Many short story markets charge submitting authors reading fees, a relatively new but growing practice. It bothers me.
When a publication cannot continue without financial support from authors—when it begins to earn money from its potential contributors—then, as a matter of survival, such a publication’s true customer base will tend to shift from readers to writers. Its focus will perforce veer from the hard business of reaching readers to the probably easier business of titillating the hopes and dreams1 of authors whose work may not be ready to reach readers, or isn’t really intended to. A submission-fee culture effectively removes readers from the feedback loop, or at least reduces their influence within it: what they want or don’t want to read grows less relevant to what the publication is willing to accept.
Should writers participate in this? It only makes sense if you’re more passionate about sustaining the form in which you write than you are about actually being read. If you feel that, despite it all, these publications are too precious to the world to be allowed to founder, then, by all means, pay the fee. But you must know that, at the bottom of this slippery slope, the only people reading your work may be other authors scouting publications to submit to2.
I don’t necessarily think all editors charging reading fees are running scams—but I think they are being unwise. They are bartering away their publications’ futures. It is easy enough to imagine what might motivate a switch to this model: lights that need to be kept on; a revenue stream that dwindles; a desire to publish for love of literature over all else; a presumption that to aim for wider readerships is to dumb down content3. Better to keep things pure by asking authors to support the scene…
But what may feel like a stopgap survival measure will, first, discourage overall submission4, resulting in a poorer quality publication. After all, if each great story is a diamond in the rough, you need a lot of rough if you want a lot of diamonds.
And an even surer bad outcome will be to make publications increasingly dependent on income from authors, rather than readers, to cover operating expenses. Why is this a problem? Say your advertising budget is limited—do you advertise to readers, from whom you make little money, or do you advertise to potential contributors, whose fees sustain you?5
Meanwhile, publishers not charging fees will surely be flooded with that many more manuscripts6, creating keener competition that will raise the bar for publication there. But that’s a bar authors should want to see raised. Pay-to-play is always going to be a tempting shortcut, but you do yourself no favors by taking it.
Authors should shun the general supposition that short fiction is a closed ecosystem, supported by authors, read by authors. Novelists, long-form journalists, screenwriters and others certainly don’t presume this, and for good reason. That way lies obsolescence.
- Hopes and dreams are downward pressures on the cost of labor, as is perfectly well known within all the creative industries.
- Again, paying a fee and sustaining the scheme.
- There are surely more available options than the false dichotomy of either publishing pap for the great unwashed, or publishing ‘good writing’ which (for some reason) few wish to read.
- Because duh.
- Taken to absurd extremes, a magazine may feel little impetus indeed to be read at all; each issue will essentially amount to a call for further submissions.
- With good consequences for them, if we presume that a larger pool of stories will lead to a higher quality publication.