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Genres and Genres
Sep. 22nd, 2021 11:49 pmI stumbled across a list of literary magazines and looked through it because hey, I'm always open to new markets. And I did find a few on that list that meet my criteria for "market."
But given how minimal my criteria for a market is, it is possibly distressing that I only walked away from what was quite a long list with three new magazines.
Market criteria:
It needs to pay something. This doesn't have to be a lot, although obviously I submit any given story to the ones that pay more before sending it to the ones that pay less. (Unless something was written for a specific call; then the call gets it first.)
It cannot violate Yog's Law. No reading fees, no fees for an expedited response, no "we also offer editorial feedback that we charge for."
That's it. That's all a magazine needs to land on my market list. And in genre land, violating Yog's Law means you're Probably A Scam, as you'll recall from my previous complaints about editors advertising their writing workshops on the backside. Literary magazines are apparently another world entirely: many of them charge submission fees and very few of them seem to pay writers. (Even some of the ones that charge writers don't pay them, which I was especially boggled by.)
And that has massive problems with the industry. It doesn't value writers-- it's functionally "write for exposure" in the unpaid ones and worse for the ones with reading fees-- and it shuts out any writer who can't afford the reading fees. Which is many of them-- when you have a reading fee you are pretty much only going to get the ones with some other income stream and probably mostly hobbyists; pros don't need to pay the fees and probably can't afford them anyway.
I wonder to what extent they get away with this because of literary fiction's historical disdain for "commercial" fiction?
But given how minimal my criteria for a market is, it is possibly distressing that I only walked away from what was quite a long list with three new magazines.
Market criteria:
It needs to pay something. This doesn't have to be a lot, although obviously I submit any given story to the ones that pay more before sending it to the ones that pay less. (Unless something was written for a specific call; then the call gets it first.)
It cannot violate Yog's Law. No reading fees, no fees for an expedited response, no "we also offer editorial feedback that we charge for."
That's it. That's all a magazine needs to land on my market list. And in genre land, violating Yog's Law means you're Probably A Scam, as you'll recall from my previous complaints about editors advertising their writing workshops on the backside. Literary magazines are apparently another world entirely: many of them charge submission fees and very few of them seem to pay writers. (Even some of the ones that charge writers don't pay them, which I was especially boggled by.)
And that has massive problems with the industry. It doesn't value writers-- it's functionally "write for exposure" in the unpaid ones and worse for the ones with reading fees-- and it shuts out any writer who can't afford the reading fees. Which is many of them-- when you have a reading fee you are pretty much only going to get the ones with some other income stream and probably mostly hobbyists; pros don't need to pay the fees and probably can't afford them anyway.
I wonder to what extent they get away with this because of literary fiction's historical disdain for "commercial" fiction?
