You submit your short story to a literary journal and pay $3 to do so. And the literary journal, in some cases, accepts your story and pays you nothing. Writers have been complaining about this practice for years, ever since some entrepreneurial literary journal staffs realized that charging for online submissions could be characterized as equivalent to the costs of mailing submissions, so why not send the money to them instead of the post office? The practice only grew from there as cash strapped journals recognized the potential for income that could keep them able to publish.
We’ve long since forgotten the original logic behind charging to submit. But writers still chafe at the requirement. And why shouldn’t they? Journals should make their money from the sale of their product, not from the content providers. In fact those providers should be fairly compensated for the enormous effort of writing, rewriting (often dozens of times), and eclipsing the hundreds of other submissions with which they are in competition.
The other standard journal solution for raising money is the ubiquitous contest. Seems like every journal has one, and they are even more of a drain on writers’ finances. I’ll discuss those in a future post. Suffice it to say that our creative writing world lacks creativity when it comes to generating revenue.
Of course I have some ideas.
As a former and longtime editor at literary journals I will first admit an uncomfortable truth. Journal staffs often see many submissions from the same writers, writers whose work does not resonate with the staff readers. Those writers usually continue to submit, and if the reader recognizes the author’s name, that person may, consciously or subconsciously, be predisposed to disliking the submission. Despite a sometimes overwhelming number of rejections, the writer continues to send in work. (I am guilty of this on both sides, as a writer who has continued to submit to the same journals without success, and as an editor who can barely bring himself to open yet another submission from a writer he has rejected many times.)
What about a tiered submission structure? Your first submission to a journal is free. Maybe two submissions are free. But after you’ve been rejected a couple of times you continue to submit. From the journal staff’s perspective you now become less of a potential contributor and more of a nuisance—but as a revenue source you have a different form of value. And that’s when the fees start to go up. Your third submission, $3. Your fourth, $4. Submission number five, $5. I can see a fee structure in which the fees go up exponentially the longer you continue to submit without success. Your sixth submission, $10. Number seven, 20 bucks. Some people might wind up being charged over $100 to submit. This may seem exorbitant, but consider it in light of how desperate some writers are to be published. Some will continue to pay. Narrative Magazine charges $26 to submit one short story, and they’ve been around for years.
And with rates like this, the journal staff would eagerly accept your nth submission. And journals would have no excuse to not pay their contributors.
No good?
Okay, maybe we do away with the monetary system of submissions completely. Literary journal editors are always talking about how what they do is not about the money, so why not put their lack of money where their mouths are? Let’s move to the barter system.
Submissions would be free, of course. Without that income most journals wouldn’t be able to pay contributors (unless they receive grant money and under the current economic circumstances and the present administration that’s becoming less and less likely), so they would have to find more creative ways to reward their writers. How about a subscription to their journal? Of course this would have to be to the online journal, since the publication could no longer afford to be printed. In fact they might not even be able to afford the cost of maintaining a website.
Hmmm. All right, then how about something more personal? A published story earns a 20-minute consultation on Zoom for another piece of the author’s writing. Or inclusion in the journal’s private book club chat room (assuming they have one)?
Not enough? Maybe make it more tangible. Get your story published and the journal editors will send you something one of them had published. Or a picture of what the journal would have looked like, had the staff had the money to get it printed. Or a photo of the journal staff, suitable for framing. Perhaps one of the editor’s personal possessions—a red pen used to make edits, the Return key from a retired computer, a COVID mask left over from the pandemic (ick).
Without being able to afford website costs journals would then have to go back to accepting submissions by mail. This fits with the direction the entire country seems to be going—so many people seem to want to return to a fantasized, simpler past. It will create jobs at the post office! Not very good jobs, but still…
In keeping with that, the barter strategy would help literature return to a less capitalist, more pure form. Art as art, not commerce. All writers and editors will be poor, as it should be. We will learn, once again, the beauty of poverty and struggle, and the value of that will be reflected in our work.
We can do this, people. We just have to want it.
That’s my modest proposal…and feeble attempt at satire. Apologies to Jonathan Swift.
Where do you stand on submission fees? Higher? Lower? Nonexistent? I’m curious to see if anyone else has an idea on how to address this often unpopular aspect of the writing world.
Finally, a shout out to Becky Tuch and her Lit Mag News. She recently mentioned work in Beyond Craft for the fifth time since we started posting three months ago, and her influence in the writing community has brought us a lot of recognition. Big thanks!
What about BLIND submissions? An editor should always read with an open mind, albeit if the work doesn't grab them within the first three pages, move on.
Here’s my experience with online submissions. From roughly 2000 to 2011, I sent out hundreds and hundreds of short stories via the postal service and had reached an acceptance rate of over four percent in academic reviews and journals. At the time, I was living in the outback of Montana and wasn’t even aware of online submission methods, though I stumbled upon Submittable sometime in 2012.
From that point until 2021, when I finally abandoned my literary ambitions, I submitted 973 stories via Submittable. Only nine were accepted—less than a one percent acceptance rate. Of those nine, just two were picked up by university journals; the rest were marginal publications.
How much money did I donate to Submittable? I don’t even want to know. The submission goes in one end, money lands in the coffer, then someone hits delete and a form rejection is automatically sent. It’s all too easy, too impersonal—nobody opens a manila folder, pages through a manuscript while reading, etc.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, and maybe I’m just crying sour grapes, but looking back, it sort of feels like a scam.