.
6
Charles Dickens?
I’m not sure it’s any more naive than Chris acting shocked that he got 100 subs and only a couple purchases. You can’t hope to start a lit journal without knowing many many writers will want it as a “notch” on their bedpost type thing to get in there and very rarely will help “support” the journal by paying for a copy. A number of writers and editors joke off the record about never knowing where to send certain stories (especially “literary” ones).
I do like the idea of shaming writers who know nothing about a journal before submitting to it.
I do like the tub.
Interesting post, Richard.
It makes a good point: I know a lot of writers in my program that are submitting stories to 15-20 different journals in a go without subscribing to a single one. Not that I have a ton of money, but I have at least 4-5 subscriptions at any given time on principle (plus, when I come across a journal that I would like to appear in someday, it’s because I like the writing and would enjoy to read more of it).
I don’t know how I feel about the submission fees as a way of supporting indie publishers, but I don’t think it would be that big of an issue if more writers bothered to read even a couple different issues every year.
adam i wish i had a tub. that would be the best.
seriously? dickens?
Roxane, you called Brendan naive earlier. I hate to say it…but you’re being naive yourself.
Writers want to get published, paid, and praised. END OF STORY. They don’t want to take their meager money earned from teaching or given to them by parents to buy other books, etc. Yes, there are exceptions like you and Matt Bell and others. But for the most part writers want the three p’s and that is it.
Also this comparision to the post office fees is a bit of a red herring. THERE WAS NO OTHER WAY TO DELIVER YOUR STORY. That money was going into the post office coffers, not a mag’s pockets. I’ll quit wasting my time writing stories before I start paying to have my story read. Even if it gets published the only readers will be other writers or family, many of whom will be thinking “eh” the whole time reading it anyway (or worse).
1. Hemingway (one “m”) is famous for having an exhaustive library. Check out this list: http://www.jfklibrary.org/NR/rdonlyres/D809DDAD-CCC6-4C97-8505-9AC5E224200D/19103/hemingwayslibrary9994.pdf
2. You’re comparing apples and oranges. For, like, a million reasons.
dude, come on it’s three m’s in hemmmingway
i don’t know. i personally am as careful as i can be and try real hard to not send out something i don’t think is ready. i think what you are saying makes a great deal of sense, if we assume all [or enough to warrant the assumption] submissions are from lazy writers who don’t spend enough time with their work because they just want a pub credit on the cv.
ha, yeah, there are some deluded tools who have money that will LOVE this kind of filter. they will keep sending the same shitty stories and the same lame ass bios and will still carpet bomb, maybe just to 16 places instead of 18.
$5.66
i think it could theoretically make a difference for the kind of writer you are talking about, and i honestly had not even considered it. but overall, i honestly just don’t know.
ha ha, seriously though, i think Ani is right. You are fired up today!
I think since you and JY are both in Bmore (eh?) you should meet in the street and “talk” this out. Hopefully there will be no bottles involved!
I spell things wrong on princaple. Hemingway couldn’t spell either.
I still don’t think this thing that writers have to subscribe to x amount of magazines is really that legit. It is like saying a plumber needs to have at least 6 toilets in his house before he can unplug yours.
I definitely don’t get too many. I just checked Submishmash (man, Michael, the reports there look awesome), and there have only been 30 since June 1. For me the question isn’t about being able to read/respond to them (though this is a challenge). It’s more about whether writers have any obligations in the matter.
Not sure why my comment is naive. Which part?
indie lit? really? you’re saying that major publishing houses put art above commerce and take nothing for themselves? did anyone get into this to get paid or did we do it because this is what we fucking do regardless of if anyone reads it or cares.
which is not to say i don’t want to get paid, or that we shouldn’t. but this was never a thing i was told was a viable career option.
and also, i have no idea what clarkesworld is.
also, having never been paid for a pub other than the novella, i am curious:
if you were getting paid for being published in a journal, what would you expect? i have no idea about this. i don’t know what you get paid for being published.
would it be tiered? like bigger journals pay you more? how would that go? does anyone have answers?
Okay, I’ve come to this late. What if, perhaps, instead of $3 sub fee, it were $1, $2 at most? You’re spending no more than you would have pre-Internet in the form of the postage to send, the SASE, and the envelope/paper you’ve printed it on. You sidestep most of the “class war” issues because in the end, $1×10 is much more manageable on the pocketbook than $3×10, and you’re still providing something of a filter. Not to mention, as it’s already been said, this revenue stream (even if small) would provide a pot for journals to 1) better produce and market their journal, and 2) start offering a bit of payment to those published, if even only a token payment?
I may only be reiterating what’s already been said, as I’m at work, and could only read a handful of the earlier comments, but I thought I’d toss this out there, because I noticed that $3/sub seemed to get caught on the collective thought in this thread, with no thought of a possibly lower sub fee.
You need to work on your analogies dude!
Here is what this discussion really reminds me of: the punk/hc scene. Back when I was growing up there was this bizarre notion that punk shows had to be 5 dollars (and LPs/CDs had to be really cheap as well) anything else was sell out awful capitalism. Fugazi is probably responsible for this attitude to a large degree. But the thing is, punk shows had been five dollars since the early 1980s yet inflation and gas costs and a everything else were soaring. The end result was a scene that wasn’t supporting itself. Touring as a band wouldn’t even recoup your touring expenses, much less make you a little living money.
Scenes really only thrive when people support them and for good or ill, that often means monetary support in this society.
I think if we are being honest with ourselves, the overlap between wannabe writers and readers of most literary magazines is pretty extensive. The venn diagram of wanna be poets and poetry readers is probably two super imposed circles. It is all nice to say that all them oney should go towards writers and since all submitters are writers none should ever have to support their scene, but it isn’t the most tenable situation. its like trying to keep punk shows at five bucks and then insisting that everyone who attends get on the guest list.
hopefully 5-10 cents a word.
Well, you aren’t paying to have your work published. You are paying to have an editor read your work.
Pay is anywhere form one cent to one dollar a word, depending on the publication.
None of the punk bands I knew made money ever. That is not what it was about. And I can tell you for sure none of those bands paid to play.
Charging a reading fee is punk??? I liked my analogy about the plumber better.
i would disagree sasha. i think this thread proves pretty well actually that $3 is a quality filter.
Not sure if you actually read my post…
It is possible to support your scene without it being about making money. There is a difference between making bank and not losing money everytime you play a show.
i’ve thought alot about this. i did think FitzGerald’s post was pretty compelling.
on one hand you want to support as many good publications as possible just like i want to support as my good writers as possible. on the other hand it seems like a situation that could quickly lead to exploitation. i’ve thought about mfa programs in the same way. very people in my program were really serious, most were just hanging around because they didn’t know what else to do. and they were there partly because they didn’t mind paying out thousands of dollars for a degree and the school didn’t mind taking that money. but because of this money many writers that couldn’t otherwise support themselves were able to support themselves by teaching.
i suppose in the end if i trusted the publication was a quality outfit (and not narrative) then i would pay 3bucks even if i was already a subscriber (and i probably would be). i don’t mind paying $ for good writing. and i don’t care if i am paid for writing (doubt it’ll ever happen). literature has given me almost everything i have and i don’t mind doing what i have to do to keep it going.
Right. The NYer sucks. But they make money. And I doubt most of the writers are friends.
They just have a viable business plan.
The part where you assert that publishers need to manage to make money off their publications. I’ve worked for two, one with national distribution and a university subsidy, and it was even impossible there. On the smaller one, which I edited, our submissions outnumbered our subscriptions at a proportion that was incredibly top heavy.
Also probably the part where you set up the binary between loving to read subs and soliciting them.
This isn’t to say your whole point is off, but it could be more nuanced.
“1) the NYer is pretty good example of what happens when you go to the same stable of writers over and over.”
You get extremely popular and respected?
Yeah, I’m with Lincoln on this one having been on both sides of the analogy. I spent 10 years of my life playing and touring in bands without care to do much more than break even on tours, or at least make enough cash to buy a bit of studio time again. Had we lost money, sure, we’d have just worked more hours at our day jobs to afford pitching in for more studio time, but it’d be a whole hell of a lot nicer to have gotten a few more dividends from doors and merch sales to cover touring expenses.
That was always the venues responsibility, not the bands. Most of these bands also had fans who would pay 2 or 3 dollars to see them. A writer brings their fans to the publication, if they have any.
This is a totally different issue, but I wish journals didn’t treat subscription purchases like donations. What I mean by this is probably more than half of the journals I’ve ever subscribed to I either never received any issues at all, had to pester the editors/subscription people until I finally received my issues many weeks or months late, or only ever recieved one issue although I paid for a year’s subscription.
I mean, half of these “venues” were just people’s houses or free spaces and it was entirely the community’s standards keeping the ticket prices unsustainably low.
Obviously writing does not equal music, but I’m just talking in general about unhealthy attitudes in “scenes.”
The bottom line is that if you toss all the maxims like “writers must get paid!” “magazines should learn to make their own money!” aside we are left with a reality where writers don’t support their magazines which ends up hurting everyone. It leads to quicker slush reading, longer wait times, fewer readers, constantly folding magazines, no pay for writers, etc.
So the question is is there a way to max things better?
I’m not sure a 3 dollar fee is the answer at all, mind you, but an attitude adjustment amongst writers would be healthy.
So I think there is some truth to the idea that some journals come across as not really caring whether anyone reads them or not, especially university-sponsored journals that rotate staffs every other year.
Also, make it EASY to financially support your journal. If you accept online submissions but want me to mail you a check to subscribe, you are an idiot.
Maybe htmlgiant should charge $.30 to comment. Cha-ching!
i don’t understand submission fees. if a writer likes a magazine, he/she will buy it. i don’t think anyone wants to buy something they don’t actually like, if they know that ahead of time. if the writer submits to a magazine he/she doesn’t like that much and thus doesn’t buy, that’s because he/she wants to make the magazine “better” or couldn’t find a more attractive venue. “perhaps” that submitter “should not” submit to a magazine they don’t like, so as to avoid alienating those editors who feel angry when a contributor doesn’t support their shit (although, i would argue if the submitter becomes a contributor, than he/she is contributing via their art even if not via their money).
submission fees make no sense to me. the artist is giving the editor/magazine some art. the amount that artist vs. editor “benefits” from the subsequent publication of the art is debatable (more on that below), but until the piece is accepted and published, no one “benefits,” unless of course there’s submission fees. it seems almost unethical to me to say, “in order to maybe get into my magazine, you have to pay me first.” the “enterprise” of a magazine should be supported by readers, and i understand that many writers/submitters are also readers, but not all of them are, and paying every time you submit is almost as dumb as buying lottery tickets (not the greatest analogy, but you could similarly be pissing your money away for nothing). this is one of those deals where i understand you want to have enough money to continue, but maybe if you produced a more attractive product, more people would buy it, and then you wouldn’t have these problems [via the recording industry, to some degree].
i’m not saying “this is how it should be, i know everything,” by the way. just expressing my confusion and opinions.
as a fully independent editor, with complete say, i plan to charge readers a little for the 2nd issue of my magazine in order to help cover printing costs (and as a result, it will also likely be a more “professional-looking magazine”). but the readers will buy the magazine of their own volition, if they do, and they are definitely getting something in return (lots of art, a physical object).
as far as who “benefits” from being in a magazine, i think it depends on the artist and on the magazine. i think I benefit from Tao being in my magazine. i think some of the newer writers “benefit,” potentially, more than i do from being in my magazine, bc Tao and others, by their mere presence alongside these others, unintentionally (to some degree/i’d say for the most part or possibly completely) grant them more credibility/expose them to more readers. this is not to say i don’t “benefit” to some degree from every artist’s presence in the magazine, bc i do, via a “better” magazine for having had them in it. but i think you can understand how an established artist lends credibility/makes things possible that aren’t otherwise possible, like media coverage/greater interest in the magazine/the bestowal of greater “legitimacy” on the magazine and its editor, to some degree.
i think some other editors seem to look at the magazine or the “enterprise” and its survival as the most important thing. it also seems like they think they’re running a contest or a lottery, like “ok, all you writer wretches of the world, put your coin in the slot and give us your best shot. i am the supreme judge.” by having more solicited than unsolicited work in my magazine, i am acting as more of a curator than a judge. this is not “better,” but it is different, and one could argue that it is an “everyone wins” situation, in that artists get exposure, i put out a magazine i want, no one pays for anything without receiving something, etc. in the other situation, with submission fees, the magazine continues to function, which is a win for the editor if his/her main concern is the magazine’s continued existence, but the win beyond that, for editor/reader/submitter, is debatable—there’s nothing “wrong” about the situation, per se, but if the magazine isn’t all that sweet, according to the submitter, but they still had to pay for it in order to maybe get in it, that kind of blows; and if the magazine continues but people are turned off by the submission fee and less kewl work comes in, that kind of blows for the editor, if he/she is aware of a “dip in quality.” and of course, same for the reader (re “dip in quality.”) ok, that’s enough on that.
peace yall
No argument there. But maybe MFA programs that act like writing is a viable “job” are partly to blame.
I agree with that. I’ve written before about how journals could really do themselves a favor by putting a little work into their concept and execution. I’m sure all journal editors work hard editing work, but few really try to do anything remotely unique. How do you expect to stand out publishing a journal called The [Location] Review that publishes 3 stories, a bunch of poems and a few nonfiction essays in the same format and shape as every other journal and all your work could easily appear in any of the other 500 similar journals out there.
addendum: i realize that if the cost of the magazine is just enough to cover printing costs, than the recording industry analogy doesn’t work, bc obviously then there’s no profit margin. so, yeah… i dunno at that point. i look at magazines as promotion meets sweetart/funtimes. if a magazine isn’t helping artists they like to be seen/read/possibly make bank, and if the magazine doesn’t have art that somewhat consistently makes some segment of the population be like, “damn, girl, you see this mag?!” i dunno what the point is then….
peace yall
Yeah, this is better probably, because $3 adds quickly, especially when a bunch of journals are probably, realistically, already so backlogged with subs or already assembled out of prior commitments that there’s little chance they’re seriously considering new pieces as a sizable incoming source of words anyway.
ACTUALLY HERE IT IS: When I submit I want to see a meter showing the likelihood that my piece will be considered, or the fullness of the magazine, or the editor’s openness to new stuff from unknowns, or something like that, and then I’ll feel better tossing my cash in as an entry fee. Maybe the price can even scale to match the possibility it’ll be well spent, so that I’d pay like a penny to sub to the New Yorker and a couple bucks for some hip regularly-updated online pub.
implied in my first paragraph is that if a writer/possible submitter already buys a magazine before submitting, that means he/she is already helping the magazine to stay afloat, and it doesn’t seem “necessary” for them to further help by paying to submit. the paragraph proceeds from that implied situation to cover those submitters who aren’t already buyers of the mag.
Well, there is Duotrope that gives you a lot of that information. There’s a lot of transparency these days.
Ha. One can always hope for an ideal situation.
Seriously though, I think $1-2 would be pretty reasonable. The only problem with this model is that you 1) have to already be an established journal with people willing to pay the sub fee, however cheap, to pitch their words into the pile, or 2) it has to be common practice across the board, otherwise, people will just still submit to the journals who don’t charge.
If they don’t make money, the publication goes under. Most magazines never make money. But some do. Most small presses never make money. But some do.
Trying to be sustainable doesn’t seem all that naïve, but maybe I am living in a different world. The majority of my income right now comes from writing and translating.
Oops. That was meant as a response to thread below Tim.
but a small magazine’s editor doesn’t have a full-time job editing. editing is their passion work or their side thing. if it was a full-time job, then they’d already have a salary and the magazine would be more financially stable in the first place. either way, i don’t see why the editor needs to be paid to read. i realize i’m in a charmed situation, though, in that i mostly solicit my work and i don’t get that many submissions (yet). but also, i mean, truth be told, if something “kinda sucks” in your opinion as you start reading it, aren’t you just going to do a power skim anyway? just keepin’ it real.
wax lion I really agree about making it easier to submit. So many magazines make it so difficult to subscribe. It’s so easy to set up a PayPal account. I wish everyone would do it.
idk, no matter how many people were submitting, i’d be flattered that they thought of me and feel good about reading their stuff. that was cynical above about the power skim. in honest truth, i haven’t power skimmed anyone’s submission to my magazine, so far.
I’m not sure I’ve ever known a program to flaunt writing as a viable “job.” Teaching writing while writing, maybe, but not writing.
I was told repeatedly not to expect to make money from my writing, at least not much more than to help me buy a car, make a down payment on a house, or start a trust fund to send whatever kids I may have to college someday.
Well what I was really getting at with that statement is that I find it a little silly when people act like magazines should be fully at the service of “writers” (seemingly meaning all writers) instead of just THEIR writers. A magazine should treat the people they publish well, but it isnt’ really their duty to bend over backwards to cater to people who don’t even read their magazine and are just carpet bombing a billion places.
Good point. I hadn’t even thought of Duotrope in that regard.
Not to mention, having a firm grasp of the journal to which your submitting can act as that meter. In your own example, you illustrated that you already have that meter.
Michael’s got a very convincing argument. I got just under 100 submissions for the print issue since we announced the call to submit last week and I got maybe two or three orders for mags. The whole time I was watching the submissions pour in I was thinking to myself that it was really cool that all these people wanted to contribute to the print issue, but how many of them had actually plunked down the cash to purchase one? I get that there’s a lot more practical places to spend your ten bucks these days. But if you’re a writer who actually cares about the publication you’re submitting to, and you want to see it survive, I don’t see anything standing in the way of dropping a couple bucks to see that someone gets paid for what they do. I really want to hear other writers perspectives.
you write a story/poem and it’s good, really good, you think. you think, i’m sending it to 10 places i like, because 10 is the minimum number of really having a good chance at getting it published. you think, do i have 30 dollars to spend?
of course, yes, there’s nothing wrong with your magazine getting that 3 dollars. and it probably will make you think twice, that 3 dollars times 10. but who will it keep out and who in? and, can you retrofit the internet to make it work like the mail? is the internet is the internet, like this blog, because it’s [potentially] free? will group A magazines charging just carve out niche B of magazines that don’t? and which kinds of talent will go to A and which to B?
chris, how so?
adam, yes. maybe ten cents to a quarter. collect that cash.
I don’t think they’re extremely popular or respected for their fiction. Maybe I’m dreaming this, but I think they’ve discussed cutting both poetry and fiction.
I’m not so much shocked as I am frustrated that there’s more writers out there than readers. And sometimes the writers don’t know anything, nor do they care, about the places they submit. Which constantly baffles me. Would you submit a photo of a pimped-out low rider to Cat Fancy? I’m not talking about anyone here. We’re obviously all pretty entrenched in the scene. It’s more the weekenders who think it would be “neat” to be a writer. It takes so much more dedication and commitment than that.
I like how you tie flash into this. It seems that every place online wants flash or at least caps stuff out at 2.5 or 3 or 4k. I know Roxane wrote on this a few weeks ago, but it probably ties in here too, as the high demand for very quick work is probably directly related to the huge glut of stuff writers can produce.
I try not to spam magazines, but I know that after I decided it would be far (far) easier for me to place a flash-esque piece than it was to place a 6k story the number of finished and, I think, quality short pieces I had to send out grew dramatically.
gotcha, lincoln. well, my follow-up question then would be, if your magazine has sort of a cadre of writers it often publishes, and you are unlikely to publish much from the slush pile, why not take away the i-will-read-you guarantee, if it’s so trying going through all those submissions? that way, submitters don’t have to pay, but they also don’t know if they’ll be read by mr. michel (just being playful). i mean, i assume you’re not as insular as like n+1 or something, but it seems like a magazine has more identity if they have some faces that pop up repeatedly, and that seems like “a good thing” to me, in a way. i just think that if the “real reason” for sub fees is “we need your money to stay afloat” why not just soliciting that money directly via idk, throwing a party, doing a pledge drive a la NPR (joking), or idk, bake sale? or just promote the crap out of your mag via the web/posters/whatevs…. just brainstorming, not telling you or anyone what to do.
And I’d modify that to strike out the “online,” as most print journals too cap out around 4.
I’ve always respected your opinion, Roxane, but the thought of a new economic model scares me because I’m already doing what publishers tell me to do: instead of BCC-bombing a bunch of journals with my newest stories, i’m purchasing and reading the ones that catch my interest before I decide to submit to them. I don’t mind shelling out $20 for a subscription every few weeks, but to ask for more from me because other people that submit aren’t doing what I’m doing feels wrong.
Yeah. I had some spare coin a few months ago and actually donated it to Juked. David was stoked. In all the years Juked has been around, I guess I was only like the 3rd person who’d actually donated.
To add to Chris’s point, too, I see that “sub fee as support,” very similar to token payments to writers, and what writer hasn’t talked about how nice it’d be to receive a token payment? Why then, when the tables are flipped, is it such a bitch move for a publisher to ask for a small sub fee (again, in the range of $1-3, not Narrative’s egregious $20) as a similar sort of token (especially if that is going back to the writers being published in the form of token payments)?
oh, and oh yeah– you spent X hours working on your story/poem. i mean, hard hours [hopefully]. now you are spending 30 dollars on it. 30 dollars and what will you get back if it’s published? 30 dollars and breaking even, discounting your hard hours? no dollars and losing, still discounting your hard hours? who gets to lose, you, the magazine, both?
In May we received 512. So far this month, we’ve received 321 which frightens me a little. Submissions range from 10 words to 20,000 or more words. Some of those submissions are a single poem or seven poems or four flash fictions. I quite enjoy reading submissions, but it can get very overwhelming, particularly when at least half of those submissions have been sent by writers who have never even looked at our website. At the end of the day, the joys of editing and publishing vastly outweigh the frustrations. That said, the frustrations are there and legitimate.
Well, we can go two ways, then–either we have a Hayden Carruth-ian lit climate where a handful of journals thrive and can support themselves because everyone else has gone under and subscribers don’t have anywhere else to go and so concentrate on those particular journals, or we have the current lit climate, where you can’t move over the web without tripping on someone’s short story.
Both of these worlds is attractive in some ways, but the majority of writers would probably be dismayed if they had a single- or even-double digit number of places to send their work. And the rub, then, is that most of those same writers (myself included) don’t do much, financially, to keep the journals they keep flailing at in operation.
well, for there to be readers who are not writers, one would need to promote quite a bit. or one’s content would need to have appeal to people who aren’t writers. felt there was a need for Captain Obvious here, and no offense intended.
while i see what you mean re Cat Fancy, i think the tastes and whims of editors might be unknown or difficult to guess for those looking to submit. i’m in a situation where i rarely come across a journal, online or otherwise, that has tons of stuff in it that i like and that is somehow in the same galaxy as my writing (the style of which is fluid and evolving anyway). in fact, i think i almost never come across a sizable collection of different people’s writing and like the majority of it. and i don’t even know my own taste in writing, let alone some other person’s. just sayin’…
I wish that instead of charging money they could distribute shame units. So you would be allowed to submit to a journal you had never read and had no intention of buying only if you were willing to undergo 5 units of shame. And you could submit more than once a year to a journal if you would agree to feel like a real heel for one hour. Maybe we could form a committee of shaming. We could investigate the weaknesses in people’s self-regard and then use them to help poets and writers behave decently.
I hear you Mark, and as I’ve said, I’m not a staunch advocate for a submission fee. It’s something my co-editor and I have discussed and decided we’re simply not going to do. That said, I see merit in it, and I think it’s a valid option for some magazines. You do bring up a good point though. There are writers who are conscientious, and who put in the work of researching magazines and who support a few magazines. Should they have to pay the fee? At the same time, to characterize this issue in that manner makes it seem like suggesting a small reading fee is a punitive gesture. I don’t think that is necessarily the case. It isn’t a punishment though it can be intended, in some cases, as a deterrent to encourage writers to submit their best work and to do so thoughtfully. All these various tangential thoughts though, are one of the main reasons why I don’t think I could implement such a fee.
Hi guys. (Adam, thanks for noticing.)
Yeah, Joseph, I agree. It could carve out niches. But to some extent the existing system is already doing that.. print, online, closed. But filters have been around in book publishing forever. Essentially agents (or small pubs like PG) act as filters. Most NYC publishers demand you go through an agent, others let you send in the ms. I think it’ll work the same way with lit. journals. The more in demand the editor(s), the more they will need a filter to keep submissions manageable and continue putting out quality work. Right now, good editors basically get penalized for putting out quality journals and books. Once they do something impressive, their slush pile mushrooms. (I know I’m suggesting slush piles aren’t good things. I’m a writer; I like the idea of my work being something more than a bit of slush. But this is the reality.)
The other option is just to keep one foot in the pre-internet and allow for both snail mail & $3.
Why not charge a penalty (or require a subscription) for anyone that submits more than twice a year to your journal without getting published? That might cut down the slush pile and force people to send only their best pieces.
Or, if someone has submitted more than x times to your journal without ever getting accepted, regardless of time period, require a subscription before they can submit again.
It seems like there should be more creative ways to discipline writers than to charge a flat fee from day one. I am unemployed. A $3 fee across the board will put me out of the game. But a little financial pain if I haven’t done my homework (either by working on my piece enough or by matching it to the right journals) seems fair, and a small recompense to the editors and publishers working so hard.
Well, more places is better I think. And I am happy to help small presses/journals out. I just don’t feel comfortable doing it with money. If I like a journal or press I will mention there names whenever I can and have certainly gotten people to take out subscriptions. I have donated books before that go out to subscribers and I have recently I even encouraged a small press to pay me less money for a story because I knew they were struggling. I am happy to do that kind of thing, but that is different than paying to be read.
just reading through this thread, there are already a good portion of people saying they wouldn’t want to pay them, and still others taking the more extreme position of saying that flat out wouldn’t pay them. sadly, some of those people are probably great writers, and that’s one negative aspect of a monetary filter like this, and on the flip side, there are still going to be mediocre writers will looser pockets. i’m not denying your example, really. just saying that it doesn’t completely refute the sub fee model.
preposterous, imho
I won’t pay a fee to have someone read my work on principle. Publishers need to manage to make money off their publication. If reading submissions is too troublesome for them, then just publish by invite only.
If my writing can’t make an editor pay attention to me, than 3 bucks sure won’t.
Why send it to 10 places? Send it, first, to 3. Or 5. Budget the 10 submissions over the year. Know the market. How much do painters spend on materials? Is it right that publishers are the only ones who have to invest money to create writing that gets read? And then pay the writers? Writers rue the perfect world, and lambaste publishers who don’t pay. Someday we might get to an economy that values VSF, but until then, it’s publishers who shoulder the burden.
It makes perfect sense, and is still a VASTLY better deal then the major dollars I have wasted over the years with the post office and office supply stores (lets see, 8.5 x 12 manila clasp envelopes, quality paper, postage, the ubiquitous SASE). What did the post office do with all that money???
I’ve tried submishmash and I LOVE IT! Tracking of what I have done, who has it, etc. etc. VS. once things are dropped off with the USPS — wow, who knew? —
And do you really trust plain old email these days? What do you have in your spam folder? Are you sure what you are emailing is getting where it is going?
Submishmash is great, and as long as I have faith in my words, I think the fees make perfect sense. Keep the print places printing, and keep the wana-bees from flooding the editors with all of their unpublishable crap that they typed up from their jr. year journals that were in parent’s basements…
Hell, my agent takes 10% from me and doesn’t really do squat.
– Steve Saroff, MontanaVoice.com
hey, michael. one reason submishmash sounds so cool is that it helps imagine other systems. does the internet work like nyc publishing? can it? are there other possible economies?
I can understand what you are saying Chris, but I think it is the editor’s job to make their publication so compelling that people think they have to read it. Even if that means no open reading and just asking writer’s you know will attract an audience to submit work. In other words, it is great if writer’s want to support you, but I don’t think any publication can be viable if they mainly rely on other writer’s to keep them afloat.
Brendan,
I don’t think it’s about getting their ‘attention’. I think it’s a matter of making their jobs possible. And “reading submissions” is a constantly changing job, esp. if your publication takes off (which on the internet doesn’t mean sales). Reading 50 submissions a month is a very different undertaking than reading 1000. I think the filter (Post office or whatever) is about keeping their jobs manageable, not a writer getting anyone’s attention.
both sides shoulder the burden. who’s time/money is more valuable? neither. both. and who cares, when you are talking art? but if you are talking economy, then that’s that.
The last part is the part I’m most concerned about. I don’t think $3 is too much, and if you’re submitting every story to that many places you’re submitting too many places. (And if you think I’m being insensitive too poor people, please know that I work for a labor union and talk to working people every single day, and to suggest to these folks that they couldn’t afford $3 every once in a while would be pretty wildly insulting to them. If you are so poor that you can’t afford $3, then you are almost certainly not writing in your spare time because you don’t have any and there are a lot of things wrong with that but not charging a submission fee is not going to be the answer to this terrible, intractable poverty.)
But. I worry, like Roxane says, that $3 becomes $5, becomes $10, becomes $20. And once you’re at that point, then you are discriminating and taking many talented writers out of your pool
but, i guess i’m also assuming that you were trying to completely refute the model. (not to mention, that was a messy response.)
i guess, in general, i think that a reasonable sub fee would cause writers to consider the “doneness” of their work before sending it, at least much more than they (even i’m guilty of it, I’ll admit) do when it’s free to submit.
when it comes down to it, there are plenty out there who don’t know they’re mediocre, and would pay the fee fully believing their subs are good enough, but i think the good would outweigh the bad.
Playing devil’s advocate, here are a few reasons why I disagree with the idea of charging for submissions:
1). It creates a class system. Writers who could not afford to pay the fees would be excluded – sure, $3 doesn’t sound like a lot for someone making $30,000+ a year, but for a grad student making $12,000 a year, $3 sounds like a meal.
2). The whole idea is backwards: instead of writers getting paid for their work, writers actually have to pay people to publish them? That sounds nuts!
3). Editors who are concerned with “mushrooming” slush piles need to learn to become more discerning readers. Having been an editor at various literary journals, I can attest that it takes approximately 96 seconds (being wildly generous) to determine whether a piece is worthy of further consideration.
4). Marketing is part of a successful business plan. If one wants to run a literary journal, one should be prepared to engage in marketing, publicity, advertising, etc. Charging writers for submissions sounds like a lazy way for journals to make money. Seems like they should be doing THEIR job, which includes creating a marketing plan, rather than asking writers to do their job for them. Making money is the responsibility of the publication, not the writers.
Hello middle class, glad you can afford 3 bucks for a chance. Some really great writers can’t and I don’t know if that’s hard to believe.
If not for the internet and free, I would’ve never found and read half the face-smacking goodness I have. why can’t we change up the game? Charge in time, in creativity, anything but money? Recycle. Trade. Keep it in the fam. Something.
I don’t think I necessarily agree with the $3 becomes $5, &c., simply because of simple economics–competition, supply and demand.
As with any commodity, there’s a breaking point where a price point is just too high.
A lot of people here are complaining that people aren’t subscribing to their journals who submit. But I don’t think subscriptions are the problem. Not READING them is the problem. And how do you know people aren’t reading them? For instance, I certainly hope that y’all aren’t judging me because I don’t have subscriptions, because I usually pick up your magazines in St. Marks or at other bookstores, and sometimes order them from you–but I don’t get subscriptions.
If the worry isn’t subscriptions but people financially supporting the magazine, I would say not everyone should have to. People like me who can definitely should (and I do–I buy every magazine and book that I possibly can, partially to support the community and mostly to read the fine writers in them. And I hope others like me do the same.) Others who can’t afford that, can read the magazines at the library or school or maybe, unfortunately, not at all if they really can’t get their hands on a free copy. I think–or I hope–that it evens out that way.
Joseph, Yeah, we think so. It’s all changing so fast, but so far most technologies have been focused on the ‘creator’ (writer, artist, musician, movie maker, etc). Which has been amazing, right? We’ve all benefited from this. So much easier to writer, to research, to get to the publisher. But the next wave will empower curators (editors, gatekeepers). This might come in the form of crowd curation (voting, like buttons, simple traffic analytics), but will also be some new paradigm for individual nodes of gate-keeping, empowering indie publishers with a way to put out great art and survive.
i didnt read michales thing or the comments here because i have not as much time to et. bascially, i wouldnt charge a fee for submitting. i only use submishmas as an alternative to submit, currently i take submissions through both submishmas and regular email, so if it suddenly costed 3 to submit submish then people would probably just submit through regular email.
i dont like the idea of cost acting as a filter. why as an editor would i want to relinquish control of what gets filtered. i dont want writes to make decisions whether or not to submit, i just want them to submit everything. i want to see everything and let my reading it and deciding on it be the filter, thanks.
a lot of ‘shoulds’ on this page
i dont submit to journals with a reading fee
if other people want to charge a reading fee, or pay a reading fee, seems like it is up to them
Thanks Darby. Submishmash doesn’t see a model where they force publishers to charge and we like that you give your writers an option.
What are we doing? Why?
Hey Chris.
1) We paid $3 to the post office forever. Grad students still managed. I sent out more when I was a grad student than I do now, though arguably I felt richer in grad school than I ever have in my whole life.
2) Maybe they’ll be able to pay writers if they have a way of dealing with submissions. Right now, no writers get paid and publishers are going out of business.
3) 96 x 2000…
4) I don’t think they’ll make money on this. They will just get high quality submissions and at more reasonable incoming rate. But again if they have more time, they will actually be able to market better and make a better publication, which markets itself.
10-4, Chris. I should have said frustrated instead of shocked. I guess maybe I shouldn’t “accept” the way things are, and I don’t say that sarcastically. I have a low opinion of myself as a writer (motives, skills, etc) and I think sometimes I project that to the “typical” (or most) writers. I’ve edited before and yes getting an 1880’s Harlequin type story is depressing and deflating…while easy to reject it just reminds me of my own pathetic tendencies to submit to some places I don’t well enough.
the internet is weird. it’s so big, for one thing, and has room to both create a class system (perpetuate capitalism) and sidestep it. and this is more weird: blogger, youtube, whatever, are all avaialble to anyone with a computer, and on them you can pretty much do whatever you want, trashtalk the govt/corporate america–even walking all over copyright is mostly ignored–but they are all corporate entities themselves. allowing people free expression, more or less, makes money.
To me, it’s point 4 that’s most appealing. The fallout from instant submissions is what Genoways should have been talking about.
idon’t understand the question here. you mean my ‘that’s that’? i mean that if we are talking economy then, i don’;t know, no one’s really too much in the black. as is now, publishers put up the front money in the hope they migth make it back in sales. same as galleries maintaining the space in the hope that they will sell paintings. writers [or artists] put up the labor (and create the actual content of books/galleries) in the hope of their own return. i suppose it makes as much sense to have writers pay in in cash up front as any other way, but what effect will that have, is all i’m wondering.
Brendan,
I don’t think anyone is suggesting this as a way to keep a publisher afloat. It will just make their jobs manageable and allow them to both continue putting out quality publications and allow for new work to come in.
I just got Annalemma # 6 in the mail. It’s slick & beautiful. (Though, Chris, cut 1 story and make the font bigger for old men like me). But this magazine shouldn’t change. It’s exactly what indie publishing should be unique, rich, and full of smart engaging writers. The only thing he could do to make this more ‘compelling so people have to read it’ (i.e. sell the thing) is put Brittany Spears on the cover. And I guess if feels like that’s the way publishing is going if something doesn’t change.
Roxane: I’m not upset by the idea of money going to the publisher. I’m upset by the idea of my money as a writer going to a publisher. I spend as much as I can on books and magazines as a reader — some old, some new. Given the rates of acceptance at good magazines, you simply can’t build a career by only submitting to places you regularly give money unless you’re at least middle class, which I currently am not. The fact is that we rely on guilt as a community to sell our products. If you need guilt, if you need to moralize at people about their submissions, then your product isn’t good enough. Now, I don’t think most people here need to do that — but the fact that they choose to reveals both an unnecessary anxiety and some beliefs that I find, frankly, a little unseemly.
If you are working hard enough on your stories, I don’t see how you can not be offended by the idea of being asked to provide capital as well as labor if you’re not at least getting a share of the pie, however meager it is. And I think we are working hard enough on our stories.
Lincoln — I’m not saying “nobody give money to publishers,” I’m saying I won’t give money to them in my role as a writer. Of course I buy books, etc., and think the rest of us should be doing the same. I just won’t pay to submit.
And while it’s true I don’t see anyone saying literally that you have to subscribe to every place you submit to (although some do seem to hint at this attitude) I do see them insisting that you ought to be subscribing to THEIR magazines if you submit. Some people even bitch about it on their submissions pages. If it’s morally imperative to subscribe to Magazine X before you submit, how can it possibly not be morally imperative to do the same with Y, Z, A, and so on?
i am going to argue that being willing to spend 3 dollars does not mean you are a better writer, just that you are more willing to spend 3 dollars.
in undergrad i thought the advanced fiction workshop meant everyone would be much better at writing than they were when we were all in the beginning fiction workshop.
they were for the most part just more serious about being mediocre writers.
which is an asshole thing to say, but i still stand by it.
but as someone who reads slush, yeah, having a way to filter it would be awesome. i just am not convinced that this is it.
I’m saying that the New York publishers pay their writers. They sell their books. They don’t use guilt, they don’t scold, etc. Does that make them perfect or their motives pure? No. But it does mean that sometimes I’d really prefer dealing with them. The way people talk about lit in threads like these *is what holds lit back.* If you don’t have the confidence in your work to believe you can sell it without relying on the people who create the content, without which you would have literally nothing, it’s time to change your work.
I agree Mike. To be honest, most publications I have seen that start to demand that those who submit buy their product end up folding. I have seen this time and time again since I began writing. Neil Clark of Clarksworld started off as a bookseller and launched Clarksworld having an audience of readers to some degree already in place. He also wisely chose to both pay well (thus attracting good writers) and do the thing in a small enough way that it was sustainable.
Mike: I agree paying the writer something is essential. But it’s not happening now. And I’m not suggesting submission fees as a way to make money for publishers. (At the amount I’m suggesting, I think it would slow the rate of even the best known indies to 5 or 10 a day. Which is still huge.) But if they had more time to focus on creating a publication that could make money, I think most of them would love to pay their writers.
I don’t think any publisher goes into small press publishing thinking about anything other then supporting the kind of work and its authors that they like.
The other thing I never see acknowledged, and something I want to add here, is that less submissions is not a good thing in my experience. I have high standards for work I take to my editor for publication. I have to read a hundred stories to find one with something like a shot. If only people who are willing and able to pay submit, or only people who subscribe, that’s not going to be enough. The magazine won’t get made — at least not to my standards.
also, yeah, i haven’t been submitting much while here in grad school, but i have zero income. i’m sure i could figure out a way to swing it, but i can say that the idea of having to pay 3 bucks would bring on some small panic attacks about how many groceries i could buy vs how many poems i could send out. i’d probably just wait til i had a job or start saving to submit. which sounds melodramatic, but it’s also not far from true.
p.s. by ‘huge’ i meant workload.
Well, you know all my anxieties. I’m just wondering, in terms of who’s time/ money is more valuable, who’s getting the better deal. I’m questioning the value of literature, I guess. Who cares? And also, oh great, writers get to sit around all day dreaming up stories (brainstorm, draft, revise, edit, submit) while publishers bust ass to edit them, publish them, promote them, pay them. And 80% of the stories are bullshit nonsense, and the writers are complaining that response times are too long. It’s amazing that, pre-internet, writers didn’t demand SASE’s to send their work to publishers.
That’s a good point.
Yeah, I don’t think it would be a way for a publication remain viable, but it would be a gesture of support. Like, “I understand that this costs money and I want to be a part of it so here’s a couple bucks for your time.” I’m speaking only for print here. I think it would be lame and unjustifiable to charge a submissions fee for something an editor is going to post online for free. And if a publication charges for submissions I think it would only be fair that the writers in that appearing in issue get paid. That way it’s more of a contest with a purse at the end of the road.
And it seems kind of pointless to make a publication with just writers who you know are going to attract readers. Sure, it may be the most reasonable way to make money but then you’re just publishing more of the same, not really doing anything to elevate the writing of unknown and emerging writers who may be just as, if not more so, talented. And if that were the case with all magazines then there wouldn’t be a point in writing at all as only the same 50 or so people would get published ad infinitum.
What do you think?
Michael. I don’t think you need Brittany Spears. I think the real key is having writing that really and truly excites people. Not everyone, but at least some people. A little marketing also is a good thing. Give copies to the right people. Make people talk about it. Print out 100 extra to give away at a convention. I am not saying I have the answer, but sometimes I have had the experience where editors complain that no one is buying their product, but upon investigation I find out that they are not really selling it. One editor I had this experience with, where they complained about no one buying their books. I looked at one I was in on their website, and it didn’t even list a table of contents. So though there were a lot of good writers, no one even knew about it.
Well, if I were putting together a publication, I would start out with mainly people who have some kind of audience, cruel as it may seem. Then I would start adding more unknowns. But who is going to buy something that is all unknown writers? I realise that in an ideal world people would ignore the names and just look at the writing. But an ideal world this isn’t.
thanks adam.
and i am not against charging, especially if you’re magazine is the sort with a paid staff and they need to be compensated.
but overall, as much as it sucks to wade through hundreds of pieces by writers who have so obviously never read a thing you’ve published, regardless of the fact that the issues are cheap and also that you publish things online or that there are samples available, what i am saying is it’s frustrating and sometimes you think that people just assume they have a right to be published. but so what. at one point most of us probably just desperately wanted a publishing credit. this is not my argument. my argument is what i already said before.
3 dollars is fine. but it’s not a filter for better work and may at times cause people who are actually really great writers that you would love to publish to not submit to you. and that’s a thing i am not so much excited about.
It’s just not that simple, Mike. Of course money goes to the writer but why is it that people always lose their shit when someone dares to suggest money should also go to the editor/publisher. Without money, we cannot give you a place to submit your work. Suggesting a nominal fee for submissions is not about putting the publisher first. It’s about trying to find some way to make overwhelming submission queues and impossible economics more sustainable. We’d make a whole lot of money if we charged a $2 or $3 submission fee. I see a lot of.. short sightedness in some of these comments because back in the day when we had to print/stamp/post a submission with an SASE we didn’t blink at the $3-4 we spent each and every time.
My co-editor and I put our own money into the magazine, work a ridiculous number of hours to put out a good product, and have relatively few people buying it. That’s frustrating. We choose to do this so there’s no need to cry about it but god, If 1/10 of the people who submit each month subscribed for one issue or bought one book, we would be able to break even and do so much more. It’s not about confidence in the product. It’s about reality. The argument that a publisher who complains about people not buying their product is not as focused as a Clarkesworld is just… insulting.
As a writer I have no problem paying a small submission fee. American Short Fiction requires it and that’s fine by me. There are concerns, of course, because if such a fee starts at $3, it will eventually become $5 and then $10 and soon it will be all Narrative all the time. Such a fee might not be reasonable for some writers and that’s also something that needs to be addressed but on the whole, I don’t think this idea is terrible.
dude, they just did a 20 under 40. i think they’re still committed to publishing fiction.
Then why not just ask 5 or 10 people whose writing you like to submit material?
Your comment is kind of naive.
Roxane: Actually, there are many many places I never sent material to because I couldn’t afford postage. And paying for postage anyhow is not the same as giving the money to the magazine. Because if I give someone money to read my writing and they publish it, it still seems like vanity publishing.
I totally agree that small presses and editors should be supported. But it shouldn’t be mandatory for the writers to do this.
Heaven forbid we give money to a magazine. Of all the nerve.
I don’t think a $3 fee translates into vanity publishing if everyone pays it.
The truth is that I’m not a staunch advocate for instituting a submission fee but I would like to see more writers paying attention to the economics of publishing, putting more thought into where they submit and why, and pitching less of a fit when publishers try out new economic models.
But submission fees have been around for as long as I can remember. Isn’t it then like a contest which asks for money?
I guess it also depends on what kind of writers the publication wants to attract.
The only writers any magazine wants to attract is good writers. In a perfect world, some of those writers might also want to read the magazine where they so much would like to see their work.
doesn’t make sense. you can’t belittle writers their efforts and then make your bread and butter (even if it’s intangible bread and butter) off of those efforts. i mean, you can, and i get it, your frustration, but jeez.
“It seems like there should be more creative ways to discipline writers…”
Why not implant a small chip in writers that monitors all submissions? The chip could double as a credit card and the nominal reading and subscription fees could be automatically deducted upon submission. Editors should be given access to remote tazing devices which would electrocute authors who submit too often or who submit pieces that fail to resonate emotionally. Writers refusing to be chipped would be automatically rejected. These measures will certainly make writers pay more attention to what they’re submitting. Just the other day, some writer sent our magazine a broken microwave as a fiction submission. The note read: Please consider my microwave for your excellent journal…
Yeah, and I don’t even agree with myself, but it felt good.
I think it is certainly true that many if not most writers don’t spend as much time as they should on their work and just carpet it bomb it out to a million places whenever they finish a draft. It seems likely that writers would be more discerning about their work and where they send it if they had to pay money. That said, 3 bucks a submission does add up quickly, especially when most magazines don’t pay. Hmm.
Adam, you sound a little burned out by the biz side? I am one of those weirdos that enjoys editing/proofing the work of others. Hit me up.
I don’t know if the NYer ever discussed cutting fiction and poetry, but I am pretty sure they have been in the red since about the end of the William Shawn era. It may be that Remnick has turned them around somewhat, but if you’re a magazine, you’re looking at the possibility of reaching the absolute cream in prestige terms, and still being millions of dollars in the red some years.
So the NYer does not “have a viable business plan,” certainly not by the standards of any other industry. It is not economically viable to pay staff nonfiction writers 100K/yr and give them license to follow their noses, or to pay fiction writers tens of thousands a year just to have the right of first rejection (and then, often, still to reject those writers’ submissions). The NYer exists because they are bankrolled by a corporation (Conde Nast) that gets prestige from it. Harpers exists because it is bankrolled by a foundation. The Atlantic is bankrolled by a foundation, and they still eliminated fiction. The Paris Review? Foundation.
The point is, there is no way to pursue excellence as a periodical, in the traditional way, and to be a viable business. You are more likely to make a ton of money writing your own stuff, and we all know how that goes. The only magazines that consistently make money are 80 percent ads, and no editorial content that isn’t geared toward turning a buck. This was true way before the internet started killing magazines. So this idea that you can just be compelling and you will be economically viable–yes, it is beyond naive. It has not been the case for decades.
Still, it is weird to me to just hand over money to a magazine when I submit. It feels so…direct. But like someone said above, yeah, for at least ten years I handed over 2-3 bucks a pop to the post office. A lot of the super-principled “I will never pay to submit” people commenting: you must be younger, I’m guessing. Have you never submitted by mail? At least you’ve heard, probably, about how us old-timers used to paper our bedroom walls with actual hard-copy form rejections? Each of those rejections cost us a couple bucks, not counting printer ink and the time we spent waiting at the post office, etc. Writing has always been a losing proposition, economically speaking, for the writer who is not established. Giving money to Annalemma for reading my stuff feels weird, but I wonder if I would get over it eventually? It is pretty fucking weird, also, to be reading Harper’s and see a Naomi Klein essay alongside a two-page ad from Exxon.
lols.
Whoops, that was for Adam, not for Sasha <3
This makes sense to me. I think this is a good way of looking at things. I think that fear controls too much of our thinking as writers, publishers, readers, etc. There is nothing to fear. Not here. Elsewhere, yes. Not here.
I think the most interesting angle that’s come up is that writers are, in fact, not readers… Maybe this is what needs to change. Shouldn’t writers be voracious readers? (This is an honest question, I am not a writer. Never will be. I am a reader. I assumed all writers were readers. My wife, a writer, is a reader.)
Is the current system a reproduction of other hegemonic systems? Isn’t the pay to play system even more of a reproduction of other hegemonic systems?
Right now, the focus of authors seems to be quantity. This is evident in the growing slush piles, the scatter shot submissions, and the flash fiction bonanza (of course, I love me some flash, but (as pointed out in another post by Roxane) I want longer stories too). It seems that every writer is trying to pad their CV with a million pubs. This is not true for all, but the system almost requires this. You cannot simply publish one or two great stories a year because they will be buried by the flood of the publishing world. This is a systematic failure. Maybe the seed of this flawed system is that you must have the quantity to get a job in academia (academia as big business is a topic for another time.)
I think authors need to support the literary enterprise, but not through submission fees. Submission fees are dangerous as they can balloon and then we start to see exclusion (more so then is already at play).
Support the enterprise by buying magazines. I’m all for 10 subscriptions a year. Or a system that pushing subscribing authors to the front of the slush pile (of course, you’d have to have a way to do this without letting the editors know or you’d get into weird bedfellows sort of issues.)
of all the journels everywhere i would subscribe to the journal that published a broken microwave.
Well, that does seems to be another thing that’s happening, which seems less interesting for readers, writers, and the publisher. I don’t think unadulterated nepotism has every produced amazing work. But maybe that’s a solution. I personally hope not.
Money should be going to everyone involved here. Publishers and magazine editors do valuable work that is essential to the whole enterprise.
I’ve never heard a single person ever claim you should buy everyone magazine you submit to. What people normally say is that you should subscribe to a few magazines of your choosing to help support the whole enterprise. If you don’t support magazines, they fold and then there are less venues for work and your work will get less readers, etc.
I’m not sure how you expect money to go to writers if no one is giving any money to the publishers…
Thanks Ani! I just might. But I think I’m more offended by the idea that publishers aren’t doing all they can to make themselves solvent, and that that’s the only reason to charge a fee. I enjoy editing too, but that’s only a small portion of the work involved.
$3 per submission: totally fair and reasonable. $20 per submission (http://www.narrativemagazine.com/node/360): brutal.
I’m not sure where the line is. I guess $5, maybe.
Chris, I think you’re right on the money. It would just be a gesture of support. A much better way to go would be to put a donate link up on the homepage — but that has never worked for me.
To be clear (and sorry I’m posting so much here, guys) I do think writers have obligations to support each other and good publishers and etc., I just have different ideas about what those are and how that should happen.
Why is it not good for readers?
I wonder how many magazines Hemmingway subscribed to.
i said it above and i’ll say it again here, to you, my friend. 3 bucks is not a quality filter. it just means they are more willing to pay. which, again, is fine, so long as we call it charging for submissions and understand that only people willing to pay 3 bucks will submit. which is also not at all a bad thing. but it is a thing.
Yeah, Adam, I don’t think that’s worked for anybody. I see those all the time and unless you’re aggressive about it, like that’s the ONLY thing you see on the front page, it becomes something that’s so easily dismissible.
I will never pay a submission fee. When I can afford it I buy subscriptions to magazines I like, but fuck me if I ever PAY someone to publish my own stuff.
Maybe some magazines shouldn’t get made. (I’m not saying yours shouldn’t. I’m not familiar with it.) Or maybe they should get made much less often, like bi-yearly instead of biannually. The problem we’re dealing with is hundreds of thousands of MFAs, only a small percentage of whom are probably really and truly writers, submitting millions of stories year after year. I participate in this system, but as a reader I have no faith in it. This is why, system-wide, it is impossible to get subscribers. At this point I think any kind of pressure that can be applied to the system–monetary pressure seems to have the best shot at working–might be a good start toward establishing a system that works not just to establish careers, but that rewards readers enough that the resulting careers will actually mean something.
Yeah, I was thinking something along these lines when I read the original post. It’s a shame (hardy har har) that money always seems to be the first solution – and almost always the last. I’d rather support a journal by buying their journal or by buying their books than by buying the publisher’s time. Can totally understand the frustration tho. How many submissions do you get a month, Adam (or anyone) if you don’t mind me asking?
1) the NYer is pretty good example of what happens when you go to the same stable of writers over and over.
2) Maybe this is unique to me (and nice example of my ego)? But I’m a writer and reader. Most of us are. We read the publications we want to publish in. If they just publish their friends, I doubt I’d subscribe. But maybe most writers are bigger people than me.
Who said they’re not readers? What do you mean?
“And 80% of the stories are bullshit nonsense, and the writers are complaining that response times are too long. It’s amazing that, pre-internet, writers didn’t demand SASE’s to send their work to publishers.”
Dude, go take a dip in the tub and calm down. Wow.
I think it’s important to remember that writers are already “contributing” to a journal by offering their work. One would think (by some of the comments from editors here) that they were asking for the editor’s kidney. The dream of every writer is to be paid–and I don’t begrudge editors, especially the ones who are sacrificing their own writing time to do editing–the right to dream of being paid for their valuable work as well. But it seems like asking your writers (contributors) to contribute more (!) is not the best way. I think that journals need to look beyond readers and writers to the community at large for support. And if you’re an editor who is already too busy reading slush to fundraise, find someone who likes to do it. Actually, volunteers can also help read slush. (If I’m not wrong, Ani Smith just volunteered to do so above and got the brush off.) As someone who has worked in fundraising, I can tell you that there is a lot of money out there that doesn’t have to come from writers. Our local writer’s group raised enough money to send someone to a festival in Sweden just by staging open mics (and selling beer at them). The National Endowment for the Humanities has a grant program specifically for digital arts and culture (some of this money is for electronically archiving existing print journals and some is for start-ups, but just about every kind of digital arts format is welcome). Most states have a similar program, and nearly every big city has an arts council, arts resources department, literacy council, or other group that is just dying to give away money. And a surprising number of these boards actually favor the avant-garde.
(Also, Amber, as a union MEMBER {in a right-to-work state, unfortunately}, I can tell you that $3 is a lot of money to me–especially, times ten or twenty. I have two kids in college and there have been times when I have had to decide between paying five or six dollars for extra contributors copies or putting that money aside in savings for what isn’t covered by my kids’ Pell Grants–about 50% of their tuition, not to mention living expenses.)
Well Sasha, your comment seemed to be making it a comparison between two writers (writer a is willing to pay, writer b isn’t, doesn’t mean either one is a better writer). I agree with that. But I was suggesting that the SAME writer might put more work into their submission if they know they are paying money. They might be less willing to toss it into the slush pile without properly editing and revising. I would guess that most writers are more careful with their contest submissions than their free online submissions.
But maybe the difference wouldn’t be significant.
Also, if a publication can’t stay afloat when it’s not even paying its contributors, then I think that publication should just not exist. If I do work I’m either going to get paid for it, I’m going to give it away free, or it’s going to sit and rot in my filing system. I’m not going to pay someone for my own work.
Maybe it’s just me, but if you don’t want to pay to submit, don’t. If you want to pay to submit, do. I don’t see any ethical anything about it. Why do something for free if people are willing to pay you for it, right? I mean, I’ve never turned down money for a story or a book, and if someone OFFERED to give me money to edit, I’d take it, no question.
Well, not cutting exactly, just replacing fiction with powerful people’s faces.
http://www.observer.com/2009/daily-transom/new-yorker-fiction-issue-replaced-world-changers
But right, I don’t think people, including most writers, really grasp the economics of publishing. It’s foundation and universities, and both are starting to lose enthusiasm for their literary publications.
Yeah, the whole thread makes me feel old. Until recently, there was always a cost for submitting. But we also got paid something. Have a picture of myself with a check for the first story I published.
Charles Dickens?
I’m not sure it’s any more naive than Chris acting shocked that he got 100 subs and only a couple purchases. You can’t hope to start a lit journal without knowing many many writers will want it as a “notch” on their bedpost type thing to get in there and very rarely will help “support” the journal by paying for a copy. A number of writers and editors joke off the record about never knowing where to send certain stories (especially “literary” ones).
I do like the idea of shaming writers who know nothing about a journal before submitting to it.
I do like the tub.
Interesting post, Richard.
It makes a good point: I know a lot of writers in my program that are submitting stories to 15-20 different journals in a go without subscribing to a single one. Not that I have a ton of money, but I have at least 4-5 subscriptions at any given time on principle (plus, when I come across a journal that I would like to appear in someday, it’s because I like the writing and would enjoy to read more of it).
I don’t know how I feel about the submission fees as a way of supporting indie publishers, but I don’t think it would be that big of an issue if more writers bothered to read even a couple different issues every year.
adam i wish i had a tub. that would be the best.
seriously? dickens?
Roxane, you called Brendan naive earlier. I hate to say it…but you’re being naive yourself.
Writers want to get published, paid, and praised. END OF STORY. They don’t want to take their meager money earned from teaching or given to them by parents to buy other books, etc. Yes, there are exceptions like you and Matt Bell and others. But for the most part writers want the three p’s and that is it.
Also this comparision to the post office fees is a bit of a red herring. THERE WAS NO OTHER WAY TO DELIVER YOUR STORY. That money was going into the post office coffers, not a mag’s pockets. I’ll quit wasting my time writing stories before I start paying to have my story read. Even if it gets published the only readers will be other writers or family, many of whom will be thinking “eh” the whole time reading it anyway (or worse).
1. Hemingway (one “m”) is famous for having an exhaustive library. Check out this list: http://www.jfklibrary.org/NR/rdonlyres/D809DDAD-CCC6-4C97-8505-9AC5E224200D/19103/hemingwayslibrary9994.pdf
2. You’re comparing apples and oranges. For, like, a million reasons.
dude, come on it’s three m’s in hemmmingway
i don’t know. i personally am as careful as i can be and try real hard to not send out something i don’t think is ready. i think what you are saying makes a great deal of sense, if we assume all [or enough to warrant the assumption] submissions are from lazy writers who don’t spend enough time with their work because they just want a pub credit on the cv.
ha, yeah, there are some deluded tools who have money that will LOVE this kind of filter. they will keep sending the same shitty stories and the same lame ass bios and will still carpet bomb, maybe just to 16 places instead of 18.
$5.66
i think it could theoretically make a difference for the kind of writer you are talking about, and i honestly had not even considered it. but overall, i honestly just don’t know.
ha ha, seriously though, i think Ani is right. You are fired up today!
I think since you and JY are both in Bmore (eh?) you should meet in the street and “talk” this out. Hopefully there will be no bottles involved!
I spell things wrong on princaple. Hemingway couldn’t spell either.
I still don’t think this thing that writers have to subscribe to x amount of magazines is really that legit. It is like saying a plumber needs to have at least 6 toilets in his house before he can unplug yours.
I definitely don’t get too many. I just checked Submishmash (man, Michael, the reports there look awesome), and there have only been 30 since June 1. For me the question isn’t about being able to read/respond to them (though this is a challenge). It’s more about whether writers have any obligations in the matter.
I don’t really see people say that, I say you should at least read an issue (online archive, at yoru library, etc.) to understand what the magazine publishes and then I see people say you should subscribe to at least a few magazines.
Not sure why my comment is naive. Which part?
indie lit? really? you’re saying that major publishing houses put art above commerce and take nothing for themselves? did anyone get into this to get paid or did we do it because this is what we fucking do regardless of if anyone reads it or cares.
which is not to say i don’t want to get paid, or that we shouldn’t. but this was never a thing i was told was a viable career option.
and also, i have no idea what clarkesworld is.
also, having never been paid for a pub other than the novella, i am curious:
if you were getting paid for being published in a journal, what would you expect? i have no idea about this. i don’t know what you get paid for being published.
would it be tiered? like bigger journals pay you more? how would that go? does anyone have answers?
Okay, I’ve come to this late. What if, perhaps, instead of $3 sub fee, it were $1, $2 at most? You’re spending no more than you would have pre-Internet in the form of the postage to send, the SASE, and the envelope/paper you’ve printed it on. You sidestep most of the “class war” issues because in the end, $1×10 is much more manageable on the pocketbook than $3×10, and you’re still providing something of a filter. Not to mention, as it’s already been said, this revenue stream (even if small) would provide a pot for journals to 1) better produce and market their journal, and 2) start offering a bit of payment to those published, if even only a token payment?
I may only be reiterating what’s already been said, as I’m at work, and could only read a handful of the earlier comments, but I thought I’d toss this out there, because I noticed that $3/sub seemed to get caught on the collective thought in this thread, with no thought of a possibly lower sub fee.
You need to work on your analogies dude!
Here is what this discussion really reminds me of: the punk/hc scene. Back when I was growing up there was this bizarre notion that punk shows had to be 5 dollars (and LPs/CDs had to be really cheap as well) anything else was sell out awful capitalism. Fugazi is probably responsible for this attitude to a large degree. But the thing is, punk shows had been five dollars since the early 1980s yet inflation and gas costs and a everything else were soaring. The end result was a scene that wasn’t supporting itself. Touring as a band wouldn’t even recoup your touring expenses, much less make you a little living money.
Scenes really only thrive when people support them and for good or ill, that often means monetary support in this society.
I think if we are being honest with ourselves, the overlap between wannabe writers and readers of most literary magazines is pretty extensive. The venn diagram of wanna be poets and poetry readers is probably two super imposed circles. It is all nice to say that all them oney should go towards writers and since all submitters are writers none should ever have to support their scene, but it isn’t the most tenable situation. its like trying to keep punk shows at five bucks and then insisting that everyone who attends get on the guest list.
hopefully 5-10 cents a word.
Well, I mean plenty of writers don’t even follow the basic submissions guidelines (like they will send a hardboiled detective novel excerpt to a poetry e-zine) so presumably they’d pay more attention of they were paying to submit.
But again, I’m not endorsing submission fees. Just thinking out loud.
Well, you aren’t paying to have your work published. You are paying to have an editor read your work.
Pay is anywhere form one cent to one dollar a word, depending on the publication.
None of the punk bands I knew made money ever. That is not what it was about. And I can tell you for sure none of those bands paid to play.
Charging a reading fee is punk??? I liked my analogy about the plumber better.
i would disagree sasha. i think this thread proves pretty well actually that $3 is a quality filter.
Well the thing is, there is really no good simple fix to the current state of things. You suggest that volunteers can read slush and several people above pointing out that you can reject manuscripts in a few seconds. Those things are true, but likely the same people would be complaining in a different thread that its awful that your work isn’t even read for a minute much less by an actual editor at the magazine.
Not sure if you actually read my post…
It is possible to support your scene without it being about making money. There is a difference between making bank and not losing money everytime you play a show.
i’ve thought alot about this. i did think FitzGerald’s post was pretty compelling.
on one hand you want to support as many good publications as possible just like i want to support as my good writers as possible. on the other hand it seems like a situation that could quickly lead to exploitation. i’ve thought about mfa programs in the same way. very people in my program were really serious, most were just hanging around because they didn’t know what else to do. and they were there partly because they didn’t mind paying out thousands of dollars for a degree and the school didn’t mind taking that money. but because of this money many writers that couldn’t otherwise support themselves were able to support themselves by teaching.
i suppose in the end if i trusted the publication was a quality outfit (and not narrative) then i would pay 3bucks even if i was already a subscriber (and i probably would be). i don’t mind paying $ for good writing. and i don’t care if i am paid for writing (doubt it’ll ever happen). literature has given me almost everything i have and i don’t mind doing what i have to do to keep it going.
Right. The NYer sucks. But they make money. And I doubt most of the writers are friends.
They just have a viable business plan.
How about one of the editors here, who isnt already doing so, charge 3 bucks a submission for 1 reading period and tell us the results?
Might be interesting.
The part where you assert that publishers need to manage to make money off their publications. I’ve worked for two, one with national distribution and a university subsidy, and it was even impossible there. On the smaller one, which I edited, our submissions outnumbered our subscriptions at a proportion that was incredibly top heavy.
Also probably the part where you set up the binary between loving to read subs and soliciting them.
This isn’t to say your whole point is off, but it could be more nuanced.
“1) the NYer is pretty good example of what happens when you go to the same stable of writers over and over.”
You get extremely popular and respected?
Yeah, I’m with Lincoln on this one having been on both sides of the analogy. I spent 10 years of my life playing and touring in bands without care to do much more than break even on tours, or at least make enough cash to buy a bit of studio time again. Had we lost money, sure, we’d have just worked more hours at our day jobs to afford pitching in for more studio time, but it’d be a whole hell of a lot nicer to have gotten a few more dividends from doors and merch sales to cover touring expenses.
That was always the venues responsibility, not the bands. Most of these bands also had fans who would pay 2 or 3 dollars to see them. A writer brings their fans to the publication, if they have any.
This is a totally different issue, but I wish journals didn’t treat subscription purchases like donations. What I mean by this is probably more than half of the journals I’ve ever subscribed to I either never received any issues at all, had to pester the editors/subscription people until I finally received my issues many weeks or months late, or only ever recieved one issue although I paid for a year’s subscription.
I mean, half of these “venues” were just people’s houses or free spaces and it was entirely the community’s standards keeping the ticket prices unsustainably low.
Obviously writing does not equal music, but I’m just talking in general about unhealthy attitudes in “scenes.”
The bottom line is that if you toss all the maxims like “writers must get paid!” “magazines should learn to make their own money!” aside we are left with a reality where writers don’t support their magazines which ends up hurting everyone. It leads to quicker slush reading, longer wait times, fewer readers, constantly folding magazines, no pay for writers, etc.
So the question is is there a way to max things better?
I’m not sure a 3 dollar fee is the answer at all, mind you, but an attitude adjustment amongst writers would be healthy.
So I think there is some truth to the idea that some journals come across as not really caring whether anyone reads them or not, especially university-sponsored journals that rotate staffs every other year.
Also, make it EASY to financially support your journal. If you accept online submissions but want me to mail you a check to subscribe, you are an idiot.
Maybe htmlgiant should charge $.30 to comment. Cha-ching!
i don’t understand submission fees. if a writer likes a magazine, he/she will buy it. i don’t think anyone wants to buy something they don’t actually like, if they know that ahead of time. if the writer submits to a magazine he/she doesn’t like that much and thus doesn’t buy, that’s because he/she wants to make the magazine “better” or couldn’t find a more attractive venue. “perhaps” that submitter “should not” submit to a magazine they don’t like, so as to avoid alienating those editors who feel angry when a contributor doesn’t support their shit (although, i would argue if the submitter becomes a contributor, than he/she is contributing via their art even if not via their money).
submission fees make no sense to me. the artist is giving the editor/magazine some art. the amount that artist vs. editor “benefits” from the subsequent publication of the art is debatable (more on that below), but until the piece is accepted and published, no one “benefits,” unless of course there’s submission fees. it seems almost unethical to me to say, “in order to maybe get into my magazine, you have to pay me first.” the “enterprise” of a magazine should be supported by readers, and i understand that many writers/submitters are also readers, but not all of them are, and paying every time you submit is almost as dumb as buying lottery tickets (not the greatest analogy, but you could similarly be pissing your money away for nothing). this is one of those deals where i understand you want to have enough money to continue, but maybe if you produced a more attractive product, more people would buy it, and then you wouldn’t have these problems [via the recording industry, to some degree].
i’m not saying “this is how it should be, i know everything,” by the way. just expressing my confusion and opinions.
as a fully independent editor, with complete say, i plan to charge readers a little for the 2nd issue of my magazine in order to help cover printing costs (and as a result, it will also likely be a more “professional-looking magazine”). but the readers will buy the magazine of their own volition, if they do, and they are definitely getting something in return (lots of art, a physical object).
as far as who “benefits” from being in a magazine, i think it depends on the artist and on the magazine. i think I benefit from Tao being in my magazine. i think some of the newer writers “benefit,” potentially, more than i do from being in my magazine, bc Tao and others, by their mere presence alongside these others, unintentionally (to some degree/i’d say for the most part or possibly completely) grant them more credibility/expose them to more readers. this is not to say i don’t “benefit” to some degree from every artist’s presence in the magazine, bc i do, via a “better” magazine for having had them in it. but i think you can understand how an established artist lends credibility/makes things possible that aren’t otherwise possible, like media coverage/greater interest in the magazine/the bestowal of greater “legitimacy” on the magazine and its editor, to some degree.
i think some other editors seem to look at the magazine or the “enterprise” and its survival as the most important thing. it also seems like they think they’re running a contest or a lottery, like “ok, all you writer wretches of the world, put your coin in the slot and give us your best shot. i am the supreme judge.” by having more solicited than unsolicited work in my magazine, i am acting as more of a curator than a judge. this is not “better,” but it is different, and one could argue that it is an “everyone wins” situation, in that artists get exposure, i put out a magazine i want, no one pays for anything without receiving something, etc. in the other situation, with submission fees, the magazine continues to function, which is a win for the editor if his/her main concern is the magazine’s continued existence, but the win beyond that, for editor/reader/submitter, is debatable—there’s nothing “wrong” about the situation, per se, but if the magazine isn’t all that sweet, according to the submitter, but they still had to pay for it in order to maybe get in it, that kind of blows; and if the magazine continues but people are turned off by the submission fee and less kewl work comes in, that kind of blows for the editor, if he/she is aware of a “dip in quality.” and of course, same for the reader (re “dip in quality.”) ok, that’s enough on that.
peace yall
No argument there. But maybe MFA programs that act like writing is a viable “job” are partly to blame.
I agree with that. I’ve written before about how journals could really do themselves a favor by putting a little work into their concept and execution. I’m sure all journal editors work hard editing work, but few really try to do anything remotely unique. How do you expect to stand out publishing a journal called The [Location] Review that publishes 3 stories, a bunch of poems and a few nonfiction essays in the same format and shape as every other journal and all your work could easily appear in any of the other 500 similar journals out there.
addendum: i realize that if the cost of the magazine is just enough to cover printing costs, than the recording industry analogy doesn’t work, bc obviously then there’s no profit margin. so, yeah… i dunno at that point. i look at magazines as promotion meets sweetart/funtimes. if a magazine isn’t helping artists they like to be seen/read/possibly make bank, and if the magazine doesn’t have art that somewhat consistently makes some segment of the population be like, “damn, girl, you see this mag?!” i dunno what the point is then….
peace yall
Yeah, this is better probably, because $3 adds quickly, especially when a bunch of journals are probably, realistically, already so backlogged with subs or already assembled out of prior commitments that there’s little chance they’re seriously considering new pieces as a sizable incoming source of words anyway.
ACTUALLY HERE IT IS: When I submit I want to see a meter showing the likelihood that my piece will be considered, or the fullness of the magazine, or the editor’s openness to new stuff from unknowns, or something like that, and then I’ll feel better tossing my cash in as an entry fee. Maybe the price can even scale to match the possibility it’ll be well spent, so that I’d pay like a penny to sub to the New Yorker and a couple bucks for some hip regularly-updated online pub.
Good point, Mark. And I think there’s another problem too. Print journals – as opposed to web ones, where I’d say the situation is rather different – face a problem with getting subscribers or selling copies for one fairly simple reason that I note isn’t really being talked about. Audiences. At the moment, they are almost all preaching to the converted – by that I mean that for all the talk about the lit ‘community’ being a great thing, the downside of it is that the magazines are produced by members of the indie lit community, edited by them, made up of content submitted by them and then, surprise surprise, bought by them too. When was the last time you heard someone *not* from the indie lit community say that they’d bought a journal simply because (and I know this sounds quaintly ridiculous) they wanted to read the work in it, as opposed to reading their own work, the work of friends, or simply because they wanted to support the journal by buying it.
The indie lit community is always going to be in dire financial straits by its very nature, but it’s made doubly worse thanks to its own navel-gazing insularity. Harsh, but true. Until that’s tackled, people can pay their $3 for all they’re worth, but all it’ll be doing is simply sloshing from one end of the ship to the other.
implied in my first paragraph is that if a writer/possible submitter already buys a magazine before submitting, that means he/she is already helping the magazine to stay afloat, and it doesn’t seem “necessary” for them to further help by paying to submit. the paragraph proceeds from that implied situation to cover those submitters who aren’t already buyers of the mag.
Well, there is Duotrope that gives you a lot of that information. There’s a lot of transparency these days.
Ha. One can always hope for an ideal situation.
Seriously though, I think $1-2 would be pretty reasonable. The only problem with this model is that you 1) have to already be an established journal with people willing to pay the sub fee, however cheap, to pitch their words into the pile, or 2) it has to be common practice across the board, otherwise, people will just still submit to the journals who don’t charge.
If they don’t make money, the publication goes under. Most magazines never make money. But some do. Most small presses never make money. But some do.
Trying to be sustainable doesn’t seem all that naïve, but maybe I am living in a different world. The majority of my income right now comes from writing and translating.
Oops. That was meant as a response to thread below Tim.
Why on earth would I pay for that?
“Hello. Here is $5 so you can read the first page of my story, decide it sucks, and toss it in the shredder. Thank you.”
but a small magazine’s editor doesn’t have a full-time job editing. editing is their passion work or their side thing. if it was a full-time job, then they’d already have a salary and the magazine would be more financially stable in the first place. either way, i don’t see why the editor needs to be paid to read. i realize i’m in a charmed situation, though, in that i mostly solicit my work and i don’t get that many submissions (yet). but also, i mean, truth be told, if something “kinda sucks” in your opinion as you start reading it, aren’t you just going to do a power skim anyway? just keepin’ it real.
wax lion I really agree about making it easier to submit. So many magazines make it so difficult to subscribe. It’s so easy to set up a PayPal account. I wish everyone would do it.
idk, no matter how many people were submitting, i’d be flattered that they thought of me and feel good about reading their stuff. that was cynical above about the power skim. in honest truth, i haven’t power skimmed anyone’s submission to my magazine, so far.
I’m not sure I’ve ever known a program to flaunt writing as a viable “job.” Teaching writing while writing, maybe, but not writing.
I was told repeatedly not to expect to make money from my writing, at least not much more than to help me buy a car, make a down payment on a house, or start a trust fund to send whatever kids I may have to college someday.
I’m not saying you should, but being a writer for a magazine and being someone submitting aren’t the same thing.
Well what I was really getting at with that statement is that I find it a little silly when people act like magazines should be fully at the service of “writers” (seemingly meaning all writers) instead of just THEIR writers. A magazine should treat the people they publish well, but it isnt’ really their duty to bend over backwards to cater to people who don’t even read their magazine and are just carpet bombing a billion places.
Good point. I hadn’t even thought of Duotrope in that regard.
Not to mention, having a firm grasp of the journal to which your submitting can act as that meter. In your own example, you illustrated that you already have that meter.
chris, how so?
adam, yes. maybe ten cents to a quarter. collect that cash.
I don’t think they’re extremely popular or respected for their fiction. Maybe I’m dreaming this, but I think they’ve discussed cutting both poetry and fiction.
I’m not so much shocked as I am frustrated that there’s more writers out there than readers. And sometimes the writers don’t know anything, nor do they care, about the places they submit. Which constantly baffles me. Would you submit a photo of a pimped-out low rider to Cat Fancy? I’m not talking about anyone here. We’re obviously all pretty entrenched in the scene. It’s more the weekenders who think it would be “neat” to be a writer. It takes so much more dedication and commitment than that.
I like how you tie flash into this. It seems that every place online wants flash or at least caps stuff out at 2.5 or 3 or 4k. I know Roxane wrote on this a few weeks ago, but it probably ties in here too, as the high demand for very quick work is probably directly related to the huge glut of stuff writers can produce.
I try not to spam magazines, but I know that after I decided it would be far (far) easier for me to place a flash-esque piece than it was to place a 6k story the number of finished and, I think, quality short pieces I had to send out grew dramatically.
gotcha, lincoln. well, my follow-up question then would be, if your magazine has sort of a cadre of writers it often publishes, and you are unlikely to publish much from the slush pile, why not take away the i-will-read-you guarantee, if it’s so trying going through all those submissions? that way, submitters don’t have to pay, but they also don’t know if they’ll be read by mr. michel (just being playful). i mean, i assume you’re not as insular as like n+1 or something, but it seems like a magazine has more identity if they have some faces that pop up repeatedly, and that seems like “a good thing” to me, in a way. i just think that if the “real reason” for sub fees is “we need your money to stay afloat” why not just soliciting that money directly via idk, throwing a party, doing a pledge drive a la NPR (joking), or idk, bake sale? or just promote the crap out of your mag via the web/posters/whatevs…. just brainstorming, not telling you or anyone what to do.
And I’d modify that to strike out the “online,” as most print journals too cap out around 4.
I’ve always respected your opinion, Roxane, but the thought of a new economic model scares me because I’m already doing what publishers tell me to do: instead of BCC-bombing a bunch of journals with my newest stories, i’m purchasing and reading the ones that catch my interest before I decide to submit to them. I don’t mind shelling out $20 for a subscription every few weeks, but to ask for more from me because other people that submit aren’t doing what I’m doing feels wrong.
Yeah. I had some spare coin a few months ago and actually donated it to Juked. David was stoked. In all the years Juked has been around, I guess I was only like the 3rd person who’d actually donated.
To add to Chris’s point, too, I see that “sub fee as support,” very similar to token payments to writers, and what writer hasn’t talked about how nice it’d be to receive a token payment? Why then, when the tables are flipped, is it such a bitch move for a publisher to ask for a small sub fee (again, in the range of $1-3, not Narrative’s egregious $20) as a similar sort of token (especially if that is going back to the writers being published in the form of token payments)?
In May we received 512. So far this month, we’ve received 321 which frightens me a little. Submissions range from 10 words to 20,000 or more words. Some of those submissions are a single poem or seven poems or four flash fictions. I quite enjoy reading submissions, but it can get very overwhelming, particularly when at least half of those submissions have been sent by writers who have never even looked at our website. At the end of the day, the joys of editing and publishing vastly outweigh the frustrations. That said, the frustrations are there and legitimate.
Well, we can go two ways, then–either we have a Hayden Carruth-ian lit climate where a handful of journals thrive and can support themselves because everyone else has gone under and subscribers don’t have anywhere else to go and so concentrate on those particular journals, or we have the current lit climate, where you can’t move over the web without tripping on someone’s short story.
Both of these worlds is attractive in some ways, but the majority of writers would probably be dismayed if they had a single- or even-double digit number of places to send their work. And the rub, then, is that most of those same writers (myself included) don’t do much, financially, to keep the journals they keep flailing at in operation.
well, for there to be readers who are not writers, one would need to promote quite a bit. or one’s content would need to have appeal to people who aren’t writers. felt there was a need for Captain Obvious here, and no offense intended.
while i see what you mean re Cat Fancy, i think the tastes and whims of editors might be unknown or difficult to guess for those looking to submit. i’m in a situation where i rarely come across a journal, online or otherwise, that has tons of stuff in it that i like and that is somehow in the same galaxy as my writing (the style of which is fluid and evolving anyway). in fact, i think i almost never come across a sizable collection of different people’s writing and like the majority of it. and i don’t even know my own taste in writing, let alone some other person’s. just sayin’…
I hear you Mark, and as I’ve said, I’m not a staunch advocate for a submission fee. It’s something my co-editor and I have discussed and decided we’re simply not going to do. That said, I see merit in it, and I think it’s a valid option for some magazines. You do bring up a good point though. There are writers who are conscientious, and who put in the work of researching magazines and who support a few magazines. Should they have to pay the fee? At the same time, to characterize this issue in that manner makes it seem like suggesting a small reading fee is a punitive gesture. I don’t think that is necessarily the case. It isn’t a punishment though it can be intended, in some cases, as a deterrent to encourage writers to submit their best work and to do so thoughtfully. All these various tangential thoughts though, are one of the main reasons why I don’t think I could implement such a fee.
Why not charge a penalty (or require a subscription) for anyone that submits more than twice a year to your journal without getting published? That might cut down the slush pile and force people to send only their best pieces.
Or, if someone has submitted more than x times to your journal without ever getting accepted, regardless of time period, require a subscription before they can submit again.
It seems like there should be more creative ways to discipline writers than to charge a flat fee from day one. I am unemployed. A $3 fee across the board will put me out of the game. But a little financial pain if I haven’t done my homework (either by working on my piece enough or by matching it to the right journals) seems fair, and a small recompense to the editors and publishers working so hard.
Well, more places is better I think. And I am happy to help small presses/journals out. I just don’t feel comfortable doing it with money. If I like a journal or press I will mention there names whenever I can and have certainly gotten people to take out subscriptions. I have donated books before that go out to subscribers and I have recently I even encouraged a small press to pay me less money for a story because I knew they were struggling. I am happy to do that kind of thing, but that is different than paying to be read.
just reading through this thread, there are already a good portion of people saying they wouldn’t want to pay them, and still others taking the more extreme position of saying that flat out wouldn’t pay them. sadly, some of those people are probably great writers, and that’s one negative aspect of a monetary filter like this, and on the flip side, there are still going to be mediocre writers will looser pockets. i’m not denying your example, really. just saying that it doesn’t completely refute the sub fee model.
preposterous, imho
Isabella, you’re totally right…it totally depends on your situation and most of the members I deal with are young, don’t have kids or at least not kids in college to support. My bad. It’s all relative, obviously.
I agree that it’s easy to use trusted volunteers and quick rejections to cull the slush, and I don’t think it’s awful that your work isn’t even read for a minute much less by an actual editor at the magazine. Don’t know who you’re assuming would say those things, but for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t — the editor has no obligation to read any longer than they want to, and they can farm it out any way they want.
The last part is the part I’m most concerned about. I don’t think $3 is too much, and if you’re submitting every story to that many places you’re submitting too many places. (And if you think I’m being insensitive too poor people, please know that I work for a labor union and talk to working people every single day, and to suggest to these folks that they couldn’t afford $3 every once in a while would be pretty wildly insulting to them. If you are so poor that you can’t afford $3, then you are almost certainly not writing in your spare time because you don’t have any and there are a lot of things wrong with that but not charging a submission fee is not going to be the answer to this terrible, intractable poverty.)
But. I worry, like Roxane says, that $3 becomes $5, becomes $10, becomes $20. And once you’re at that point, then you are discriminating and taking many talented writers out of your pool
but, i guess i’m also assuming that you were trying to completely refute the model. (not to mention, that was a messy response.)
i guess, in general, i think that a reasonable sub fee would cause writers to consider the “doneness” of their work before sending it, at least much more than they (even i’m guilty of it, I’ll admit) do when it’s free to submit.
when it comes down to it, there are plenty out there who don’t know they’re mediocre, and would pay the fee fully believing their subs are good enough, but i think the good would outweigh the bad.
I’m not really assuming anything, people have complained about that on this site (and every other writing site I’ve ever seen) all the time. I don’t think their complaints are wrong either, it IS crappy that your work isn’t really read by the people who are actually in a position to judge whether it works for the magazine or not. Its not like editors want to farm out all the work, but the current state of submissions makes anything else impossible.
I don’t think I necessarily agree with the $3 becomes $5, &c., simply because of simple economics–competition, supply and demand.
As with any commodity, there’s a breaking point where a price point is just too high.
A lot of people here are complaining that people aren’t subscribing to their journals who submit. But I don’t think subscriptions are the problem. Not READING them is the problem. And how do you know people aren’t reading them? For instance, I certainly hope that y’all aren’t judging me because I don’t have subscriptions, because I usually pick up your magazines in St. Marks or at other bookstores, and sometimes order them from you–but I don’t get subscriptions.
If the worry isn’t subscriptions but people financially supporting the magazine, I would say not everyone should have to. People like me who can definitely should (and I do–I buy every magazine and book that I possibly can, partially to support the community and mostly to read the fine writers in them. And I hope others like me do the same.) Others who can’t afford that, can read the magazines at the library or school or maybe, unfortunately, not at all if they really can’t get their hands on a free copy. I think–or I hope–that it evens out that way.
i didnt read michales thing or the comments here because i have not as much time to et. bascially, i wouldnt charge a fee for submitting. i only use submishmas as an alternative to submit, currently i take submissions through both submishmas and regular email, so if it suddenly costed 3 to submit submish then people would probably just submit through regular email.
i dont like the idea of cost acting as a filter. why as an editor would i want to relinquish control of what gets filtered. i dont want writes to make decisions whether or not to submit, i just want them to submit everything. i want to see everything and let my reading it and deciding on it be the filter, thanks.
a lot of ‘shoulds’ on this page
i dont submit to journals with a reading fee
if other people want to charge a reading fee, or pay a reading fee, seems like it is up to them
Thanks Darby. Submishmash doesn’t see a model where they force publishers to charge and we like that you give your writers an option.
10-4, Chris. I should have said frustrated instead of shocked. I guess maybe I shouldn’t “accept” the way things are, and I don’t say that sarcastically. I have a low opinion of myself as a writer (motives, skills, etc) and I think sometimes I project that to the “typical” (or most) writers. I’ve edited before and yes getting an 1880’s Harlequin type story is depressing and deflating…while easy to reject it just reminds me of my own pathetic tendencies to submit to some places I don’t well enough.
What I imagine for those who are really worried about it is using volunteers mainly to weed out what obviously won’t work — the bottom 70%, the people who just don’t know what to send or tried and failed massively — and recommend what seems best, while the “higher ups” do the rest.
But I basically think one reader is as good as another for these things unless they’re letting their reading be governed by fear, which is admittedly something I suspect hugely affects a number of mainstream, MFA-based journals.
I’m saying that the New York publishers pay their writers. They sell their books. They don’t use guilt, they don’t scold, etc. Does that make them perfect or their motives pure? No. But it does mean that sometimes I’d really prefer dealing with them. The way people talk about lit in threads like these *is what holds lit back.* If you don’t have the confidence in your work to believe you can sell it without relying on the people who create the content, without which you would have literally nothing, it’s time to change your work.
The other thing I never see acknowledged, and something I want to add here, is that less submissions is not a good thing in my experience. I have high standards for work I take to my editor for publication. I have to read a hundred stories to find one with something like a shot. If only people who are willing and able to pay submit, or only people who subscribe, that’s not going to be enough. The magazine won’t get made — at least not to my standards.
i suspect as a child anon’s mommy stuck him in a microwave and defrosted him just long enough to boil that lil brain
actually i’m going to tell myself that anon is pulling a j swift here and having some fun with everyone
your education costed you too much, darby
dude, they just did a 20 under 40. i think they’re still committed to publishing fiction.
“It seems like there should be more creative ways to discipline writers…”
Why not implant a small chip in writers that monitors all submissions? The chip could double as a credit card and the nominal reading and subscription fees could be automatically deducted upon submission. Editors should be given access to remote tazing devices which would electrocute authors who submit too often or who submit pieces that fail to resonate emotionally. Writers refusing to be chipped would be automatically rejected. These measures will certainly make writers pay more attention to what they’re submitting. Just the other day, some writer sent our magazine a broken microwave as a fiction submission. The note read: Please consider my microwave for your excellent journal…
I don’t know if the NYer ever discussed cutting fiction and poetry, but I am pretty sure they have been in the red since about the end of the William Shawn era. It may be that Remnick has turned them around somewhat, but if you’re a magazine, you’re looking at the possibility of reaching the absolute cream in prestige terms, and still being millions of dollars in the red some years.
So the NYer does not “have a viable business plan,” certainly not by the standards of any other industry. It is not economically viable to pay staff nonfiction writers 100K/yr and give them license to follow their noses, or to pay fiction writers tens of thousands a year just to have the right of first rejection (and then, often, still to reject those writers’ submissions). The NYer exists because they are bankrolled by a corporation (Conde Nast) that gets prestige from it. Harpers exists because it is bankrolled by a foundation. The Atlantic is bankrolled by a foundation, and they still eliminated fiction. The Paris Review? Foundation.
The point is, there is no way to pursue excellence as a periodical, in the traditional way, and to be a viable business. You are more likely to make a ton of money writing your own stuff, and we all know how that goes. The only magazines that consistently make money are 80 percent ads, and no editorial content that isn’t geared toward turning a buck. This was true way before the internet started killing magazines. So this idea that you can just be compelling and you will be economically viable–yes, it is beyond naive. It has not been the case for decades.
Still, it is weird to me to just hand over money to a magazine when I submit. It feels so…direct. But like someone said above, yeah, for at least ten years I handed over 2-3 bucks a pop to the post office. A lot of the super-principled “I will never pay to submit” people commenting: you must be younger, I’m guessing. Have you never submitted by mail? At least you’ve heard, probably, about how us old-timers used to paper our bedroom walls with actual hard-copy form rejections? Each of those rejections cost us a couple bucks, not counting printer ink and the time we spent waiting at the post office, etc. Writing has always been a losing proposition, economically speaking, for the writer who is not established. Giving money to Annalemma for reading my stuff feels weird, but I wonder if I would get over it eventually? It is pretty fucking weird, also, to be reading Harper’s and see a Naomi Klein essay alongside a two-page ad from Exxon.
lols.
This makes sense to me. I think this is a good way of looking at things. I think that fear controls too much of our thinking as writers, publishers, readers, etc. There is nothing to fear. Not here. Elsewhere, yes. Not here.
of all the journels everywhere i would subscribe to the journal that published a broken microwave.
To be clear (and sorry I’m posting so much here, guys) I do think writers have obligations to support each other and good publishers and etc., I just have different ideas about what those are and how that should happen.
Maybe some magazines shouldn’t get made. (I’m not saying yours shouldn’t. I’m not familiar with it.) Or maybe they should get made much less often, like bi-yearly instead of biannually. The problem we’re dealing with is hundreds of thousands of MFAs, only a small percentage of whom are probably really and truly writers, submitting millions of stories year after year. I participate in this system, but as a reader I have no faith in it. This is why, system-wide, it is impossible to get subscribers. At this point I think any kind of pressure that can be applied to the system–monetary pressure seems to have the best shot at working–might be a good start toward establishing a system that works not just to establish careers, but that rewards readers enough that the resulting careers will actually mean something.
I think it’s important to remember that writers are already “contributing” to a journal by offering their work. One would think (by some of the comments from editors here) that they were asking for the editor’s kidney. The dream of every writer is to be paid–and I don’t begrudge editors, especially the ones who are sacrificing their own writing time to do editing–the right to dream of being paid for their valuable work as well. But it seems like asking your writers (contributors) to contribute more (!) is not the best way. I think that journals need to look beyond readers and writers to the community at large for support. And if you’re an editor who is already too busy reading slush to fundraise, find someone who likes to do it. Actually, volunteers can also help read slush. (If I’m not wrong, Ani Smith just volunteered to do so above and got the brush off.) As someone who has worked in fundraising, I can tell you that there is a lot of money out there that doesn’t have to come from writers. Our local writer’s group raised enough money to send someone to a festival in Sweden just by staging open mics (and selling beer at them). The National Endowment for the Humanities has a grant program specifically for digital arts and culture (some of this money is for electronically archiving existing print journals and some is for start-ups, but just about every kind of digital arts format is welcome). Most states have a similar program, and nearly every big city has an arts council, arts resources department, literacy council, or other group that is just dying to give away money. And a surprising number of these boards actually favor the avant-garde.
(Also, Amber, as a union MEMBER {in a right-to-work state, unfortunately}, I can tell you that $3 is a lot of money to me–especially, times ten or twenty. I have two kids in college and there have been times when I have had to decide between paying five or six dollars for extra contributors copies or putting that money aside in savings for what isn’t covered by my kids’ Pell Grants–about 50% of their tuition, not to mention living expenses.)
Maybe it’s just me, but if you don’t want to pay to submit, don’t. If you want to pay to submit, do. I don’t see any ethical anything about it. Why do something for free if people are willing to pay you for it, right? I mean, I’ve never turned down money for a story or a book, and if someone OFFERED to give me money to edit, I’d take it, no question.
Well, not cutting exactly, just replacing fiction with powerful people’s faces.
http://www.observer.com/2009/daily-transom/new-yorker-fiction-issue-replaced-world-changers
But right, I don’t think people, including most writers, really grasp the economics of publishing. It’s foundation and universities, and both are starting to lose enthusiasm for their literary publications.
Yeah, the whole thread makes me feel old. Until recently, there was always a cost for submitting. But we also got paid something. Have a picture of myself with a check for the first story I published.
I don’t really see people say that, I say you should at least read an issue (online archive, at yoru library, etc.) to understand what the magazine publishes and then I see people say you should subscribe to at least a few magazines.
Well, I mean plenty of writers don’t even follow the basic submissions guidelines (like they will send a hardboiled detective novel excerpt to a poetry e-zine) so presumably they’d pay more attention of they were paying to submit.
But again, I’m not endorsing submission fees. Just thinking out loud.
Well the thing is, there is really no good simple fix to the current state of things. You suggest that volunteers can read slush and several people above pointing out that you can reject manuscripts in a few seconds. Those things are true, but likely the same people would be complaining in a different thread that its awful that your work isn’t even read for a minute much less by an actual editor at the magazine.
How about one of the editors here, who isnt already doing so, charge 3 bucks a submission for 1 reading period and tell us the results?
Might be interesting.
Good point, Mark. And I think there’s another problem too. Print journals – as opposed to web ones, where I’d say the situation is rather different – face a problem with getting subscribers or selling copies for one fairly simple reason that I note isn’t really being talked about. Audiences. At the moment, they are almost all preaching to the converted – by that I mean that for all the talk about the lit ‘community’ being a great thing, the downside of it is that the magazines are produced by members of the indie lit community, edited by them, made up of content submitted by them and then, surprise surprise, bought by them too. When was the last time you heard someone *not* from the indie lit community say that they’d bought a journal simply because (and I know this sounds quaintly ridiculous) they wanted to read the work in it, as opposed to reading their own work, the work of friends, or simply because they wanted to support the journal by buying it.
The indie lit community is always going to be in dire financial straits by its very nature, but it’s made doubly worse thanks to its own navel-gazing insularity. Harsh, but true. Until that’s tackled, people can pay their $3 for all they’re worth, but all it’ll be doing is simply sloshing from one end of the ship to the other.
Why on earth would I pay for that?
“Hello. Here is $5 so you can read the first page of my story, decide it sucks, and toss it in the shredder. Thank you.”
I’m not saying you should, but being a writer for a magazine and being someone submitting aren’t the same thing.
Isabella, you’re totally right…it totally depends on your situation and most of the members I deal with are young, don’t have kids or at least not kids in college to support. My bad. It’s all relative, obviously.
I agree that it’s easy to use trusted volunteers and quick rejections to cull the slush, and I don’t think it’s awful that your work isn’t even read for a minute much less by an actual editor at the magazine. Don’t know who you’re assuming would say those things, but for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t — the editor has no obligation to read any longer than they want to, and they can farm it out any way they want.
I’m not really assuming anything, people have complained about that on this site (and every other writing site I’ve ever seen) all the time. I don’t think their complaints are wrong either, it IS crappy that your work isn’t really read by the people who are actually in a position to judge whether it works for the magazine or not. Its not like editors want to farm out all the work, but the current state of submissions makes anything else impossible.
What I imagine for those who are really worried about it is using volunteers mainly to weed out what obviously won’t work — the bottom 70%, the people who just don’t know what to send or tried and failed massively — and recommend what seems best, while the “higher ups” do the rest.
But I basically think one reader is as good as another for these things unless they’re letting their reading be governed by fear, which is admittedly something I suspect hugely affects a number of mainstream, MFA-based journals.
i suspect as a child anon’s mommy stuck him in a microwave and defrosted him just long enough to boil that lil brain
actually i’m going to tell myself that anon is pulling a j swift here and having some fun with everyone
your education costed you too much, darby
But you are missing something! You can always send things freely by email, or use physical mail to send. I’ve used submishmash a lot, and it offers some great organizational features (keeping track of what where and when of the submissions), and offers the same sort of things but even more so to the editors and publishers. Like it or not, we writers are KILLING the journals and magazines with our submissions… there used to be a natural gate keeper with postage and material costs, and now with those gone, its a delluge of curd. submishmash is a very, very good thing for both serious writers and editors and journals who are low on time and funds. But the free submission methods always exist…
also, I haven’t heard a lot of belly aching about the 10% cut agents take. Should we give shame tokens to them too for not working for free?
But you are missing something! You can always send things freely by email, or use physical mail to send. I’ve used submishmash a lot, and it offers some great organizational features (keeping track of what where and when of the submissions), and offers the same sort of things but even more so to the editors and publishers. Like it or not, we writers are KILLING the journals and magazines with our submissions… there used to be a natural gate keeper with postage and material costs, and now with those gone, its a deluge of curd. submishmash is a very, very good thing for both serious writers and editors and journals who are low on time and funds. But the free submission methods always exist…
also, I haven’t heard a lot of belly aching about the 10% cut agents take. Should we give shame tokens to them too for not working for free?
I don’t think submission fees ensure a higher quality of writing. I think they ensure that working class/poor writers submit to less journals, less often. The ability to pay $3 a pop to various journals every month or couple months doesn’t mean they are a better or more conscientious writer than someone who only submits to free-to-play journals because they can’t afford to do otherwise.
Re: those who imply that “poor” people don’t have the time to write anyway… So not true. The “I work 2/3 jobs and I’m still struggling” archetype is increasingly becoming an inaccurate portrait of the working class/working poor individual. The U.S. is awash with involuntarily unemployed and underemployed people. Also, many people have one regular full-time job, but it pays shit with no benefits. These people clearly have the time. I’m one of them (I make less than $10,000/year) and I’m a writer (I’ve been saying “I’m a writer” since I was 8 years old; I must have sounded so snotty).
And re: all those who claim that submission fees are comparable to paying postage fees in the past… You were paying the post office, not the journal in question, and there was no other option at the time. Therefore, it’s not comparable. (Full disclosure: I was born in 1987 so I never experienced the print-only literary scene.)
I do strongly believe in financially supporting the small press/indie lit community. We should all do everything we can. I’m especially fond of the “tip your editors” Paypal button. Because we really fucking should. And of course, if we can afford it, we should be buying all kinds of literary goodies on a regular basis.
In fact, I wish I could on a regular basis. I told my partner recently that my idea of financial stability is: the ability to amass a decadently huge collection of journal/zine subscriptions, chapbooks, broadsides, full-length collections, and novels. Mmmmmm. So dreamy.
Submission fees dont ensure a higher quality of writing, but self editing often does. I was born in the late 50’s and all my earlier submissions where through the post office, and it was expensive. Paper, envelopes, postage and return postage. And I was desperately poor then, so I took my time to make sure to send good writing. I remember when I first sold a story to Redbook, over the transom (http://www.saroff.com/stories/daughter.htm ). I had about 20 possible stories I could have sent them, but I worked on one specifically and could barely afford the postage both ways…. I self edited a lot and it paid off in good ways.
Again, we are killing the very magazines we appreciate because we are deluging them with endless, cruddy submissions. I say submission fees for agent-like organization is a great thing. Thank you Michael Fitzgerald for submishmash and the start of a brave new (and better like the old days better) world!
Nobody’s killing my journal, and we get tons of submissions through our online manager. We just deal with it. Editors need to do their jobs and edit. It’s just not that hard.
Agents get writers money. These publishers do not. If magazines want to keep a cut of the cash they pay me I will happily give them a cut.
But you are missing something! You can always send things freely by email, or use physical mail to send. I’ve used submishmash a lot, and it offers some great organizational features (keeping track of what where and when of the submissions), and offers the same sort of things but even more so to the editors and publishers. Like it or not, we writers are KILLING the journals and magazines with our submissions… there used to be a natural gate keeper with postage and material costs, and now with those gone, its a delluge of curd. submishmash is a very, very good thing for both serious writers and editors and journals who are low on time and funds. But the free submission methods always exist…
also, I haven’t heard a lot of belly aching about the 10% cut agents take. Should we give shame tokens to them too for not working for free?
But you are missing something! You can always send things freely by email, or use physical mail to send. I’ve used submishmash a lot, and it offers some great organizational features (keeping track of what where and when of the submissions), and offers the same sort of things but even more so to the editors and publishers. Like it or not, we writers are KILLING the journals and magazines with our submissions… there used to be a natural gate keeper with postage and material costs, and now with those gone, its a deluge of curd. submishmash is a very, very good thing for both serious writers and editors and journals who are low on time and funds. But the free submission methods always exist…
also, I haven’t heard a lot of belly aching about the 10% cut agents take. Should we give shame tokens to them too for not working for free?
I’m with Mike. Really, come on. It’s not like people who edit literary magazines had some kind of mystical visitation, choirs of angels singing “Thou shalt edit a literary journal”. If you don’t like the number of submissions you’re receiving, you can do one of two things: a) stop producing your literary magazine; b) stop taking submissions. The latter, as far as I’m concerned, is always a pity if it’s a journal you particularly admire, but I sense from the ‘closed shop’ displayed by so many journals, that more and more are choosing to do this.
I really admire this attitude that’s developed in the latter stages of this thread that it’s all the fault of writers for “deluging” poor, overworked editors with our “endless, cruddy submissions”. Of course, those “endless, cruddy submissions” are everyone ELSE’S, not mine or yours. Obviously not. In fact, if everyone could just stop sending their endless, cruddy submissions and leave it those few of us who really understand and appreciate good writing – whatever that is – then the world would be a much better place.
Oh, and another thing. If editors don’t want so many “endless, cruddy submissions” and are just going to complain about it, don’t open yet another literary magazine. There are 939,000 of them (approx) at the last count, so you can’t really blame all those cruddy writers for sending out their endless, cruddy submissions to the endless number of cruddy literary journals.
The smell of indignant snobbery in this thread is sick-making.
I don’t think submission fees ensure a higher quality of writing. I think they ensure that working class/poor writers submit to less journals, less often. The ability to pay $3 a pop to various journals every month or couple months doesn’t mean they are a better or more conscientious writer than someone who only submits to free-to-play journals because they can’t afford to do otherwise.
Re: those who imply that “poor” people don’t have the time to write anyway… So not true. The “I work 2/3 jobs and I’m still struggling” archetype is increasingly becoming an inaccurate portrait of the working class/working poor individual. The U.S. is awash with involuntarily unemployed and underemployed people. Also, many people have one regular full-time job, but it pays shit with no benefits. These people clearly have the time. I’m one of them (I make less than $10,000/year) and I’m a writer (I’ve been saying “I’m a writer” since I was 8 years old; I must have sounded so snotty).
And re: all those who claim that submission fees are comparable to paying postage fees in the past… You were paying the post office, not the journal in question, and there was no other option at the time. Therefore, it’s not comparable. (Full disclosure: I was born in 1987 so I never experienced the print-only literary scene.)
I do strongly believe in financially supporting the small press/indie lit community. We should all do everything we can. I’m especially fond of the “tip your editors” Paypal button. Because we really fucking should. And of course, if we can afford it, we should be buying all kinds of literary goodies on a regular basis.
In fact, I wish I could on a regular basis. I told my partner recently that my idea of financial stability is: the ability to amass a decadently huge collection of journal/zine subscriptions, chapbooks, broadsides, full-length collections, and novels. Mmmmmm. So dreamy.
Submission fees dont ensure a higher quality of writing, but self editing often does. I was born in the late 50’s and all my earlier submissions where through the post office, and it was expensive. Paper, envelopes, postage and return postage. And I was desperately poor then, so I took my time to make sure to send good writing. I remember when I first sold a story to Redbook, over the transom (http://www.saroff.com/stories/daughter.htm ). I had about 20 possible stories I could have sent them, but I worked on one specifically and could barely afford the postage both ways…. I self edited a lot and it paid off in good ways.
Again, we are killing the very magazines we appreciate because we are deluging them with endless, cruddy submissions. I say submission fees for agent-like organization is a great thing. Thank you Michael Fitzgerald for submishmash and the start of a brave new (and better like the old days better) world!
Nobody’s killing my journal, and we get tons of submissions through our online manager. We just deal with it. Editors need to do their jobs and edit. It’s just not that hard.
Agents get writers money. These publishers do not. If magazines want to keep a cut of the cash they pay me I will happily give them a cut.
option 3 would be lee kleining those foolish enough to send horribly written and/or misguided stories
lock thread
well put….vaughan
I’m with Mike. Really, come on. It’s not like people who edit literary magazines had some kind of mystical visitation, choirs of angels singing “Thou shalt edit a literary journal”. If you don’t like the number of submissions you’re receiving, you can do one of two things: a) stop producing your literary magazine; b) stop taking submissions. The latter, as far as I’m concerned, is always a pity if it’s a journal you particularly admire, but I sense from the ‘closed shop’ displayed by so many journals, that more and more are choosing to do this.
I really admire this attitude that’s developed in the latter stages of this thread that it’s all the fault of writers for “deluging” poor, overworked editors with our “endless, cruddy submissions”. Of course, those “endless, cruddy submissions” are everyone ELSE’S, not mine or yours. Obviously not. In fact, if everyone could just stop sending their endless, cruddy submissions and leave it those few of us who really understand and appreciate good writing – whatever that is – then the world would be a much better place.
Oh, and another thing. If editors don’t want so many “endless, cruddy submissions” and are just going to complain about it, don’t open yet another literary magazine. There are 939,000 of them (approx) at the last count, so you can’t really blame all those cruddy writers for sending out their endless, cruddy submissions to the endless number of cruddy literary journals.
The smell of indignant snobbery in this thread is sick-making.
Funny thing for all the lamentations of us “killing the magazines” there are as many or more than ever as far as I can see. No shortage of magazines. And as far as “crappy submissions” go. There are also a lot of crappy magazines and crappy editors. A lot of crap to go around as far as I can see. And I doubt charging money will make any of it less crappy. It is not like I am going to send something better in because I am spending 3 dollars or think about that kind of thing while writing. Jesus, writing isn’t like selling girl scout cookies.
For some reason didn’t see this when I replied above…Completely agree.
Mike–I think writers are being short sighted about this. The present system has us running at a brick wall. Electronic submissions is increasingly turning submission into a numbers game. Since the chance of being accepted is so low (at popular journals) we send our more and more submissions. This is an endless cycle. The harder it gets to publish, the more submissions we send out. Ultimately punishing journals that are successful.
But creating some tension on the process that is similar to what the post office did for years, would make the odds for writers (esp. the good ones) significantly better and it’d help the publishers (which ultimately helps us).
If you work hard on your stories, you should want them to be read by editors who aren’t drowning in submissions. You want the work to have chance, get a serious read, etc…The present system is working against people who are actually serious about their work.
I don’t think this makes sense for small journals that don’t have piles of submissions.But the more successful the journal (which again with the internet doesn’t mean sales), it seems to me to be very friendly to the serious writer.
There are more online magazines because it’s free to just throw up a website (and submission management system!) and call yourself a journal. No one is suggesting this model for those journals. But for journals that become successful and as a result get swamped with submissions, something needs to change or they go out of business (Story, TriQuartely, Swink, etc..) This tension existed for years via the post office. Now it’s gone, and the foundations and universities that used to support them are going away. Libraries are no longer subscribing. etc..But for all the new online magazine that only get a few submissions, I don’t think anyone would suggest putting tension on the process that doesn’t need it.
You seem to think that there’s an antagonistic relationship between the writer and the publisher. There isn’t. Less slush and more polished submissions to the big journals would be a very good thing for the writer and the publisher.
I don’t think there is an antagonistic relationship between anything.
Charge money if you like. But a lot of people will not submit if you do. There are tons of ways to limit submissions, but using a fee as a way of limiting them really does seem like a cop-out.
You mention Swink. But there is no pay even if a story is accepted. The writer gives there work for free already, and you expect them to also pay? That just seems totally nuts.
And why in the world do submissions have to be polished? Who says they would be by charging 3 dollars? It is an assumption. There is also an assumption there that rewriting and rewriting and making the thing slick makes it better.
I guess, I’m just speaking from personal experience. Before electronic submission, my process was very different. I had to print everything out. Much more thought and care went into the story when I was going to put it in the envelope, pay the post office and send it off. Now, I just attach and send.
And yes, I guess I do believe, rewriting makes a story better.
The present version of Swink is a significantly different journal than it was in 2005 because of what has happened to publishing in the last few years. You seem to think the present situation was the way it’s always been.
As far as Swink goes, I have no idea what the present situation is. As far as writing in general and publishing I imagine my grasp on the situation is similar to everyone else here.
If you feel that the quality of your writing is better if you send it off through the post though, maybe you should just submit all your work through the post?
Charging 3 dollars does not mean someone is more careful, it just means you are charging 3 dollars. And since the place doesn’t pay anything, it turns into a kind of micro vanity publishing.
Why do you assume publisher don’t want to pay writers? Any publication that could would. No publisher goes into indie publishing thinking it’s a way to make money. They do this to support writing that doesn’t have an outlet in the larger publishing world.
option 3 would be lee kleining those foolish enough to send horribly written and/or misguided stories
lock thread
well put….vaughan
there’s a broken microwave in “At the Fire Scene.”
I don’t see anyone assuming that here.
Of course everyone would like to give everyone money.
The question is, has been, and will be, why the hell it’s writers who are supposed to pony.
And the answer seems to be because we think writers are bad people who can’t be trusted to pay otherwise, to do their best, etc. And, like everyone else, most writers are bad at what they do. But they shouldn’t have a chance at your magazine anyway. If you’re good, you’ll rewrite as much as you need to without the incentive. If you need the incentive, you can’t be very good.
Funny thing for all the lamentations of us “killing the magazines” there are as many or more than ever as far as I can see. No shortage of magazines. And as far as “crappy submissions” go. There are also a lot of crappy magazines and crappy editors. A lot of crap to go around as far as I can see. And I doubt charging money will make any of it less crappy. It is not like I am going to send something better in because I am spending 3 dollars or think about that kind of thing while writing. Jesus, writing isn’t like selling girl scout cookies.
For some reason didn’t see this when I replied above…Completely agree.
Mike–I think writers are being short sighted about this. The present system has us running at a brick wall. Electronic submissions is increasingly turning submission into a numbers game. Since the chance of being accepted is so low (at popular journals) we send our more and more submissions. This is an endless cycle. The harder it gets to publish, the more submissions we send out. Ultimately punishing journals that are successful.
But creating some tension on the process that is similar to what the post office did for years, would make the odds for writers (esp. the good ones) significantly better and it’d help the publishers (which ultimately helps us).
If you work hard on your stories, you should want them to be read by editors who aren’t drowning in submissions. You want the work to have chance, get a serious read, etc…The present system is working against people who are actually serious about their work.
I don’t think this makes sense for small journals that don’t have piles of submissions.But the more successful the journal (which again with the internet doesn’t mean sales), it seems to me to be very friendly to the serious writer.
There are more online magazines because it’s free to just throw up a website (and submission management system!) and call yourself a journal. No one is suggesting this model for those journals. But for journals that become successful and as a result get swamped with submissions, something needs to change or they go out of business (Story, TriQuartely, Swink, etc..) This tension existed for years via the post office. Now it’s gone, and the foundations and universities that used to support them are going away. Libraries are no longer subscribing. etc..But for all the new online magazine that only get a few submissions, I don’t think anyone would suggest putting tension on the process that doesn’t need it.
You seem to think that there’s an antagonistic relationship between the writer and the publisher. There isn’t. Less slush and more polished submissions to the big journals would be a very good thing for the writer and the publisher.
I don’t think there is an antagonistic relationship between anything.
Charge money if you like. But a lot of people will not submit if you do. There are tons of ways to limit submissions, but using a fee as a way of limiting them really does seem like a cop-out.
You mention Swink. But there is no pay even if a story is accepted. The writer gives there work for free already, and you expect them to also pay? That just seems totally nuts.
And why in the world do submissions have to be polished? Who says they would be by charging 3 dollars? It is an assumption. There is also an assumption there that rewriting and rewriting and making the thing slick makes it better.
I guess, I’m just speaking from personal experience. Before electronic submission, my process was very different. I had to print everything out. Much more thought and care went into the story when I was going to put it in the envelope, pay the post office and send it off. Now, I just attach and send.
And yes, I guess I do believe, rewriting makes a story better.
The present version of Swink is a significantly different journal than it was in 2005 because of what has happened to publishing in the last few years. You seem to think the present situation was the way it’s always been.
As far as Swink goes, I have no idea what the present situation is. As far as writing in general and publishing I imagine my grasp on the situation is similar to everyone else here.
If you feel that the quality of your writing is better if you send it off through the post though, maybe you should just submit all your work through the post?
Charging 3 dollars does not mean someone is more careful, it just means you are charging 3 dollars. And since the place doesn’t pay anything, it turns into a kind of micro vanity publishing.
Why do you assume publisher don’t want to pay writers? Any publication that could would. No publisher goes into indie publishing thinking it’s a way to make money. They do this to support writing that doesn’t have an outlet in the larger publishing world.
Mike M,
Writers have always been the ones to pony. Only since like 2005 has anyone taken electronic submissions. And those of us who were submitting pre-2005 were emphatically not sending out 50 submissions at a time, in large part because it was too damn expensive. Was it right for the post office to take money for conducting my stories around the country to the hands of editors? I think so, even though it was a lot of upfront cost for me, with not much likelihood of payback. Is it right for a magazine/small press to offset its administrative and marketing costs by asking me to pony up an amount equivalent to what I gave the post office all those years? I think so. I think it will have the added benefit of making me–and all of the rest of us–target our submissions, reduce our coverage, give editors some breathing room, etc. And I would love it if this token amount I give each magazine I submit to could give them a little leverage to raise their profile, get reviewed, and so forth, because obviously, all the action is in the small presses these days.
This is the pressure that’s needed–pressure to be more thoughtful and selective in who you submit to, making your submissions count instead of just tossing seed into the void and making it difficult not only for editors but for yourself. Writers aren’t good or bad for tossing seed; they’re just responding to the technology that’s out there, which is only sensible. The technology has changed the game, in some ways for the better, but in terms of the casualness with which it is possible to submit–not so much.
To editors like Ted Genoways or even the Fence people, who are great in other ways, the slush pile is little more than a token gesture now because it’s just too unwieldy to sort through. That wasn’t true ten or even five years ago. I imagine that editors at these places might be very receptive to FitzGerald’s thoughts on this issue. If you’re not receptive, fine, but you shouldn’t fool yourself into thinking you’re arguing based on some immutable, historical principle of “writers never pony.”
Also, to all those who think that this makes the playing field slanted toward rich people, I’d say that more likely, this just makes it easier to transfer money from rich people to small presses. Which is a cause anybody ought to be able to get behind.
there’s a broken microwave in “At the Fire Scene.”
Sounds like a good way to kill a magazine to me. Anytime I see a fee (be it for reading, contest or what have you) I think: Scam.
As I said, all those who are into it: Go for it. But clearly a lot of good stories will be going elsewhere.
I would actually bet that the story quality would go down, rather than up, because most writers with any kind of a name can find places to take their work pretty easily.
I don’t see anyone assuming that here.
Of course everyone would like to give everyone money.
The question is, has been, and will be, why the hell it’s writers who are supposed to pony.
And the answer seems to be because we think writers are bad people who can’t be trusted to pay otherwise, to do their best, etc. And, like everyone else, most writers are bad at what they do. But they shouldn’t have a chance at your magazine anyway. If you’re good, you’ll rewrite as much as you need to without the incentive. If you need the incentive, you can’t be very good.
Writers with names do not go in the slush pile, Brendan. Never have, never will. We’re talking about the environment for the breakout writer. Every editor wants to find that great unpublished (or underpublished) writer, and every writer wants to be discovered in a way that gets attention. It has become way harder to do this based on merit in the last 5-10 years. The average university-affiliated semi-prominent journal takes submissions but fills its table of contents primarily with friends and solicited “name” writers precisely because slush piles are unmanageable. This to me is the real scam–I want to feel like there’s a publishing apparatus that approximates a meritocracy. $3 submission fees wouldn’t undermine the pretension to meritocracy nearly as much as nepotism does right now.
Writers with names don’t go in the slush pile?
Are you serious?
I know a number of writers with names (in other words their books sell) who submit to places through the usual channels. Stephen King probably doesn’t, but we are talking small press here, aren’t we?
I am not sure where you get your info from.
Even if I know an editor and they have published my work before I always just go through whatever the normal submission process is, unless for some reason they are contacting on the side.
i like the phrase “writers with names”
If you can’t see the difference between paying the mailman to deliver your mail when there isn’t an alternative and paying an editor when there is, I don’t feel like you’re actually listening to what I’m saying about this. Not that you need to. But you put a lot of effort in to miss the point so badly.
If people think mailed submissions were really that much better, they can go back to mailed submissions — I still do those, I don’t mind too much, seems reasonable.
Speaking from my own experience, Puerto got more and better work once we switched to electronic subs. Everything got better. I still find it insane that we’re talking about submissions as if they were a burden. They are a compliment. Every time.
Mike M,
Writers have always been the ones to pony. Only since like 2005 has anyone taken electronic submissions. And those of us who were submitting pre-2005 were emphatically not sending out 50 submissions at a time, in large part because it was too damn expensive. Was it right for the post office to take money for conducting my stories around the country to the hands of editors? I think so, even though it was a lot of upfront cost for me, with not much likelihood of payback. Is it right for a magazine/small press to offset its administrative and marketing costs by asking me to pony up an amount equivalent to what I gave the post office all those years? I think so. I think it will have the added benefit of making me–and all of the rest of us–target our submissions, reduce our coverage, give editors some breathing room, etc. And I would love it if this token amount I give each magazine I submit to could give them a little leverage to raise their profile, get reviewed, and so forth, because obviously, all the action is in the small presses these days.
This is the pressure that’s needed–pressure to be more thoughtful and selective in who you submit to, making your submissions count instead of just tossing seed into the void and making it difficult not only for editors but for yourself. Writers aren’t good or bad for tossing seed; they’re just responding to the technology that’s out there, which is only sensible. The technology has changed the game, in some ways for the better, but in terms of the casualness with which it is possible to submit–not so much.
To editors like Ted Genoways or even the Fence people, who are great in other ways, the slush pile is little more than a token gesture now because it’s just too unwieldy to sort through. That wasn’t true ten or even five years ago. I imagine that editors at these places might be very receptive to FitzGerald’s thoughts on this issue. If you’re not receptive, fine, but you shouldn’t fool yourself into thinking you’re arguing based on some immutable, historical principle of “writers never pony.”
Also, to all those who think that this makes the playing field slanted toward rich people, I’d say that more likely, this just makes it easier to transfer money from rich people to small presses. Which is a cause anybody ought to be able to get behind.
Sounds like a good way to kill a magazine to me. Anytime I see a fee (be it for reading, contest or what have you) I think: Scam.
As I said, all those who are into it: Go for it. But clearly a lot of good stories will be going elsewhere.
I would actually bet that the story quality would go down, rather than up, because most writers with any kind of a name can find places to take their work pretty easily.
Writers with names do not go in the slush pile, Brendan. Never have, never will. We’re talking about the environment for the breakout writer. Every editor wants to find that great unpublished (or underpublished) writer, and every writer wants to be discovered in a way that gets attention. It has become way harder to do this based on merit in the last 5-10 years. The average university-affiliated semi-prominent journal takes submissions but fills its table of contents primarily with friends and solicited “name” writers precisely because slush piles are unmanageable. This to me is the real scam–I want to feel like there’s a publishing apparatus that approximates a meritocracy. $3 submission fees wouldn’t undermine the pretension to meritocracy nearly as much as nepotism does right now.
Mike M,
I do see the difference between giving money to the post office and giving it to an editor. I said exactly that way up above somewhere, and I think that this is an issue. It currently feels weird. But the demands of business have always forced publishers to do weird things not in keeping with the purity we all look to literature for. I think that writers who did not come of age in the last five years will probably be able to live with shifting that money from the one entity to the other, especially since they supposedly actively support the other.
If the history of publishing is 24 hrs, things have been the way they are now for roughly three seconds. The future is with small presses, and it is silly to claim ethical superiority for a system (“free” submissions) that has only existed for three seconds and that could very will hinder the vitality of small presses. Your personal experience consists of, what, a couple semesters? Lots of other editors have different experiences, I guarantee you.
Brendan,
Maybe we are talking about different “names.” I am referring to people I would have heard of. Magazines I’ve been involved with, these people are solicited or (the one bigger magazine where I worked) their agents send stuff. There are exceptions, obviously.
Writers with names don’t go in the slush pile?
Are you serious?
I know a number of writers with names (in other words their books sell) who submit to places through the usual channels. Stephen King probably doesn’t, but we are talking small press here, aren’t we?
I am not sure where you get your info from.
Even if I know an editor and they have published my work before I always just go through whatever the normal submission process is, unless for some reason they are contacting on the side.
i like the phrase “writers with names”
I am going to start charging my friends a submission fee for any personal email they send me, because in the past they would have just paid that to the post office anyway.
If you can’t see the difference between paying the mailman to deliver your mail when there isn’t an alternative and paying an editor when there is, I don’t feel like you’re actually listening to what I’m saying about this. Not that you need to. But you put a lot of effort in to miss the point so badly.
If people think mailed submissions were really that much better, they can go back to mailed submissions — I still do those, I don’t mind too much, seems reasonable.
Speaking from my own experience, Puerto got more and better work once we switched to electronic subs. Everything got better. I still find it insane that we’re talking about submissions as if they were a burden. They are a compliment. Every time.
Demi: This sounds like a good idea. I usually get about 30-40 emails a day. If I charge them everyone each the price of a stamp maybe they will only send me emails that really matter. People will think twice before contacting me and wasting the time I would otherwise be spending posting here on HTML Giant.
Mike M,
I do see the difference between giving money to the post office and giving it to an editor. I said exactly that way up above somewhere, and I think that this is an issue. It currently feels weird. But the demands of business have always forced publishers to do weird things not in keeping with the purity we all look to literature for. I think that writers who did not come of age in the last five years will probably be able to live with shifting that money from the one entity to the other, especially since they supposedly actively support the other.
If the history of publishing is 24 hrs, things have been the way they are now for roughly three seconds. The future is with small presses, and it is silly to claim ethical superiority for a system (“free” submissions) that has only existed for three seconds and that could very will hinder the vitality of small presses. Your personal experience consists of, what, a couple semesters? Lots of other editors have different experiences, I guarantee you.
Brendan,
Maybe we are talking about different “names.” I am referring to people I would have heard of. Magazines I’ve been involved with, these people are solicited or (the one bigger magazine where I worked) their agents send stuff. There are exceptions, obviously.
I am going to start charging my friends a submission fee for any personal email they send me, because in the past they would have just paid that to the post office anyway.
agree w/ Chris H. when editors stop thinking that they’re lucky to get the writing they get, when they start resenting the fact that enthusiastic young writers often send neophyte work, that’s backwards and from my angle fucked up. what we’re really talking about here: a lame and cynical business model, the Narrative Magazine one.
Demi: This sounds like a good idea. I usually get about 30-40 emails a day. If I charge them everyone each the price of a stamp maybe they will only send me emails that really matter. People will think twice before contacting me and wasting the time I would otherwise be spending posting here on HTML Giant.
agree w/ Chris H. when editors stop thinking that they’re lucky to get the writing they get, when they start resenting the fact that enthusiastic young writers often send neophyte work, that’s backwards and from my angle fucked up. what we’re really talking about here: a lame and cynical business model, the Narrative Magazine one.
demi-puppet- if you were doing your friends a service and they were sending you more and more each day to the point that you couldn’t actually do that service, they might want to figure out some way of filtering and prioritizing the emails.
Submission fees don’t strike me as a good idea, for reasons outlined above by Stephen & others. Business models are one thing, but in my experience it’s a good idea to align yourself with what’s possible rather than create artificial disincentives.
In other words, if it’s “too easy” for people to send submissions, perhaps we should put them all up and find another way to sort through them and discover the good stuff instead of making writers pay to have their work read. That’s the idea behind Fictionaut: if there are “too many writers” producing “too much work”, perhaps we could all share the reading, editing, and curating, rather than trying to make money off people’s hopes for publication.
There’s more virtual space for publication than ever, so I would expect a potentially profitable but artificial bottleneck like a non-trivial submission fee will be routed around. (Who here paid Narrative $20?) The web offers tons of tools for what we’re all trying to do — get more great writing to more people. As a writer, a fee would make me look for other ways to get my work read.
demi-puppet- if you were doing your friends a service and they were sending you more and more each day to the point that you couldn’t actually do that service, they might want to figure out some way of filtering and prioritizing the emails.
I’m willing to be almost everyone who is an editor here considers themselves a writer first the foremost. And you know what, “cruddy” judgement aside, I’m willing to be that most people who have worked as editors actually are better about submissions. I bet they at least read the submission guidelines, something a good chunk of writers don’t do.
I’m sorry, but there is nothing “snobby” about being annoyed that your online haiku e-zine gets sent submissions of sci-fi short stories.
I agree with this, but again, these people are not real problems. When your online haiku e-zine gets sent submissions of SF fiction, it takes no time at all to send the rejection. Or, really, don’t bother — they won’t notice anyway.
And some of those people probably just think your magazine would be better with some SF. Your example is extreme enough that there’s no wiggle room, but I bet a lot of the stuff editors consider wildly, unbelievably inappropriate is someone’s attempt to help the editors see another angle from which they could approach their work. Blake gets a lot of rejections that say something like “This is great but it doesn’t fit what we do,” right? Should he be ashamed that he tries in these instances? Should he never try again?
Too much shame, too much worrying. If we work from good intentions and give each other a little room to breathe, lit can be forever exciting. If we freak out every time somebody breaks our rules, we can feel forever on the edge of a heart attack, the way so many of the editors here seem to constantly feel. I edit, I plan to edit more in the future, and I’m happy about it. Why do so many of us seem so angry about this? It makes me sad that people are spending time feeling angry and uptight about something that’s supposed to be fun and beautiful and exciting.
Submission fees don’t strike me as a good idea, for reasons outlined above by Stephen & others. Business models are one thing, but in my experience it’s a good idea to align yourself with what’s possible rather than create artificial disincentives.
In other words, if it’s “too easy” for people to send submissions, perhaps we should put them all up and find another way to sort through them and discover the good stuff instead of making writers pay to have their work read. That’s the idea behind Fictionaut: if there are “too many writers” producing “too much work”, perhaps we could all share the reading, editing, and curating, rather than trying to make money off people’s hopes for publication.
There’s more virtual space for publication than ever, so I would expect a potentially profitable but artificial bottleneck like a non-trivial submission fee will be routed around. (Who here paid Narrative $20?) The web offers tons of tools for what we’re all trying to do — get more great writing to more people. As a writer, a fee would make me look for other ways to get my work read.
I’m willing to be almost everyone who is an editor here considers themselves a writer first the foremost. And you know what, “cruddy” judgement aside, I’m willing to be that most people who have worked as editors actually are better about submissions. I bet they at least read the submission guidelines, something a good chunk of writers don’t do.
I’m sorry, but there is nothing “snobby” about being annoyed that your online haiku e-zine gets sent submissions of sci-fi short stories.
I agree with this, but again, these people are not real problems. When your online haiku e-zine gets sent submissions of SF fiction, it takes no time at all to send the rejection. Or, really, don’t bother — they won’t notice anyway.
And some of those people probably just think your magazine would be better with some SF. Your example is extreme enough that there’s no wiggle room, but I bet a lot of the stuff editors consider wildly, unbelievably inappropriate is someone’s attempt to help the editors see another angle from which they could approach their work. Blake gets a lot of rejections that say something like “This is great but it doesn’t fit what we do,” right? Should he be ashamed that he tries in these instances? Should he never try again?
Too much shame, too much worrying. If we work from good intentions and give each other a little room to breathe, lit can be forever exciting. If we freak out every time somebody breaks our rules, we can feel forever on the edge of a heart attack, the way so many of the editors here seem to constantly feel. I edit, I plan to edit more in the future, and I’m happy about it. Why do so many of us seem so angry about this? It makes me sad that people are spending time feeling angry and uptight about something that’s supposed to be fun and beautiful and exciting.
Not making a dime makes the publisher more careful about what they publish. Is that a bad thing?
I mean, the really great publishers I know will do it anyways. Many here have gone out of business more than once. Or maybe that’s just me. Publishing is as satisfying as writing for some of us, and so it will be done whether these little fees become prevalent or not.
Prove it.
So if it cut your 500 submissions to 200 but the magazine made $600 a month–$7200 a year, plenty to operate and grow–why not do it?
There can be only one or two reasons. I’ll keep my guess to myself.
They’re owned by Conde Nast now. They’re doing fine.
Not true. The first 20 years were all about the establishment. Now suddenly the Internet makes democracy for the peons and the old guard huffs. EMI no longer considers itself a record label. Did you hear about that? They’re now some technical term for distributor. And that’s what they’re best at anyways.
Merge records never charged their artists a demo tape fee. You guys are all crazy.
Neither did Epitaph.
Hi, phm – I’m down with what you’re getting at, but I’m not sure your analogy to indie music works, at least not these two labels – Merge was started by Superchunk to put out their own records, and records by their friends’ bands. I’d be curious to find out how much material they actually released from bands sending them demo tapes. At this point, they don’t even accept unsolicited demos. I also suspect Merge is making enough money to have a paid staff, unlike most literary journals. Epitaph takes demos, but admits that it’s unlikely to get anywhere with them, and again, Epitaph makes enough money to have what looks like around 20 employees. I think I read an article about them some time ago saying that their money came from The Offspring and to a lesser extent, NOFX and Rancid, so again, the fact that they don’t charge money for demos is a little bit off when thinking about indie presses in that most indie presses don’t have the luxury of more than a few (if any) paid staff, and while labels like Merge and Epitaph may accept demo recordings, most (if not all) of the bands on those labels came to the label through other channels, unlike indie presses (especially literary magazines) which rely heavily on unsolicited subs. At least that’s been my experience with the journals I’ve worked for or with – it’s not like we have some cash cow hit (the literary equivalent of the Offspring or Arcade Fire, in the case of Merge) to fund the press, and even when I’ve been in a situation where a mag has published a ‘name’ writer, it doesn’t translate to increased sales. So while I’m in general opposed to charging reading fees for submissions, I don’t think indie music and indie publishing are quite the same here. Or course the economics are different with bigger publishers, where, in theory, a big book can fund a bunch of smaller books, but most of those presses don’t take unsolicited manuscripts.
Merritt submitted a demo tape. Some they picked up on tour. Read their awesome book. Not to interrupt you.
I guess I’ll have to read up on successful independent presses of the past century and getbback to you. My thinking is mostly that the spirit is what got them to where they are today. I believe Epitaph has much more money than Merge, but recent years could have changed that. Recently they put out Zach de la Rocha’s new project, One Day as a Lion. Something tells me that la Rocha’s snoring on tape would make money, even in these piratical times.
Also, I don’t believe that paid staff equals better product 100% of the time. For people who are used to doing all the work anyway it just translates to fewer menial tasks. Or so I might imagine.
Yeah, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, just that these labels don’t rely on unsolicited demos for the records they release, as opposed to a literary journal, which relies almost 100% on unsolicited material.
And RE the paid staff – that was only to point out that a label like Epitaph, with twenty paid staff members, is a lot better equipped to handle unsolicited demo tapes, than a journal with three volunteer editors who are also copyediting, laying out the mag, and trying to drum up subscribers. Again, the analogies don’t quite line up because a literary mag has to read unsolicited submissions, while Epitaph certainly doesn’t, but I can understand a press asking for a few bucks to read a submission if they’re in a position of not surviving if they don’t.
We seem to get more than our fair share of quality submissions at Girls with Insurance. Def. Not complaining, but wonder what that says about us in comparison to the jilted ones here.
Like, look at this shit: http://fresh.in/cb
Undeniably fucking incredible. Does it make believe that GwI will win one the award ceremonies next year or even a mention on this piece of shit blog? Fuck no! But it does make me feel good to be alive. All the credit for that piece goes to Noelle Adams and associate Dawn Corrigan. I just feel lucky to be part of a crew that can do shit like that and get away with it. We were discussing financial moves this very day. We’ll figure it all out, man, we always do.
make me believe*
one of*
So kiss my ass, capitalism. I got my jollies and that counts for something.
It’s http://frsh.in/cb
Fucking iPad!
http://frsh.in/cb
I might argue, given the reality of the variety of names published in magazines like noo journal, smoke long, pank, haha clever, etc, that they don’t really rely on the submissions. They rely on those writers to be their readers, and to keep submitting in the face of bald nepotism. Etc. I don’t want hitch my keyboard up right now. Might have to continue this tomorrow. So very tired.
Not making a dime makes the publisher more careful about what they publish. Is that a bad thing?
You’ve been in PANK, Paul. We pull 99% of the work we publish from the submission queue. You, in fact, are one of the few writers we ever solicited. Irony. Fascinating.
I mean, the really great publishers I know will do it anyways. Many here have gone out of business more than once. Or maybe that’s just me. Publishing is as satisfying as writing for some of us, and so it will be done whether these little fees become prevalent or not.
Prove it.
So if it cut your 500 submissions to 200 but the magazine made $600 a month–$7200 a year, plenty to operate and grow–why not do it?
There can be only one or two reasons. I’ll keep my guess to myself.
They’re owned by Conde Nast now. They’re doing fine.
Not true. The first 20 years were all about the establishment. Now suddenly the Internet makes democracy for the peons and the old guard huffs. EMI no longer considers itself a record label. Did you hear about that? They’re now some technical term for distributor. And that’s what they’re best at anyways.
Merge records never charged their artists a demo tape fee. You guys are all crazy.
Neither did Epitaph.
Hi, phm – I’m down with what you’re getting at, but I’m not sure your analogy to indie music works, at least not these two labels – Merge was started by Superchunk to put out their own records, and records by their friends’ bands. I’d be curious to find out how much material they actually released from bands sending them demo tapes. At this point, they don’t even accept unsolicited demos. I also suspect Merge is making enough money to have a paid staff, unlike most literary journals. Epitaph takes demos, but admits that it’s unlikely to get anywhere with them, and again, Epitaph makes enough money to have what looks like around 20 employees. I think I read an article about them some time ago saying that their money came from The Offspring and to a lesser extent, NOFX and Rancid, so again, the fact that they don’t charge money for demos is a little bit off when thinking about indie presses in that most indie presses don’t have the luxury of more than a few (if any) paid staff, and while labels like Merge and Epitaph may accept demo recordings, most (if not all) of the bands on those labels came to the label through other channels, unlike indie presses (especially literary magazines) which rely heavily on unsolicited subs. At least that’s been my experience with the journals I’ve worked for or with – it’s not like we have some cash cow hit (the literary equivalent of the Offspring or Arcade Fire, in the case of Merge) to fund the press, and even when I’ve been in a situation where a mag has published a ‘name’ writer, it doesn’t translate to increased sales. So while I’m in general opposed to charging reading fees for submissions, I don’t think indie music and indie publishing are quite the same here. Or course the economics are different with bigger publishers, where, in theory, a big book can fund a bunch of smaller books, but most of those presses don’t take unsolicited manuscripts.
Merritt submitted a demo tape. Some they picked up on tour. Read their awesome book. Not to interrupt you.
I guess I’ll have to read up on successful independent presses of the past century and getbback to you. My thinking is mostly that the spirit is what got them to where they are today. I believe Epitaph has much more money than Merge, but recent years could have changed that. Recently they put out Zach de la Rocha’s new project, One Day as a Lion. Something tells me that la Rocha’s snoring on tape would make money, even in these piratical times.
Also, I don’t believe that paid staff equals better product 100% of the time. For people who are used to doing all the work anyway it just translates to fewer menial tasks. Or so I might imagine.
Yeah, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, just that these labels don’t rely on unsolicited demos for the records they release, as opposed to a literary journal, which relies almost 100% on unsolicited material.
And RE the paid staff – that was only to point out that a label like Epitaph, with twenty paid staff members, is a lot better equipped to handle unsolicited demo tapes, than a journal with three volunteer editors who are also copyediting, laying out the mag, and trying to drum up subscribers. Again, the analogies don’t quite line up because a literary mag has to read unsolicited submissions, while Epitaph certainly doesn’t, but I can understand a press asking for a few bucks to read a submission if they’re in a position of not surviving if they don’t.
We seem to get more than our fair share of quality submissions at Girls with Insurance. Def. Not complaining, but wonder what that says about us in comparison to the jilted ones here.
Like, look at this shit: http://fresh.in/cb
Undeniably fucking incredible. Does it make believe that GwI will win one the award ceremonies next year or even a mention on this piece of shit blog? Fuck no! But it does make me feel good to be alive. All the credit for that piece goes to Noelle Adams and associate Dawn Corrigan. I just feel lucky to be part of a crew that can do shit like that and get away with it. We were discussing financial moves this very day. We’ll figure it all out, man, we always do.
make me believe*
one of*
So kiss my ass, capitalism. I got my jollies and that counts for something.
It’s http://frsh.in/cb
Fucking iPad!
http://frsh.in/cb
I might argue, given the reality of the variety of names published in magazines like noo journal, smoke long, pank, haha clever, etc, that they don’t really rely on the submissions. They rely on those writers to be their readers, and to keep submitting in the face of bald nepotism. Etc. I don’t want hitch my keyboard up right now. Might have to continue this tomorrow. So very tired.
You’ve been in PANK, Paul. We pull 99% of the work we publish from the submission queue. You, in fact, are one of the few writers we ever solicited. Irony. Fascinating.
And that is what is odd to me. With 512 people begging, why did you come asking?
And just to clarify, we are not talking about me.
Adam, this is my official withdrawal of YOUR. I’m going to self-publish it on Scribd with some or all of your edits under the original. Thanks for two years of patience with me. I feel better.
original title*
Fuck still tired.
And that is what is odd to me. With 512 people begging, why did you come asking?
And just to clarify, we are not talking about me.
Adam, this is my official withdrawal of YOUR. I’m going to self-publish it on Scribd with some or all of your edits under the original. Thanks for two years of patience with me. I feel better.
original title*
Fuck still tired.
We are always looking for writing that interests us. When something catches our eye, we’ll ask for it. It’s probably happened four or five times.
And submitting to a magazine is not begging. Your disdain for everything is unfortunate.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33420444/Yearning-Corners-Utopia-Communication-Reason-and-Hate
Guess I must owe you something. My belated solicitation fee is in the mail.
If there’s 512 of them in 30 days (17 per day), then begging has to be the only way in.
I say that paying writers is a quality filter. It was often tough to decide when I was publishing a paying magazine, and we didn’t pay but a pittance.
No, that’s not true, it was just a retarded thing I said because I felt argumentative a second ago.
You don’t owe me jack shit. Get over yourself.
We are always looking for writing that interests us. When something catches our eye, we’ll ask for it. It’s probably happened four or five times.
And submitting to a magazine is not begging. Your disdain for everything is unfortunate.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33420444/Yearning-Corners-Utopia-Communication-Reason-and-Hate
Guess I must owe you something. My belated solicitation fee is in the mail.
If there’s 512 of them in 30 days (17 per day), then begging has to be the only way in.
I say that paying writers is a quality filter. It was often tough to decide when I was publishing a paying magazine, and we didn’t pay but a pittance.
No, that’s not true, it was just a retarded thing I said because I felt argumentative a second ago.
You don’t owe me jack shit. Get over yourself.
Good post. I read slush for a well-known, national journal, and I bet we receive more subs than most of the whiners on this thread. Keeping up with slush is not difficult if you spend less time dicking around on blogs. You can easily go through 5-15 subs a day. Takes no more than an hour. The crappy subs are the easiest to reject. Get out of editing if you don’t have time management skills, lazy fucks.
It makes no sense to expect writers to know 900,000,000 markets when you’re not disciplined to simply read a little bit each day. I know way too many editors who approach their reading like a an 18 year old freshman pulling an all-nighter to write a term paper he should’ve started 1 month before the deadline.
Good post. I read slush for a well-known, national journal, and I bet we receive more subs than most of the whiners on this thread. Keeping up with slush is not difficult if you spend less time dicking around on blogs. You can easily go through 5-15 subs a day. Takes no more than an hour. The crappy subs are the easiest to reject. Get out of editing if you don’t have time management skills, lazy fucks.
It makes no sense to expect writers to know 900,000,000 markets when you’re not disciplined to simply read a little bit each day. I know way too many editors who approach their reading like a an 18 year old freshman pulling an all-nighter to write a term paper he should’ve started 1 month before the deadline.