PAID SUBMISSIONS: TO CHARGE OR NOT TO CHARGE?
Canteen wants you to weigh in.
There has been a recent trend toward charging modest reading fees for submissions to literary magazines, as detailed in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers (nicely summarized here). We’d like to hear your thoughts on this shift and what it means for the relationship between magazines and contributors.
As a scrappy nonprofit, Canteen is currently considering some form of pay-to-submit: Ideas include charging a few dollars per submission, offering discounted subscriptions to aspiring contributors, or something else entirely. The aim is not to get rich—everyone who works on Canteen is an unpaid volunteer—but merely to help our magazine survive. How would you feel if Canteen starting charging for submissions? We’d greatly appreciate any comments you make below or send to us at info [at] canteenmag.com.
We’re all partners in this literary thing.
Submission fees are distasteful. A submission fee policy takes advantage of a market imbalance to extract money in exchange for no value. It is capitalism at its ugliest.
Your product is your editorial taste. That is your value, and it accrues to your readers only. If you can’t find enough readers who appreciate your product, then it’s time to close up shop…you have failed.
You provide nothing of value to your submitters. They toil away for days and weeks and months to produce creative work for your consideration that (in a majority of cases) you spend two minutes rejecting. Further, submissions are your raw material. The value flows to you from your submitters. Could you charge them fees and get away with it? Apparently so. Is such an act of capitalistic opportunism consistent with the values of Canteen? Does it sit well with you, exploiting the writers and artists that you claim to admire on your About Us page?
I think it makes perfect sense to charge a nominal fee. There’s an undeniable cost to reading and engaging with submissions. The fact is that electronic communications have made the process to submit way too easy. We can submit with the click of a button. As a writer, I’m suspect of place that don’t change, the big ones at least. I can’t imagine how they read all those submissions. A small fee will cut out unserious submissions. It’s no different than college applications. If those were free we’d all just apply to hundreds of colleges, making it a number game instead of targeting the colleges we’re really interested in.
I just picked up Canteen at Elliott Bay Books and was impressed with the quality of the cover and what I skimmed between the pages. It’s definitely not slapped together, definitely has a quality that I’m sure comes at a price that is not easy for new magazines. I’m looking forward to reading it more thoroughly.
What I think many don’t understand is that electronic submissions aren’t free. They have an overhead of server costs, website, labor, and a submission manager; much like postal submissions have an overhead of fuel, vehicle upkeep, and labor. What costs were at one time covered by submitters through an outside service are now expected to be absorbed by nonprofits. It seems rather selfish of submitters to continue to expect this in the current economy.
What we submitters also get is a certain amount of transparency. I have eleven submissions ranging from February through July, and the only ones I wonder about are the postal submissions, the others I can see haven’t been lost in the backseat of an intern’s car, or by the postal service. I don’t mind reasonable (postage priced) submission fees.
I sympathize with literary magazines that are overwhelmed by electronic submissions. However, I agree with Pete that a submission fee is distasteful. If you would like to limit the number of submissions you receive, I suggest that you ask writers to submit only once (or twice) a year, or limit your submission period(s).
Thank you for asking our opinions.
It would also make it a lot harder for bullying to take place, since anyone stupid enough to try it would be taking on a potentially even bigger community, as well as whoever happened to be hosting you. (Anyone who did host would have your back 100% and be able to manage comment moderation and such so you’d never even have to see the garbage.),