The creative ways that literary journal editors try to take advantage of writers can sometimes be…astounding. A new literary journal recently approached Authors Publish, asking to be featured.
They seemed particularly proud of their “fee free” submissions.
The catch? You had to “win their lottery” in order for them to even read your submission. Otherwise, your submission goes straight into their trash.
Of course, if you were willing to pay, they’ll guarantee your submission will get read. The fee, according to their website, let them “Respect writers’ time by guaranteeing their story is seen.”
The message was clear: If you didn’t pay, then they’re not really respecting your time, are they?
After a few back-and-forth emails to them, they finally got the message, and got rid of their “lottery” and implemented free submissions, with a cap of one hundred submissions per week.
But, this begs the question: why did they think their lottery was a good idea in the first place?
Based on our interactions with them, it seems they believed that submission fees to literary journals are normal, and that their lottery was better than just charging a submission fee.
To be clear: Many, many literary journals and related organizations have worked very hard to make it seem normal to charge writers money for the privilege of having their work considered for publication. The creators of this new journal saw the normalization of submission fees, and genuinely thought they were doing the right thing by creating their unusual “lottery.”
In case you’re curious about how much money some literary journals make from submission fees, the numbers can be surprising. It’s not uncommon for an established journal to have an acceptance rate of one percent, while charging a $5 submission fee. That means they’re making $500 per poem they publish, many times not even paying authors a cent.
The situation is even more stark with contests, which often have much higher fees and much lower acceptance rates. For example, a recent contest charged over $15 and had over 1,000 entries. Do the math on that one!
More and more people have started to see literary journals as a way to extract money from authors, while actively blinding themselves to the idea that they’re trying to extract money from authors. This leads to very backwards situations, such as the one described above.
Fortunately, there are many opportunities to submit your writing without paying any submission fees at all — and without a bizarre lottery either.
Authors Publish is the only major newsletter that doesn’t include opportunities that require submission fees. We’re happy to keep providing you those opportunities in our newsletter, free of charge.
One more detail: Submittable, which got its start focused on helping literary journals manage their submissions, earned over $60 million in revenue in 2024, up 35% from the year before. The COO of Submittable has previously bragged about the tens of thousands of paid submissions his literary journals recieved each year. He sold them in a “private deal” in 2019.
Modest reading fees, say $3, to cover costs in a nonprofit journal seem OK, especially if its a paying market. When the fees become a revenue source, then it’s a big problem. A businesses like a literary journal should be making its money from customers (readers), not suppliers (writers).
I’ve been a voiceover talent for many years and agents/companies that represent talent have done this for years. If you pay the ‘modest fee’ of $200, you’ll get to be on the CD of approved talent that is pushed upon clients first. If you don’t pay, you don’t pay, unless the client happens to stumble upon your demo, which is just one of hundreds to wade through, essentially making it almost impossible to be heard by a client. Who’s got the time for that, right? So, this is a $$ making gimmick that sadly, has now shown up on the literary field. Quick bucks for no work on their part.
Yeah, exactly this. And timely too. Writers already bleed time, unpaid, pouring into drafts nobody asked for. Now journals want to run a casino on top of it? Pull the lever, maybe your poem gets eyeballed. Ridiculous. If you’ve got to build a slot machine just to justify reading slush, maybe you shouldn’t be running a journal in the first place.
The whole “we respect your time if you pay us” line is pure scam logic. Like airlines charging you extra to not get stuffed in the seat by the bathroom. They pretend it’s premium treatment, but really they’re just holding basic decency hostage. Same move here: cough up or get tossed in the bin unread.
And yeah, the money numbers are gross. Five bucks times thousands of submissions, 1% acceptance rate, zero payment to writers — basically an ATM disguised as “community building.” Meanwhile Submittable rakes in millions like they’re running the house at Vegas. Writers lose either way, but they keep calling it “opportunity.”
So thanks for calling it out. Lotteries, “processing fees,” whatever creative nonsense they invent next — it’s all the same hustle. If journals can’t survive without shaking down the people who create the actual content, maybe they don’t deserve to survive.
Free submissions should be the baseline. Anything else is just a tax on desperation.
It’s so disheartening to know that literary journals are part of the racket that’s already bleeding writers dry. Authors are already being gutted for their work and time in general, but adding short form opportunities is just extra sour. And it’s not as if the small fees aren’t understandable to a degree – how many of us have finally gotten a “yes” from a small opportunity and then waited over a year to see it actually published, only to learn that the journal or small press folded?
Someday publishing might function with an iota of professionalism instead of devouring its source of material. But it is not this day.
Obviously those thugs are there to cheat the young writers.Its their way of easy money, and they are around in every country!
I have zero issue with a modest fee $1 to $5. Most literary journals barely cover their costs, many lose money. A few dollars that goes toward offsetting the costs of Submittable and throttles the flood of submissions … Yeah, I have no issue with that. I have no doubt there are scammers out there though, but that is true everywhere.
I wrote my first short story at age 10, in sixth grade. Mr. O’Keefe told the class to take out a piece of paper and write until he said “Time’s up.” I was selected among others to read what I had written, which I did reluctantly. Then I promptly sat down. There was total silence in the class. It continued. I was puzzled. “Well, what happened next? Mr. O’Keefe asked me. “That’s all I wrote,” I answered. Mr. O’Keefe then told me to finish my story at home and read it to the class the next day, which I did. My teacher took my story home and Mrs. O’Keefe typed the story for me. I was confused and overwhelmed from the attention and didn’t write again for a long time.
Now writing is part of who I am. I have stories on my computer, I wrote just because. No one has seen them except my son. I have made one submission, with no reply. I am disappointed but okay about it. Now I don’t know if I should try again.
The business practices you describe feel like a slap in the face to the people who are emotionally committed to their craft and have made themselves vulnerable by submitting it to scrutiny. Sure we could “toughen up”, but then our work would be tough as well. What good is that? A little respect goes a long way. These editors on high need to show some.
What a great topic for writers to discuss! Creating a special poem, I am prepared to invest a small amount of money on it (“you deserve to go to the ball little poem” I’ll say). With AI chatbots swamping the literary pond, a SMALL fee is probably the only way to stop a tsunami of text being randomly submitted these days. Having said that, I’m still fizzing about the Submittable profit bragging info you’ve shared!
I don’t understand why people are blasting Submittable here? It is a company, not a charity!, providing a service that people obviously find useful enough to pay for. Not a single literary magazine is forced to use the platform, there are other ways to receive submissions, for example email is still free.
Having said that, I do agree with the general assertion of the article above. I also find submission fees egregious, especially when there is no payment for the authors at the same time and the majority of the people working for the magazine are volunteers.
But once again, as the author, I have the choice not to submit to magazines that charge any kinds of fees and/or do not pay for my work. Vote with your feet (or submissions). Bitching on the internet has never changed anything.
Appreciated the informative above article and other writers’ comments. Like another writer, I don’t mind a minimal fee (like under $5) for literary journals, especially if associated with higher ed. I was quite surprised at Submittable’s profit, even though I use it often since I like the easy-access record keeping of my submits.
Will not pay to submit under any circumstances any longer. I did at the onset of my submission journey, and it cost me a small fortune and so many publications never responded or took so much time (over two years to notify in some cases) that the value of the spend, even as little as $3, became a non-starter.
Insightful article with information that all serious writers should be mindful of IMHO. What annoys me most is that these swamy business management practices can foster cynicism. Most writers, and indeed most editors, really put a lot of heart into their work. Demoralizing scams like contests with high “pay to play” fees poison the well.
I only submit to contests. At 76, I enjoy the fight for “glory,”at a modest up to $10.00 fee when the prize is $1,000 or more. It motivates me to push on completing a high quality piece–makes me sweat to finish. 88I only submit to educational or well-known literary publications that most likely are making bubkis on the magazine. I like when the fee includes a subscription. Great marketing idea! As for Submittable, they are a business as noted. And, for good or bad, we are a capitalist country. I ask, how many of you continue to buy on Amazon when you can get the same item from the company’s own website and not give this billion dollar company more money?
You’re all talking in USD. I live in a country where the exchange rate is prohibitive and USD5 becomes a lot of money for the privilege of submitting for no return, which creates a further quandary for the struggling author. Just saying.
Submissions have always cost the writer something. When I first started submitting a batch of poems or a short story the process involved, first, actually creating the work on a yellow legal pad or spiral notebook age, revising same, rewriting on a clean page, and re-revising until you got it right. Then you would roll a crisp clean sheet of at least 20 pound bond into your typewriter ad clean typing your work. Without removing the page you would examine it for typos. If you found any, you would carefully roll the paper backwards through the typewriter until you could position a little white plastic sheet with white pigment on it over the offending typos, re-hit the key you mis-typed, then hit the proper key to correct the typo. Unless you had an IBM Selectric II with a self-correction ribbon, but the same process applied. Or you could just crumple the page up and start over with a fresh sheet of paper.
THEN you would type the address on an envelope large enough to contain the manuscript AND a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) with sufficient postage to ensure the return of the manuscript to you, then schlep to the Post Office before they closed and send it on its way; if you were lucky the manuscript page(s) would still be clean and unwrinkled enough you could reuse it without having to retype the whole thing.
All of this time and expense and bother helped keep the number of people who submitted their work anywhere to a reasonable number, made up of those who were actually dedicated to their craft and willing to do the work that submitting a manuscript entailed. Those who were not as committed, or who were mere dilettantes, tended NOT to want to do anything laborious, but enjoyed claiming that they were writers.
Publications received a very small and easily manageable number of submissions, all from individuals who had put in the work that showed they were serious about being a writer; editors would hope that those who submitted had been as serious about polishing their craft as well.
Now it takes nothing to send your first draft off to hundreds of places at once, because anything that comes out of the creative person’s brain and the finishing of which provides that endorphin rush of “feel good” means it must be perfect already so why not send it out without proofreading it?
From the editor’s perspective, I think, a fee will induce the writer who is considering submitting to decide whether or not the shotgun approach to multiple-submitting makes economic sense for them, and may also prompt them to take a look at their “finished” first/second/third daft to see if it really is finished before they make that investment.
Basically the fee becomes a filter to keep down the sheer volume of submissions, replacing the earlier filter of time and effort and dedication which kept the number of submissions down to what a staff of a couple of interns could have done, and the speed of responses is in part because the volume of submissions today is nonetheless probably 100 times greater than it was fifty years ago, and can no longer be handled by a couple of interns, but by a platoon of graduate students interning a couple of days a week.
Sadly, this whole fee-for-submitting thing privileges those who can economically afford it. I am glad to see that more and more publications are offering needs-based fee-free submissions option.
You pay to play, put away your pen for another day. Here’s the tip off when they crave your cash it’s a rip-off.
I’ve come across several journals that offer free submission but for a small fee of $3 you can get reader feedback. It’s better than a form rejection but the feedback is rarely useful (e.g. “I couldn’t get into it,” “The middle was boring.” “I didn’t understand the character arc.”). For a larger fee you can get editor feedback. Not sure if this helps you get remembered but for $20 the cost adds up.