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writerkitI've been continuing to pick through lists of literary magazines, since a number of them express openness to all genres (and there's also long history of the literary world publishing speculative and then denying that it's speculative; just look at Handmaid's Tale or anything in "magical realism"). It continues to be another world-- the practice of charging for submissions is apparently incredibly common, always with that "it's not a reading fee, it's just that using Submittable is so expensive so we need to charge a service fee."
Y'all. It does not magically cease being a reading fee if you slap a fancy name on it. You are still making money off your writers. If Submittable is that expensive, take your submissions via email. But don't charge writers and call it a convenience. It's a convenience for you, not the writers, so you should be paying for it. ("Charging for submissions but not paying for publication" is also distressingly common. At that point you're just a vanity press, thank you very much. If all I want is to see my stories out there, I can do that for free right here. Or get a Tumblr or something.)
There were a lot of posts going around about how being published is so much easier than you think because the bench at most literary magazines is just a bunch of mediocre white cis men and there aren't many submissions so it's not that hard to stand out from the pack, therefore submit! And looking at it now I'm like "Well, yes, because who has the money to pay all these submission fees?" It's certainly not anyone from the sort of marginalized background that impacts their ability to have a well-paying day job.
Why am I still doing this? Because I have found a few new markets that are reasonable, and I have some short stories that are a bit too literary (quite heavy on the stylism) for your average SFF magazine to be willing to publish.
As a sidenote, I discussed this with my visual artist coworker and she was shocked that there exists a world where you don't have to regularly pay submission fees, and then she was very interested in how that works. I'm really starting to think this has to do with "commercial" fiction versus "High Art." Even the language is different-- literary magazines give you an "honorarium" and SFF magazines just pay you. There's a lot more direct acknowledgement that yes, the cash is part of the point.
Y'all. It does not magically cease being a reading fee if you slap a fancy name on it. You are still making money off your writers. If Submittable is that expensive, take your submissions via email. But don't charge writers and call it a convenience. It's a convenience for you, not the writers, so you should be paying for it. ("Charging for submissions but not paying for publication" is also distressingly common. At that point you're just a vanity press, thank you very much. If all I want is to see my stories out there, I can do that for free right here. Or get a Tumblr or something.)
There were a lot of posts going around about how being published is so much easier than you think because the bench at most literary magazines is just a bunch of mediocre white cis men and there aren't many submissions so it's not that hard to stand out from the pack, therefore submit! And looking at it now I'm like "Well, yes, because who has the money to pay all these submission fees?" It's certainly not anyone from the sort of marginalized background that impacts their ability to have a well-paying day job.
Why am I still doing this? Because I have found a few new markets that are reasonable, and I have some short stories that are a bit too literary (quite heavy on the stylism) for your average SFF magazine to be willing to publish.
As a sidenote, I discussed this with my visual artist coworker and she was shocked that there exists a world where you don't have to regularly pay submission fees, and then she was very interested in how that works. I'm really starting to think this has to do with "commercial" fiction versus "High Art." Even the language is different-- literary magazines give you an "honorarium" and SFF magazines just pay you. There's a lot more direct acknowledgement that yes, the cash is part of the point.
