Last time in Get Real, Ellen Parker and I asked our panel of writers about The Money Factor. This time around, we posed the issue to editors. Although we would have loved to hear from a journal who charges reading fees, we understand the sensitive nature of the topic, and we appreciate and thank those editors who did respond. Their comments give us a peek into the operations of a literary journal, and the issues, they, as editors, face.

Question: As an editor, what is your policy for paying writers? If you pay writers, where do the funds come from? What is your policy for charging reading fees? Do you charge contest-entry fees? If so, what do you do with the money you receive from writers?

Mark Budman is the editor of Vestal Review magazine and the author of My Life at first Try. (Counterpoint, Winter 2008)

I think that every work has to be rewarded. It’s best when it’s done in cash, but sometimes recognition is more important. What constitutes recognition is a touchy subject in itself.

Vestal Review pays all authors in cash, copies and recognition. This is the best combination, so all grounds are covered.

There is no funding for Vestal Review rather than my own pockets. I have been doing this for almost eight years now.

I ran only one contest so far, and all the monies were paid as prizes.

Dave Clapper is the founding editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. He occasionally writes, most recently appearing in FRiGG Magazine and forthcoming in Per Contra.

My policy is that I’d love to pay writers, but it doesn’t make much sense to me to pay unless it’s a meaningful amount. Realistically, I could probably afford a thousand dollars out of my own pocket every year. That’d be tight, but I could do it. Since the web hosting we use runs a bit over $200 a year, that leaves $800. We publish up to 80 flashes per year. Do the math and that’s $10 a story. If I’m a writer and I get a check for $10, I sort of feel like, “Save it.” Even if we applied for, and received grants, the same money goes the same distance (and I’ve not yet found grants that would raise the pay to a meaningful level).

Also, as a writer, when I see places that do pay $10-$25 per flash, I sort of feel like they’re only doing so in order to qualify as “professional markets” in the various listings, and then run around touting their status at every opportunity. Professional what? Is there a flash writer out there making a living from it? I know I’ll probably get some flak for saying that (especially since a couple very specific markets leap to mind), but… sorry, that’s the way I feel. Unless a story is worth the cost of at least a fairly nice dinner, the money is borderline insulting.

The threshold, for me, is about $50. I can actually use $50 to do something nice for myself I wouldn’t have otherwise done. It’s enough to pay for a small celebration, y’know? At SmokeLong, we used to give $50 each to our favorite three stories each issue until my finances got insanely tight. I could see us doing something like that again, although I’d really rather be able to pay across the board than single people out. $50 a flash is $1,000 an issue, though. It adds up fast.

About reading fees… I hate ‘em. When we very first started out, we had only one staff member who’d ever worked on a literary magazine before (it was published by an MFA program, I believe). She insisted that people wouldn’t take us seriously unless we charged reading fees. So we set a policy that we’d charge, but that to get submissions rolling, reading fees would be waived for the first issue. I think the reading fee was set to be ten bucks(!). She kind of drifted away before we’d even put the first issue to bed, and another writer/editor broke down the math and demonstrated that we’d essentially be charging submitters about $100/hour to read their work. And we saw other models of magazines sans reading fees that were very well-respected. So we went with our original instincts and never did charge reading fees.

Even for contests, we don’t charge fees. We’ve been very blessed to have an anonymous donor for the Fish Fellowship. Another potential donor stepped forward recently to offer a prize for another contest. So we may have something else in the future besides the Fellowship. But except in cases where we have funding in place, we probably won’t do contests.

I’m loath to fund contests via entry fees for a couple reasons. As a writer, I don’t pay fees to be read, and it’d be hypocritical of me to expect others to pay me for the “privilege.” And there’s no way of knowing how many entries there will be and what the ratio of fees to prize will be—not enough entries means we’re short for prize money, and too many entries means we have a surplus (and what do we do with that? do we somehow deserve it?). How transparent is the process? If we’re collecting money from writers, I think they have every right to see what’s happening with the money. What’s the best way for us to do that? Taking in fees just introduces way too many layers of administration to make it worthwhile (at least if we were to do it in a way I felt was “right”). And the fact is that when it comes to handling monetary transactions, I personally am a lazy-ass, and writers deserve better than dealing with a lazy-ass.

I don’t mean to sound holier than thou, I really don’t. What’s right for us isn’t going to be right for everyone. But when I see a contest with a $6 entry fee and a $50 prize (and again, saying this is going to piss off a specific publication), it makes my eyes bleed.

Matt DiGangi is editor of Thieves Jargon.

I wish I could pay writers. I hate the idea of charging reading fees. We don’t run contests, probably because we don’t have good prizes, probably because I couldn’t bring myself to charge contest-entry fees. I’d be too worried nobody would enter the contest, and then there would be no money to pay out. Boy, that would look cheesy.

Vanessa Gebbie is a writer, editor and Creative Writing teacher.

I founded, own and edit a specialist ezine called Tom’s Voice. It is for writing from those trying to kick addiction in any form. And for anyone whose life has been touched by the addiction struggles of others.

I pay for the webspace. The name. A friend uploads the work I choose from open submissions, and charges me nothing. I am unable to pay.

I would like to, because many of my writers seriously need to know that they can do something to earn funds legitimately, as opposed to finding cash via breaking the law.

So, nope, I don’t/can’t pay.

I would not dream of charging a reading fee. These writers have trusted me with their feelings, their thoughts, their fears. Why on this earth would I make them pay to be listened to?

Feel strongly? You bet I do.

Steve Hansen has had limited success as a writer, having published stories over that last 10 years at FRiGG, The Danforth Review, The Paumanok Review and a few other online “reviews.” He currently spends his time and energy trying to meld the worlds of high finance, literature and comic books at www.tqrstories.com.

We pay $50 per published piece of fiction. The money comes from my bank account. I just think writers ought to be paid. I’m not ambitious our audacious enough (yet) to hold contests. As far as reading fees go, I don’t think we’d get any submissions if we tried going that route. Maybe years down the line when TQR is branded and gets hundreds of thousands of hits a day, then we’ll think about monetizing the whole enterprise in some fashion or other. Fantasizing about that later time, I’d use the money to pay the folks who volunteer their time and creative energy to not only read the work sent in, but create their own particular narratives as the quarters go by. TQR is, after all, a total quality reading experience wherein the fiction published by its contributors is complemented by the staff’s own publicly accessed serial. And, when that glorious day comes, I’ll use the money to improve the site, pay the contributors more, and then what’s left over, use for my own personal gain. I am in fact a capitalist, just not a very successful one at this moment. But things could change with time, who knows?

Steven J. McDermott is the editor of Storyglossia. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals and in his collection of stories Winter of Different Directions.

If Storyglossia had funding besides my checkbook I’d be happy to pay writers upon publication. Instead they get the permanent exposure that online publication provides. Reading fees are heinous. Contest entry fees are a bit more complicated. Part of me says that just as with paying for publication, if the journal had other funding I’d forego the entry fees and still pay a cash prize. But another part of me, the part that has competed in numerous sports and other events that all required an “at risk” entry fee, says that the entry fee is a necessary part of the competition. A hurdle. A threshold guardian. A test—a sacrifice–to prove you want it. I find it interesting that many writers balk at paying entry fees while still expecting a cash prize when that is not the norm for nearly all other types of competition.

So, yes, Storyglossia does charge an entry fee for it’s annual fiction prize contest. The entry fees are used to pay cash prizes to the finalists and to pay for the advertisements purchased to announce and promote the contest. I’d be happy if the contest broke-even—which it has yet to do—and would increase the prizes awarded if the entry fees were producing a surplus.

Stefani Nellen is a writer of literary fiction and science fiction. She co-edits the Steel City Review, an online quarterly that also publishes as annual print edition.

At Steel City Review, we can’t pay writers. Since we’re primarily an online magazine, we don’t have subscribers, we don’t run advertisements, and hence hardly have any income. The profit from selling the print edition is barely enough to cover the webhosting expenses!

Our payment is in exposure, and in loving preparation of the stories we publish. We’re small. I (Stefani) am okay with this, because I submit to non-paying places all the time. If I had to earn money, I wouldn’t write.

New Yorker Carol Novack is a former criminal defense/constitutional lawyer, the publisher of the multi-media collaborative e-journal Mad Hatters’ Review, a former grant recipient, and the author of a chapbook of poetry, a play, and several collaborative projects. Recent writings in print may or will be found in journals including American Letters & Commentary, First Intensity, Gargoyle, Fiction International, Journal of Experimental Fiction, Knock, LIT, Notre Dame Review, Salt Flats Annual, and in the anthology, Online Writings The Best of the First Years; links to online publications are accessible via Carol’s blog.

I can’t afford to pay writers or artists or musicians, unfortunately. I pay our webmistress/designer. But our writers get custom-made music and art, if they so desire, which, in my opinion, is worth more than the usual token payment provided by most journals that list themselves as paying markets. Writers may also opt to record recitations. They are delighted by the attention and respect we give to their writings.

We only charge $6 for our regular contests and we charge no reading fees. The little money we receive from writers, plus donations we receive, go toward paying our webmistress. A new video contest co-sponsored by Web Del Sol, plus a big benefit we’re organizing (May 4th at The Bowery Poetry Club, NYC) will, I hope, make it possible for me to continue paying our webmistress. If not, I may ultimately take some courses in HTML and produce the magazine myself.

Ellen Parker writes fiction and edits the online literary journal FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry.

FRiGG doesn’t pay writers. I wish we could—but I wouldn’t do it unless it was a sufficient amount. I’m not sure token amounts—like $10 per story—are very meaningful or beneficial to writers. But how much is “sufficient”? I think $50 per story would be an OK sum; $100 per story would be even better. But would this sum apply regardless of the story’s word count? Like, a 400-word story would get $50—and so would a 4,000-word story? And we often run more than one story by a fiction writer. So, if we run three short-short stories by a writer (less than 1,000 words each), would that writer get $50 per story, for a total of $150? But the writer of the 7,000-word story would get only $50? This becomes even more complicated when we take into account the poetry we feature. Would we pay $50 per poem? We have, in the past, run as many as 10 poems in an issue by one writer. Would that writer get $500?

What if we go strictly by word count? A poem does tend to have fewer words than a story does. So is one poem not worth as much as a story? Of course not.

If we started paying, I can also foresee bad feelings among writers. A writer might think, Hey, why was Dennis allowed to have five poems in this issue and I was allowed only three? He gets paid for five but I get paid for only three. Or say we paid each writer a flat sum regardless of how much of his or her work we ran. A writer could go, Hey, Patricia got the same amount of money I did—but she’s got three stories in the issue whereas I had seven.

Thinking about it gives me a headache.

Say we paid $50 for each story and poem that appeared in FRiGG. In any given issue, we might run as many as 50 poems and stories. That would be $2,500. For the year, it would be $10,000. There’s no way we could do this. The money behind FRiGG comes from my pocket.

Like I said, thinking about it gives me a headache.

We don’t charge reading fees. We’ve never had a contest. If we ever had a contest, I wouldn’t charge an entry fee because I don’t want to take money from writers. Right now, no money gets exchanged—except from my credit card to Yahoo, the Web host.

Probably I should try to get a grant so we could pay writers. I would really like to pay writers. But, again, this brings me ‘round to my original question: How much should we pay? Per story? Per poem? Per writer?

I think we would have to change our format so we ran only one story or poem per writer per issue. (We would still have the question, though, of how much to pay for a poem vs. how much to pay for a story.) But then the number of stories and poems featured in FRiGG would be drastically cut. Who does this benefit? No one.

Didi Wood’sstories have appeared in Vestal Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Night Train, and other print and online publications. She is an editor for flashquake, an online journal of flash literature.

I am one of six editors at flashquake. Authors published in flashquake receive payments ranging from $5 to $25, depending on the editors’ ranking of the works within the sections (fiction, nonfiction, poetry), and a contributor’s CD copy of the issue. Payments are privately funded.

flashquake does not charge reading fees - even for contests, which are also privately funded.


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