There are a lot of literary magazines that include a reader fee as part of the submission process–so as you prepare to send them your manuscript (your baby!), you must also decide if you will send these magazines payments through PayPal.

To be honest, I hate this idea.

I understand that some literary magazines need the money to pay their staff. (We are coming out of a recession, after all.) But I doubt this much needed cash should come at the expense of the struggling writer.

There’s enough difficulty in getting our work read by editors, let alone getting it actually published. Paying for the privilege seems ridiculous. And expensive.

Like playing the lottery, we’re gambling that editors will like our work as much as we do. Since magazines will rarely pay the writer enough to compensate for all of these reader fees, if we’re lucky enough, we’ll walk away with a publishing credit and two contributor copies.

The good news is that there are plenty of reputable literary magazines that continue to accept fiction submissions for free. Some will even pay you upon publishing your work. I highly recommend sending work to these magazines.

On a side note, most literary magazines sponsor annual contests. These will almost always involve a contest fee. Most fall between $5 to $25, and some will include a one-year subscription to the magazine. If you must pay for someone to read your work, these are the better bet. Upon publication, some magazines will even send your work to several agencies as an additional bonus.

In 2007, I submitted two short stories to a few contests. At that time, everything had to be sent in as hard copies, which meant a lot of paper and ink. And I wrote checks that totaled a couple hundred dollars in contest fees. Well, I was rejected by all of the magazines except one, the most prestigious of the bunch: Zoetrope: All Story. The Editor, Michael Ray, contacted me by email to tell me that Joyce Carol Oates had selected my short story to win Third Prize out of over 2,000 submissions!

Though the contest results were later published in the magazine, only the first-prize-winning story was published on their online companion site. So after all the dust had settled, I still did not have the story published, and the money only compensated for all of my expenses in the first place.

If I were you, I would still write my heart out, but I would also approach any of these fees with trepidation.

What do you think?

Photo credit: aaronmcintyrephotography / Foter / CC BY