[image credit: Unsplash]
Girls, gays, goths & others,
YO! It’s been a minute, but I’m back in Black baby! If you haven’t heard, I’m a full-time artist & consultant as of today (book me y’all!) & I’m going on tour for How To Identify Yourself with a Wound this spring!!! The last time I dropped out of grad school (lol), I came out a better person. I’m hoping for the same this time & appreciate your support :)
Second update is that I’m guest editing a special issue of perhappened (the coolest ever magazine & press) & we’re open for submissions for writers with ADHD now! Send me them poems, them proses & such. I’m looking forward to reading them.
ANYWAY. Most of this will be a rant about a thing that has been the bane of my existence all 3 years of me trying to do “traditional publishing”: submission fees.
Earlier this year my debut chapbook was picked up from a beautiful small publisher. As many writers can guess, that wasn’t the first place I tried to place it so I had to withdraw submissions to a plethora of places upon signing that contract. Over and over, I got that “Please Note: This is a paid submission. If you withdraw this entry your payment will not be refunded” notification, and after it was all said and done I’d lost $300.
3. hundred. big ones. Somewhere floating in the ether with folk who may or may not have even touched my submission. PAIN is an understatement!
I have a plethora of other poets in my orbit that all have drop-dead gorgeous work. Some have gotten books published, won awards, gotten prestigious fellowships (among other things). I don’t think any of them haven’t complained at least once about submission fees, but we all still give up the dough (or wait til the occasional “submission-free” window). Very, very few writers I know have successfully taken on the writer/marketer/graphic designer/tik toker work of self-publishing our books and individual poems.
We have a serious problem, and I believe that it starts with submission fees.
As an “emerging” writer in a poetry landscape that wholeheartedly embraces the $3-65 fee, I’ve learned to not come out against submission fees publicly unless I want passive-aggressive shame embedded in my classroom/mentions. From you can be self-righteous and unpublished to it sounds like you don’t want poor people to run a litmag, a range of negative replies come pouring in when you question if you’re supposed to be giving up bill-type money to participate in trad publishing.
We know money barriers lead to inequities. Should we just not care? Should writers avoid a large number of non-agented publishing opportunities and just… save up money for people to *checks notes* possibly like our work enough to publish it?
I don’t think so, and that’s why I made a vow with myself (and my pockets) to not submit to anything else that had a price attached to it and advise emerging writers against pay-to-play opportunities entirely.
Among other things, submission fees are one of the most inequitable practices that is normalized in the literary canon, and for a moment last year it felt like periodicals got that. I cannot even count the amount of places I saw do “free for BIPOC” days and months. A select few even made these things permanent (ex: Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry, both of which are owned by the same folks). Still though, a very large percentage of periodicals — from the Academy of American Poets to _____ review — require submission fees. Why?
Below I’ve attempted to figure that out and respond to some of the most upheld arguments for why submission fees should exist.
“We need to pay staff.”
Well yes, you absolutely do need to pay staff. Why are hopeful contributors tasked with that, though? I’ve never heard of a business structure that relies on a consumer that may or may not get a product or service from the transaction, so why does that exist in the literary canon? When I go to Best Buy, I’m hoping to walk out with a charger. When I submit to ____ lit review, I’m hoping to get published in their next issue. I know that that may or may not happen, but I’m not signing up to pay your staff. A prospective contributor paying someone to read their work is called personal editing. I’m sure that a person submitting to your general submissions category on submittable, duotrope, or email is not paying you to be their personal editor, so why would they pay you directly for reading (and possibly rejecting) their work? I recognize that this is labor, and labor in any other profession or capitalist situation is usually paid for by the person asking for the labor of you (AKA the magazine), so why is the magazine’s budget not paying staff? Do you not have a patreon, fundraising activities, grants to cover this kind of thing? If the funding strategy is to pay for staff positions through inconsistent submission fees, I’m afraid that it is not a funding strategy. It is a hope at best. A normalized way for entities to sustain operations without having to budget for staff at worst. I worry that when we make arguments like this we think of a magazine as a gambling process; a slot that you put money into hoping that you will get your money & then some (recognition, prize money, etc) back.
“How will we pay the contest judge?”
For folks unaware of contests, these are one of the only ways poets can get an advance for a first book (others I know of are open reading periods). See my point above.
“It sounds like you just don’t want poor people/BIPOC to run a lit mag/press.”
As a Black queer transmasc whose been poor all of my life, this one especially gets me. I want anyone regardless of what they make on a year-to-year basis to run a literary space that makes space for others if that’s what they want to do. I’ve been on staff with super small lit mags that have a $5000 budget for their website, paying staff, printing issues, and paying contributors before; I know how expensive and time-consuming things can get. I just wonder why more time is not invested into the development of a literary space: where are you getting your money from, and why is that question not answered before you kick off your website/social media page? I think corners are being cut, and that leads to the burnout of some of our brightest editors and the lazy idea that submission fees are Sustainable and Good. They’re hella inconsistent. They lead to contributors looking like mayo and cottage cheese. Editors can’t always also be development and executive directors slash slash slash. Why are you charging submission fees, friend? I want you to run a lit mag if you are ready to run a lit mag.
“When we solicit people, we don’t charge them.”
Congratulations?…. If anyone tried to charge me after personally reaching out to me and saying “we like you and want to submit” that would be….. odd to say the least. Also, what about the heaps of folks with no social following or stack of publications that large journals that lead to solicitations, hm? They should have to pay? This argument makes no sense to me unfortunately.
“How else are we doing to pay contributors?”
See “we have to pay staff”. Also, it’s very much not an industry standard to pay contributors, else this argument could (possibly) hold up. I’d LOVE to live in a world where poets were like freelancers and got paid for every piece they got accepted everywhere. That’s just not the case for many entities, and though I’m not particularly upset by not getting money from contributions (since most of the “money I make doing poetry” is from shows), that doesn’t mean everyone else has to be.
“We have no fees for BIPOC/give waivers for people that request them.”
Cool, but often the “waiver” sitch is not clear on the website or up to how many people have already requested one that month. Also, some entities just…. decide not to give them out for undisclosed reasons (trust me, I’ve asked many, many places). The “fee-free for BIPOC” thing is often not permanent, and it puts a bandaid on larger issues (no BIPOC on the masthead, a long history of the publication having all-white or tokenizing issues). It’s inconsistent. It’s presumptuous. It’s a fix that should instead be not charging submission fees.
“How else are we going to run a journal?”
Arts grants in your state. Arts grants in your city’s government. Arts grants at the national/federal level (NEA, Poets & Writers, etc). Partnerships with foundations. Grassroots fundraising through patreon or another monthly donor system ($10 from 10 people is $100!). Corporate sponsorships. Merch. Ads. Providing a submission tier that is “editorial services” or “expedited subs” and charging a fee for that (instead of a fee for all submissions). If you are a university entity, advocating for your university to give more money to the entity. Finding someone that will volunteer their time to help you diversify your income (especially a white person with time and access in their hands — there are many of them).
I KNOW that, in the age of many beloved entities — Believer, Wear Your Voice, Entropy, etc — shutting down, it’s not easy. It is, however, possible. Take it from a person that has ran an arts nonprofit on love and no money (then $3,000) (then $30,000). We made the dopest fucking zine ever with $300.
Revisit your mission and see if the practice of charging people to read their work and charging the community that you want to serve to be a part of your cause is in alignment with it. For most of you “we believe in DEI” girls, it is not. For the other girls who don’t have a DEI commitment AND charge submission fees, I am judging you.
“You have to pay in order to play the game. I budget for it, why don’t you?”
I, among many other writers, don’t think of our work as a game. When I started to write myself into life and into a canon that doesn’t have a lot of me’s, I didn’t sign on to play literary-cool-kid-roulette. I signed on to find people that needed to find me, and I shouldn’t have to pay to do that. Pay-to-play structures like submission fees are also very much ground upon in other genres of art (music especially), so I don’t know why folks have this “that’s just how it is” kind of attitude about it. There was a time where submission fees didn’t exist, and there is a world in which they don’t have to as well.
Over the past 6 years, I’ve been an editor for two different indie magazines. I’ve guest edited another indie mag, been an ED and an intern for an EIC. I don’t think anyone needs to know the ins and outs of your periodical to know that it shouldn’t be charging people to read their work. The work of the artist is to look at the status quo and interrogate it, and I must interrogate the usefulness of this barrier that we have normalized. It’s demoralizing to know that I’ve spent something like $1000+ over the past 3 years to get closer to my people, and I have things to show for it but at what cost?
Are you running a literary journal or an editorial business? Do you want to uplift the poor/disabled/queer/disadvantaged/BIPOC writer or discourage them completely? I challenge entities to phase out of submission fees as an income stream, divorce yourself from inequity, and dare to get creative with the ways that we usher in the writers and change-makers of tomorrow.
Take it from this writer/editor. Your stanzas in submittable will thank you.