Submission Fees for Literary Journals: An Academic's Perspective

Earlier this year, The Offing magazine was launched as a spin-off of the Los Angeles Review of Books (you can find it here). The launch attracted a great deal of interest including a write up in the Washington Post by Ron Charles: Who really needs another literary journal?

Not long after launching, but after receiving 1000 submissions in one week, The Offing announced that it would charge a $3 submission fee to prospective authors. The fee would be waived for paper submissions, as well as on a regular schedule throughout the year, so that authors could avoid paying the fee in various ways. Nonetheless, the decision attracted a large amount of criticism (Lincoln Michel provides a good survey in Is it Time for Literary Magazines to Rethink Slush?)

Perhaps most vocally, author Nick Mamatas got into a long twitter debate on the subject that has been storified. Mamatas's argument is essentially that this is a scam (or like a scam) in which aspiring authors are charged and the resulting money used to pay for work by established authors. The aspiring authors who pay, on the other hand, will typically get nothing (giving that publication rates from the slushpile are typically very low).

As Mamatas summarizes it, somewhat uncharitably, in his blog post here, the view from The Offing seems to come down to this:

1. editors work on a volunteer basis for free, thus writers must pay.
2. Submittable and web space and other elements of running a magazine cost money, thus writers must pay.
3. Audiences cannot or should not or will not pay, thus writers must pay.
4. Various fund-raising techniques can only be used partially and casually—they will not function systemically in a lit journal context—thus writers must pay.
5. Our projects are designed to publish writers from marginalized demographics, thus writers must pay.
6. Lit journals exist outside the market, thus writers must pay.
7. Lit journals are victims of capitalism, thus writers must pay.

The response by The Offing is that they need to raise revenue to pay for overhead and to compensate authors for submissions. Until reader contributions and advertising sales grow, the submission charges will carry some of this burden (authors will initially be only paid $20, less the submission fee, with the hope of later raising it to $100).

Other authors jumped to defend the submission fee model. Nathaniel Tower gives 5 Reasons Why Submission Fees Really Aren’t the Scourge of the Publishing World (each reason is followed by my summary of his argument)

1. Submissions have never really been free. Traditionally, authors had to print submissions, put them in envelopes, affix postage to the envelopes, and place a SASE inside the envelope. Therefore, charging a submission fee means nothing has really changed as far as expenses that authors must pay.
2. Submission fees keep writers in check. Too many writers submit stories that just aren’t ready to be submitted. Too many writers spam out their stories without paying attention to submission guidelines. The writer knows to make every submission count. $3 is too much to spend on crap.
3. It reduces the workload for overworked lit mag editors For the most part, lit mag editors are volunteers. Of course, that’s their choice so we needn’t pity them. Turnover is pretty high in the slush reading industry. Why? Because many of these volunteers quickly get tired of reading tons of stories that have no business being submitted. A submission fee weeds out these bad stories. When there’s no risk involved, everyone thinks they should send out their stories. This leads to many grumpy editors who have to read far more (and far worse) work than they should.
4. There’s almost always a free option. Almost every magazine that charges fees for online submissions also provides some “free” alternative. Whether it be an open reading period a couple times a year or the option to snail mail your submission, there’s usually a way for you to get a story to that publication without giving money directly to the magazine. If you don’t want to pay, you don’t have to.
5. Submission fees can help a magazine exist. There are many ways to pay the operating costs of a literary magazine. It’s important for writers to understand that lit mags cost money. There are domain fees, hosting fees, submission manager fees, marketing/promotional fees, printing fees, etc. It can really add up. Most lit mags are not profitable. Yes, this is the choice of the editors. But there needs to be some funding to back it up. That money can come from a variety of places: the pockets of the editors, subscription fees, ad space, donations, book sales, crowdfunding, or even submission fees.

Coming from academia, where almost every journal has a submission fee (or requires that you purchase membership in some society in order to be able to submit), and having worked on the editorial boards of five major academic journals, I was a little bit surprised by this backlash. As Tower points out, and my experience confirms, submission fees are very helpful in reducing the number of junk submissions. They also help pay referees to give informed opinions on papers. Unlike Tower's claim, I do not know that they do much to make authors polish their work to a shine before submitting; the fact that, once rejected a paper is typically not considered for resubmission tends to act as an incentive to make it the best you can the first time you submit. But overall they do help make an editors job manageable.

Of course, things are different in academia (or at least my slice of it). For one thing, our employers often pay for our submissions. But perhaps the biggest difference is that, at least traditionally, all papers receive referee reports from experts in the field (there has been a recent tendency for editors to "desk reject" a paper without a referee report, but in this case the submission fee is typically refunded). Some of these referees are more expert than others, and some do a better job than others, but a good editor makes sure that they have at least read the paper and given some thought to the comments. In some cases, good referees provide many tens of pages of comments and contribute immensely to making a paper better. Most academics will gladly pay for anything approaching this kind of feedback.

Which begs the question: could we make this kind of a system work for a SFF magazine?

That is, could we construct a business model for a SFF (or indeed, a literary) magazine in which all submissions received feedback from a selected group of referees and associate editors in return for a significant submission fee? The fact that there are many courses for aspiring writers that appear to be well subscribed suggests to me that many aspiring writers would be glad to pay for good criticism of their work. And if media reports of low author incomes are to be believed, many authors might welcome another potential source of income (even if it is only modest).

Could it work? It all depends on whether we can make the sums add-up correctly, and the truth is that I do not know if it can be done. For all my experience on the editorial board of academic journals, I know little of the business side of them. And I simply do not know enough about the market for genre journals to know the cost structures they face or the size of the potential market. Nonetheless, I thought it might be useful to do some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations to see if we could make it work. Corrections and clarifications from anyone who knows more about these issues than I do would be very much welcomed!

Suppose the journal set out to publish roughly 500,000 words per year and is published monthly. At something close to 10 cents per word, this means $50,000 of payments to authors per year. Throw in another $10,000 per year for artwork, website hosting, and hiring some administrative support (but assuming that a lot of other administrative time was donated).

How much of this would be paid for by subscriptions and advertising? Most of these journals seem to retail for about $2 to $3 per issue, with discounts for annual subscriptions. How many subscribers could the journal get? I found it hard to get subscriber information (although I did not devote much time to it). Clarkesworld claims that it is read by 35,000 fans per month. I expect many of these readers do not pay and in any case it would be impossible to get this kind of readership base initially.  Let's say the paying subscribers come to 5,000 (after a few years of publication) and the magazine gets $1 (net of fees) per paying subscriber per month. That comes to $60,000 in revenue, which covers the costs above. Anything raised from advertising could go towards covering other costs I have not mentioned, and amortizing the initial set-up costs which include subsidizing the magazine during its initial years when subscribership is low, website set-up, advertising etc etc etc. If the journal was only released online there would be no printing costs and fewer distribution costs.

That leaves the submission fee and compensation for editors and "referees". Suppose we set the submission fee to $100, with discounts available to people living in middle income countries ($50 fee) and low income countries (no fee), as well as to registered full-time students ($50 fee) and subscribers (fee reduced by cost of annual subscription). The fee would be refunded if the story is accepted.

No doubt this seems like a large sum, although it is modest by academic standards. In my field,
The Journal of Finance charges $250 for non-members of the American Finance Association, and $200 for members, if the member lives in a high income country. These fees are reduced for residents of middle income countries to $150 and $100 respectively, and to zero for residents of low income countries. The Journal of Monetary Economics charges $250, reduced to $150 for full time students. The American Economic Review charges $100 for members of the American Economic Association, $200 for non-members, with residents of middle and low income countries eligible for half or zero fees respectively. Econometrica only accept submissions from members of the Econometric Society. The Journal of Political Economy charges $125 for non-subscribers and $75 for subscribers.

Suppose each referee was paid $80 to write a report at least one page long (longer at the discretion of the "referee" writing the report). If we think it should take about 2 hours to read enough of a submission to decide on whether it is publishable and to write up a one page report explaining why, this amounts to a wage of $40 per hour (less if the referee is slower at these things, or if they are inspired to write more). If a referee wrote 20 reports per year that is $1,600 in additional income to them for about one weeks work spread throughout the year.

How many submissions would the journal get at that price? I have no idea. Suppose there were 400 per year each averaging 10,000 words in length. 50 would be accepted per year which is a pretty high acceptance rate. With fees for accepted papers refunded, that means that net of referee costs there would be about $7,000 in additional revenue to cover the cost of (partially) waiving the submission fee for some submitters, as well as to contribute to covering the many other costs that I have no doubt neglected to include in the calculations.

I have no idea if these numbers are reasonable, but I expect that they are not too unreasonable. If that is correct, then it may be possible to make such a magazine work.  If I was going to run it (and I am not volunteering to do so) I would seek to get 20 established authors to add their names to an editorial board with a commitment to read 20 stories each per year (if there are enough submissions). If my understanding of author incomes is correct, $1,600 in extra income might be appealing to some midlist authors. And given the large number of aspiring writers prepared to spend money and time to attend writing workshops, I imagine there would be some who would pay $100 for this kind of feedback about their writing.

Based on these calculations, I conclude that it might just be possible. Comments, corrections, clarifications, and volunteers to do all this work would be most welcome!

EDIT: An updated and, I think, more accurate version of these calculations, is available at The Market for Short SFF: Could The Academic Model Work?