![]() ![]() With hundreds of exhibitors, AWP’s bookfair is the nation’s largest marketplace for literary journals, presses, and arts organizations, and socializing there in person provides payoffs that solitary web research may not. Although attendance can be pricey, the AWP Annual Conference & Book Fair offers a wealth of resources and information. Attend literary events and ask writers where they submit, then see if your tastes match. Browsing the lit mag shelves and Googling individual submission guidelines is effective but exhausting, so try crowdsourcing recommendations on social media. Although it doesn’t separate paying from nonpaying, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’ directory is a helpful place to begin.ĭatabases are a good place to start your search, but the best resource writers have is one another. The Poets & Writers Literary Magazines database provides listings for nearly a thousand publications, with filters for payment and genre. Granted, some pay ten bucks, but ten bucks is ten bucks. A quick search reveals that roughly one third of the 666 pubs in its database pay writers. Chill Subs gathers well-known outlets alongside new, small publications. The pioneering crowdsourced Who Pays Writers? mixes literary magazines with freelance outlets and empowers writers with details about rates and payment issues, such as how long the money takes to arrive. You can start with databases, though there are surprisingly few. Most of us have to earn a living somehow, and for some writers the idea of giving your work to a publisher for free-even if that publisher is a small, under-resourced yet popular literary magazine-is a nonstarter. Still, “good reasons” don’t matter much when you’re financially strapped. There are many ways to write for money-content marketing, copywriting, journalism, technical writing-but for writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, there may be good reasons to write free of charge. Few writers, however, can live off such small, inconsistent payments, and I would argue you shouldn’t try to do so. One way to start building a platform and reaching readers is through publication in literary magazines. Conventional wisdom says that if you want to sell a book to a traditional publisher, you’ll benefit from first building a platform as an author known for working in particular topics or genres. That calculation might be different at different times in your life, based on your existing income, and your ideas about the value of writing and the less quantifiable value of publishing, such as reaching readers and building a writing résumé. As a writer who wants to be published, you’ll have to decide whether compensation determines the value of your writing or if you prefer to avoid mixing creativity and money, period. While a few literary magazines pay contributors-as much as five hundred to a thousand dollars for prose-most pay between fifty and a few hundred dollars for literary essays, poetry, and fiction, work that takes months to create. I’ve been paid more by commercial magazines for some of my reported pieces than any of my book advances. I’ve been paid five dollars and over a thousand dollars for essays and have given many more away. It’s a start.ĭuring the approximately twenty years I’ve been writing seriously, I’ve published books, a chapbook, personal essays, cultural criticism, reportage, photos, and interviews, and I’ve been a magazine editor, all while working retail and other jobs. Thankfully more literary magazines have found ways to pay contributors, and some waive submission fees to writers who cannot afford them. It’s a travesty that money and privilege determine who is heard, because some of the most vital, pressing stories are told by people with the least power and fewest resources to tell them. ![]() By paying so little, literary publishing is set up to reward the economically privileged who can afford to give work away, and that setup needs to change. That so many writers are expected to do so embodies one of the central inequities in publishing. Let’s be clear: It is a privilege to be able to write without compensation. But when it comes to getting paid for our literary labors, transparency empowers everyone. ![]() ![]() Maybe it’s because there’s so little money in writing, because commerce can muddy art, or because money often seems a private matter. Writers tend to be uncomfortable talking about money. ![]()
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