Online poetry submission fee kerfuffle
C. Dale had alluded to NER charging earlier in the summer when he posted a poll on his blog asking what readers would be willing to pay for online submissions. The majority said they would not pay. I was one of them. Since then, I've had a change of heart. Here's why.
I consider the post office one of the seventh circles of hell. Even getting in the parking lot to buy stamps at a machine in the lobby, which may or may not be working, is nightmarish. I hate the post office so much that I set up an account at a small business center up the street from my apartment to handle all my mailing with no fuss or muss. The couple of extra cents they add to stamps or extra dollar or two they add to box up my packages -- especially when I was doing the publicity for Conquering Venus -- is money well-spent. It's not only saved timed, but my sanity.
So, I was thinking about this yesterday when I was taking my old word processor disks over to the business center for them to package and mail. I had emailed the address and packing instructions earlier, so all I had to do was walk in and hand the disks to the person at the counter. If I'm willing to pay for this service, why should I blanch at paying $2 to submit some poems to a magazine? Paying for paper, printer ink, envelopes and stamps surely adds up to more than $2. The convenience of submitting online from the comfort of my own home is most definitely worth $2. Poet Stacey Lynn Brown said we should consider it "e-postage." I like that.
The thing is that both NER and Ploughshares still accept snail mail submissions absolutely free, so some of the folks freaking out about this affront to the literary world seem to be overreacting. Steve Fellner described this new practice as "creepy," which seems more like a headline grabber than an honest critique of the situation. Fellner argues that graduate students will suffer the most from the $2 or $3 online charge, but since we're talking about a handful of journals, it seems like an overinflated argument. Those poor graduate students will be schlepping over to the post office to buy stamps, which ranges from $4.40 for a book of 10 to $8.80 for a book of 20. You can do the math on this, and be sure to add the stamp that must be affixed to the SASE.
What I found even more interesting were some of the comments under Steve's post. One commenter says that the argument about the cost of stamps is irrelevant, because the journals are essentially charging a "reading fee" and that postage is just assuring delivery. I made a comment that I'd rather pay $2 on a submission to a good journal than pay $25 to enter the contest lottery and that more and more poets were turning to self-publishing and online journals. Some anonymous commenter said my logic was skewed and that online journals were second-rate venues with bad editing and bad poets seeking "instant gratification and self-justification." This anonymous person also said they would never lower themselves to publishing online. It's a well-known print journal or nothing. With that attitude, I sincerely hope it's nothing for this moron. Sadly, this elitist snobbery is still widely prevalent in the poetry world. Somehow, the poetry just isn't good enough if it isn't in ink on a printed page.
For shits and giggles, let's pretend that American Poetry Review, Paris Review and Kenyon Review announced they were going online because a print journal was too costly to produce. Would those journals suddenly become second-tier? What if they charged an online subscription fee and/or a $2 submission fee to keep their editorial staff intact? Would you still submit? In the very near future, you may not have a choice.
For shits and giggles, let's pretend that American Poetry Review, Paris Review and Kenyon Review announced they were going online because a print journal was too costly to produce. Would those journals suddenly become second-tier? What if they charged an online subscription fee and/or a $2 submission fee to keep their editorial staff intact? Would you still submit? In the very near future, you may not have a choice.
The fact is that the next generation has very little use for physical books or magazines -- and that goes double for poetry journals. They want their books online, on their iPhone or their Kindle. Just last month, Amazon reported that the purchase of ebooks surged past those of traditional hardbacks. If that trend continues, books, magazines, journals and newspapers will be online only. And if that doesn't work for you, anonymous poet, where are you going to publish?
The fact is that there are many fantastic online literary magazines. A few that instantly come to mind are Boxcar Poetry Review, qarrtsiluni, MiPOesias, Hobble Creek Review, The Pedestal, The Cortland Review, 2River, LOCUSPOINT, Barn Owl Review and Blue Fifth Review. They don't accept every poem that comes over the transom and the work they are publishing is usually better than what's appearing in the "important" print journals. Slagging these journals off because they don't meet your prestige-o-meter is ignorant and incredibly shortsighted. Poets getting their panties in a wad over $2 online submission fees to the print journals they uphold as the last bastions of "real poetry" are hypocrites.
Poets, get your heads out of the sand. The times they are a-changin'...
Poets, get your heads out of the sand. The times they are a-changin'...
Comments
i've not yet reached a conclusion on paying to submit online. I must not think it's a terrible idea, because i still occasionally enter contests for which there is a reading fee.
Yes, those are all good online journals. There are so many for folks to explore.
Paper ebb. I'm in denial,
but that doesn't stop it. I talked
with an editor. I was in an event
for a lush online with POD paper.
Awesome. But POD is a big purchase
price. She said...just the authors
bought. That was 2 yrs ago.
Now, the lush onlines have killer
load and page times. I want a fast
page B+W or Lanczos-sharpened jpg
format.
When calculators came, slide rules
got exotic. Bought 5 years. When
digital watches came...well, you
remember pocket-watch nostalgia.
That has a boomlet even today.
My daughter has 3. "Steam punk"
is a huge thing with the kids.
Makes me wonder about a
"paper nostalgia" journal format.
Not cardboard-thick decorated
pages...yuck. But, a thin opaque
quality paper with hand.
Leatherette, intaglio-look BW art.
Class, for the Jls. I keep on the
shelf. Stiff pages are getting
me down. I hate cracking backs.
Just pondering outside the
box. The shrinking box. Style.
Paper Jl. production is a killer
as is, esp. with color. Hmmm..
Meanwhile, fees can and will
produce shock, but it will fade.
It's part of bigger issues.
Fulcrum went giant-thick-paper.
Huge poem count. It was phone
book, though.
--Jilly
If only we could get more of the nonpoetry writing world to buy journals/poetry, even if on Kindle.
Sorry I've been so long away from your blog, Collin. Not much on mine for a while, either.
i agree that the bias towards print is kind of ridiculous, but it's one that probably won't disappear in much of the (submitting) public's minds. when i started writing, there was no internet to speak of, and when you dream about publishing, it's in a magazine or between the covers of a book.
i'm sure that when printing presses became widespread or even when poetry was read on hand-written scrolls, there was a lot of hand wringing how traveling poets would be put out of business, and that would be the last time anybody heard of homer, because he was meant to be spoken, not read.
in 20 years -- maybe less -- this argument will probably be moot, since we'll be using ipads or whatever technology uproots it to read most of our poetry, news, novels, etc. more important, the young 'uns won't know any better. they'll just assume online publications are just as august as print, because the few left that are exclusively print will be dying.
If those 1st tier mags went online, their production costs would reduce tremendously--no paper, binding, printing, posting--and the need to charge would be unneccessary. When you pay a local mail service or the post office (you can also print stamps and order them online to be sent to you) the difference is that nobody is reading the contents of your mail, just ensuring that it reaches its destination safely. You may want to support these magazines and that is well and good. Give them a donation, and buy a subscription for yourself, and gift subscriptions for others, such as nonwriters.
As I said before, there are snobs out there who only feel like they've accomplished poetry greatness once they appear in a well-known journal. They don't care how many people read it as long as they can include the journal's name in their cv and acknowledgment page for their collection.
The truth is, none of know if this pay-to-submit model will work. Time will tell.
As for the idea that print is going away, that won’t happen anytime soon. Yes, e-books are on the rise, but the truth is less than 5% of the population use e-readers. The readers themselves are still expensive for a large part of the population. Until journals and newspapers figure out how to adapt a subscription model that works--and how to format poems for small screens--print is still king.
The difference is: when you pay the business center for their services, you can expect that they will in fact mail the stuff. You aren't going to get a form rejection slip from them, "Thank you for submitting this task to us. Unfortunately it does not meet our needs at this time."
On the other hand, when you pay for the privilege of submitting poems, maybe the magazine will publish them, maybe not; either way it costs $3.00 or whatever the fee is.
In that sense, purely considered as a question of how much money it costs, yeah, it's not really different from paying the post office to mail a paper submission. I've been doing that for decades, and never have had a problem with the idea of doing it. And I don't submit poems in large quantities, so a submission fee here and there wouldn't be a hardship for me.
But if I'm going to have to pay just for the possibility of getting a rejection slip, then it might make more sense for me to skip submitting to magazines entirely, and just self-publish. (I said more about this in the comment box in C. Dale's blogpost, and won't repeat it all here.)
If online magazines start becoming available online only by subscription (essentially replicating that part of the print model), fair enough, have to find the funding somewhere. Then, for me, it likely will become the same as with print magazines -- I subscribe to a few, and check out a few others from time to time, and I leave most magazines alone most of the time. There are only so many hours in a day.
One of the surpassing advantages of submitting by e-mail is that it costs less than submitting by paper (at least theoretically -- of course, you have to have a computer somehow or other, and that might cost money, but...). If magazines start charging for submissions, that will essentially neutralize the advantage of submitting by e-mail.
Just to be clear, I have no problem with publishing online as such -- the online magazine Pemmican (formerly a print annual, now entirely online) is the magazine that has published me the most times, and I'm delighted to have some poems available online there.
No solid conclusions to my thinking about this right now. Right now mostly just questions, some of which I've maybe asked in the muddle of what I've said here.
Thanks for posting this.
Getting late, maybe I'll come back and try again. In any case, enjoyed the discussion here. I also was one of the commenters on C. Dale's blogpost on the subject.
Thanks for posting this.
The good thing about the move to online publishing is that books-as-art -- letter press, etc., with a high degree of publishing and artistic integrity -- will take on even more importance, and perhaps will even sell more. They won't become obsolete, only more precious.
Thanks for an excellent post, Collin!
I'm at a point in my life that I value my time more than anything else and if it costs a couple extra bucks to streamline something so I can work on other projects, it's worth it. Not to mention, I think NER and Ploughshares are good journals and if it helps keeps the lights on, then I'm okay with. They're being open and transparent about their economic woes, so the fee is not arbitrary.
And now for a brief shill -- some posters may be interested in attending this roundtable at AWP in February:
Hands On: A Conversation about DIY and Craft Culture in a Digital World
Liz Ahl, Jennifer Flescher, Timothy Schaffert, Kathryn Bursick, Betsy Wheeler, Mathias Svalina
Given the efficiency-driven digital world, why does handcraft survive? Why are there still books? What does lead type offer us in 2010 that differs from what it offered Whitman when he set Leaves of Grass? What does the cut and paste 'zine have to say to the hand-set broadside? How are the digital and the handmade cooperative or symbiotic? What can handcraft offer us about learning, reading and writing? Session participants’ experiences as writers, publishers, and teachers inform their answers.
I don't submit in high volume, so the cost of paying a submission fee wouldn't be a hardship for me. The question that comes to the forefront for me is, do I really want to pay for the privilege of receiving a rejection slip?
Yes, paper mail costs money for postage. (It's not the magazine that charges for the postage, but anyway.) One of the advantages of submitting by e-mail is that it doesn't cost anything (actually, you do have to have a computer, and internet access, but...), or at any rate it doesn't cost money per submission. If magazines start charging submission fees for e-mail submissions, one of the advantages of e-mail submission disappears.
One of the great advantages of publishing poetry online is that it has the potential of finding many more readers than if it's available only in print. However if poetry magazines start becoming available online only by subscription, I suspect that will reduce the readership of many magazines. I know that I would read much less poetry online if I could only get at it by paying for a subscription.
I currently subscribe to a half dozen print literary magazines, which is about typical at any given time over the years. And there have been a few others that I would buy single issues of, when they had something that interested me. That was when literary magazines were more widely available in bookstores.
When I commented in C. Dale's post on this topic, I talked mostly about self-publishing as an alternative. I've had the luck to find a print publisher who has published multiple books of mine, though if that weren't available I would totally be self-publishing, in print for sure, and probably online too, though for now print is still a priority for me.
A large part of this is an aesthetic choice -- the kind of poetry I like to read tends to work better, I think, in print than it does online. The internet is a "noisier" medium than print -- when I read poems online, it's harder to hear the silence around the poems (the silence which is often a part of the working of a poem).
I'm not at all opposed to publishing on line as such, I have poems published online, I have a blog, etc. My favorite poetry magazine, Pemmican, was a print annual for several years and is now entirely online.
Not pretending to anything organized or coherent in what I've said here, just what's bubbling to the top as I'm thinking about it here.
Again thanks for posting this.