Re: Download Becky G Can't Get Enough
Lora Ceasor
In my most recent interview with Whitney Koo, Editor of Gasher, I joked that editors sometimes describe Submittable as the lit mag mafia. (I want to give props here to Whitney, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that submissions to her magazine always remain free.)
I know that many editors are frustrated with or cannot afford the platform. For these reasons, some never stopped using simple email submissions. Others are migrating to Duosoma. Others continue to use Submission Manager.
What we have, then, is a curious little situation: a bunch of people with not very much money doing a ton of work, and then paying in order to sustain a company that has raised over $60 million, which is itself sharing its profits with companies that also fundraise for millions of dollars.
What I would like to understand here is how Submittable works on the editorial end. I think a whole lot of writers would also like to know why, exactly, they are being charged fees in order to have their work considered by magazines.
Submittable costs my magazine $1500 a year, just for our subscription. That is a huge part of our magazine's budget. When we started, ten years ago, it was few hundred. On top of that, they take .99 plus 5% of every penny we take in through Submittable. They pay us through PayPal, which takes another cut. It's incredibly expensive and they house 10 years of our archives. They recently updated their platform which forced a lot of changes that make it more difficult for us to use it (but must be useful to their enterprise-level clients). There are a ton of features that are locked to us because we have a lower-level membership. Why do we stay? It's pretty much baked into the way we operate (many editors can view and comment together on a manuscript, and message one another on the back end; we can also carry on conversations with the writers and accept revisions and other uploads, such as bios and photos for publication, etc.) We will probably eventually leave but we need a product in place that can offer much of what Submittable does at a lower cost.
Submittable is moving toward becoming a profitable company, as Becky pointed out re: series A funding. They have venture capital who will be interested in making money when Submittable goes public etc. However, Karen Rile, if you run a magazine you should become a member of CLMP. Members of CLMP are grandfathered in to a lower pricing structure. The CLMP membership comes with a fee, starting at around $125 per year for small organizations. Submittable costs "only" $350 or something in that arena with proof of CLMP membership. This was a big deal when the new CEO took over and Submittable changed its pricing structure and Submission Manager sort of left the arena (they no longer service their product and decoupled from CLMP who had vouched for SM and provided the clients at a very affordable one time fee, in addition to the CLMP membership). Short of it is you can get submittable cheaply (though not as cheap as when they started). Regarding submissions costing, while this has created a burden for writers to an extent, it also creates more opportunities for writers since more lit lags are able to function by virtue of charging nominal fees. So long as the lit mags due their part and select from their submission pools and do no solicit big names and do not insert their friends and colleagues and continue to pay out something (whether it's subscriptions, copies, or cash) the new economy can be viewed as positive. Certainly, however, there are issues with big magazines who are fully funded nonprofits either through foundations or by attached universities should tread very lightly in terms of charging for submissions...that seems a bit like it's taking advantage, especially since these established venues are quite selective and can sometimes be elitist. Perhaps a simple rule of thumb ought be, if you already take PUBLIC money to fund your enterprise, you oughtn't charge sub fees. If you're a bootstrapping new mag who needs the funds to survive, then by all means, you're providing a service to the community by any measure (as long as no behind the scenes dealing), and the community ought support via fees. That seams like a fair exchange.
Since the developer of Submission Manager makes the software available for free. (See =software) It seems not to have the bells and whistles of Submittable but I am curious why even a few more litmags don't use it.
One other observation: in past years, when we had a glitch, often a software issue on their end, their support staff would answer promptly. They are now no longer available on weekends or evenings (which is exactly when most of us, who have day jobs, do our Submittable-based work.) The last time we had an emergency, which was related to their (to us) user-unfriendly platform update, they never even responded to my email ticket. I don't think they are interested in small magazines anymore--they are chasing large clients like universities and foundations. A few years ago a rep even said to me, "We still care about the small magazines like yours who were there when we started." I knew that was a bad sign...
Thanks for these insights, Karen. And yes, it looks like they got a new CEO in 2020. I remember meeting the original founder, Michael Fitzgerald, at AWP. He was really nice, approachable and seemed interested in being accessible. With the new CEO it looks like they have sought to expand well beyond lit mags.
Isn't this part of a bigger issue, though? That writing used to be for an audience of readers but now is often for an audience of other writers? We pay to get read by other writers in the lit world, which almost feels like a vanity fee. I know of no one outside of other writers who read lit mags or small press chapbooks, etc. This not only results in writers getting paid little to nothing, it often results in a stylistic echo chamber. I think we have to start brainstorming entirely new systems.
I think submission fees actively cut against a healthy and diverse literary ecosystem. There's no pressure on magazines to sustain themselves by finding an audience or identifying new, interesting niche markets to cater to. They don't have to cater to readers at all, because funding is coming from submission fees.
Is there any other art form that props itself up this way? Record labels that survive by charging musicians, or film/TV studios that charge their directors and actors? By creating revenue models driven by submission fees, lit mags have essentially excused themselves from the actual hard work of curating excellent content that readers will pay for.
The explosion of paid Substack newsletters is evidence that readers are out there for all kinds of extremely niche and diverse forms of writing. Those readers were not being reached or served by literary journals, and those journals have absolutely no incentive to do so as long as they make money off of writers instead of by cultivating an actual audience.
I get it about most literary magazines being volunteer efforts. And writers who wish to support magazines are free to do so. But many journals that charge fees do not pay writers. I would argue that any writer who submits her work for free is already supporting the magazine--charging a fee seems doubly unfair.
Fully agree. Not to add that it's not as if these lit mags don't have cover prices. I bet what many rake in via fees even after paying Submittable surpasses that via cover price. Shouldn't that be of ethical importance?
Note: I will NEVER pay to submit to a magazine. Period. That's not how it works. The degree to which so much is monetized in litfic world has me side-eying a lot of it, because it sure looks like a financial means of gatekeeping to me.
The big commercial genre magazines use Moksha or the Clarkesworld submission system, not Submittable. It's the little literary equivalent to genre magazines that use Submittable. I rather think it's the culture of the SFF genre in particular, where "money flows to the writer" is the status quo. Seriously.
I am an editor and publisher who has used Submittable since it started, back when I was in the beta-testing group for it. I can give some insight into the submission-cap situation: Submittable used to be free. They used to have a free account that was promised to remain free, and it didn't come with stipulations; for those of us who have been around for a long time, we were able to keep our free accounts, *but* when Submittable went to all-paying, they put stipulations on us. In order to keep our free account, we can now only accept 100 free submissions across all our categories per month (and no access to the features of the upgraded plans). Other paying tiers have similar caps; if I were to upgrade to the next level, I could get 300 free submissions. But we have 100 because I'm not paying $1,000 per year for the upgrade. We have multiple categories open and need some of those to remain free, and it doesn't take any time at all to hit that 100 mark. We usually hit 100 free submissions by the end of the first week of every month. So, then, what? Do we stop taking submissions because we've used up all our free ones?
No, because we won't have enough quality submissions, so we have to charge a small fee for the rest of the submissions, which do not count against any limitations or stipulations. On Submittable's end, the sky is the limit for people sending in paid submissions, and they take a cut of that. For an average month, Submittable gets several hundred dollars off me in percentages. It's also important to note that Submittable puts a *minimum* limit to how low your charged fee can be. The minimum is $2.00, and the editor doesn't see any of that except a few cents. So, if you see a fee that is $2.00 or so, the editor really is using that entirely to pay Submittable for the submission. (If you have a paying account, Submittable still takes a cut of the fee, but it's a smaller percentage. For us, however, the smaller percentage was not equal to the amount that the upgrade would cost in total per year, and it's especially not equal if you are an editor who only takes submissions during certain months and not yearlong, because it's a yearly plan.)
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