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J.W. Wood's avatar

Outstanding piece that captures the problems most indie writers face. But possibly does not go far enough into the fact that so few people read anything at all these days. Thank you.

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Caitlin Jans's avatar

Thank you for the mention! I actually had already started to put together the notes below, before I reached it. This is really compelling article and I have a couple of thoughts in no particular order:

1. There is actually one High School lit journal that I know of, and they do seem to have decent funding and seem really cool: https://levitatemagazine.org/

2. Both Reedsy and Submittable, are run on the start-up funding model, and both very much have silicon valley roots. I'm not saying they aren't run by writers, but their focus/mode is very different than a lot of writer run companies because of where their funding is coming from (or came from initially - I did a deep research dive on this about 5 years back, but I can't remember what I came up with at the time and it's probably irreverent now.

3. I think it's important to note that a lot of the lit journals run by Discover Art LLC do seem exploitative not just in terms of contests, but in terms of where they are getting their labor. I'm not sure about all of the magazines which seem to function differently, for example I know Uncharted has a long history of not paying their writers (thanks to The Grinder which you also mentioned) , but at least two of the major journals they run do not pay any of the masthead staff including the head editor. And at least one of these magazines where you can pay a huge fee for personal feedback, that personal feedback is actually not given by anyone linked to the magazine, but by outside writers/editors, who are paid, and coordinated/hired, not by the editor of the journal but by someone higher up in the company.

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