Q: What is a fair wait for writers who pay reading fees?

"If a reading fee falls to a lit mag, and there is no one there to read the work, can it even be called a 'reading fee'?"

Welcome to our weekend conversation!

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Within the literary magazine community, there is perhaps no subject quite so universally debated and so persistently divisive as submission fees. The discussions and arguments seem to have begun with the dawn of online publishing combined with the launch of Submittable, in and around 2010, and have not let up since.

I’m not going to weigh in on the pros and cons, the justifications or lack thereof, for submission fees. Most of you by now know what you are willing to pay or not pay. Most of you who edit lit mags know why you’ve chosen to charge a fee, or not. We can leave it at that.

What I do want to talk about this weekend has to do with response times. More specifically, a question: Do lit mags that charge reading fees have a responsibility to reply to submissions in a timely manner?

Arguably, all lit mags should respond to submissions in a timely manner. Thankfully, many wonderful magazines do exactly that.

It is the lit mags that charge fees, however, while also maintaining long response times, that I want to focus on. What does it mean if writers are paying a “reading fee” to lit mags that take so long to respond the work never actually gets read?

In a recent Lit Mag Chat, a reader alerted me to a literary magazine that, according to Duotrope, had a reported response time of over 2,000 days.

My jaw hit the floor. 2000 days? That’s over five years.

When I looked up this magazine on Duotrope, I was not surprised to see that the journal also has a reported acceptance rate of 0%. Most of the work submitted to this magazine is withdrawn. Of course it is. Who can wait five years to hear back from a lit mag? Writers either grow impatient and withdraw their work or, more likely, the work gets picked up by a speedier magazine, leading to withdrawal.

Meanwhile, this journal charges a fee. What is that money paying for? Is it fair to be charging a “reading fee” for work that may never be read?

Now, let me clarify something. This 2,000-day response time is an outlier. The magazine’s average response time is not five years. It’s safe to say that no magazine could reasonably exist with a five-year-average response time.

However, what I’ve since discovered is that many fee-charging lit mags have such outliers. Here are a few:

2,670 days (Barnstorm)

3,503 days (American Short Fiction)

2,702 days (Harvard Review)

2,984 days (Carve Magazine)

2,735 days (Bennington Review)

2,976 days (Michigan Quarterly Review)

1,644 days (LitMag)

2,388 days (Iowa Review)

2,999 days (Cream City Review)

1,480 days (Sequestrum)

4,460 days (FENCE)

All of these journals charge reading fees. Some charge $2-$3. Some charge $5. At least one charges $7.15 per submission.

Most of these magazines have a reported acceptance rate of less than 1%. Some have a reported 0% acceptance rate. Many of these magazines have a high rate of withdrawn submissions.

Now again, I want to be fair. We know that mishaps happen. Submissions get lost. Editors change and chaos ensues. These long waits are not the average at any of these magazines. In some instances, the average response time is a reasonable few months.

These figures also constitute what is reported on Duotrope. A magazine with a 0% acceptance rate may in fact accept work that is simply not reported here.

That said, this does paint a somewhat grim picture of a writer’s chance of having work not only accepted but actually read within a reasonable time frame. At some of these journals, the average wait time is indeed quite long. Some fee-charging lit mags respond in roughly one year or more. Many writers wind up withdrawing their work before it even gets to that point.

So again, I wonder: Do lit mags that charge reading fees have a greater responsibility to respond to submissions in a timely manner?

There is also another dimension worth discussing here. That is the matter of solicitation. At those lit mags with the longest response times, one might reasonably wonder—where are these magazines getting the material for their journals? Is it all from general submissions? Or are they also soliciting work from other writers?

If this is the case, is it also the case that not only are some writers paying while others are not, but that the solicitation process is slowing down the process for those in the general submissions queue?

If a lit mag is filling its pages with a mix of both solicited and unsolicited writers, it would stand to reason that the writers in the queue will wind up waiting longer. There is less urgency to get to their work. Sometimes, as I’ve pointed out, there would seem to be no urgency at all.

What do we make of all this?

My aim in writing this is not to call out particular journals. Like I said, the numbers listed above are outliers. These are good magazines that publish outstanding work.

What I do hope is that editors who charge reading fees and also take an extraordinarily long time to respond to submissions might think about the fairness of operations. If the submissions are overwhelming, if it’s proving impossible to respond to writers in less than a year, if some responses are taking as long as several years, might it not be incumbent upon editors who charge fees to slow things down for a while? Take a breather, catch up, put a monthly cap on submissions, hire more staff, bring in more readers, put out a call for volunteers?

There are ways to ensure that operations continue to run smoothly, efficiently and fairly. If writers are being asked to pitch in for operating costs, then don’t they deserve as much?

Put another way: If a reading fee falls to a lit mag, and there is no one there to read the work, can it even be called a “reading fee”?

You tell me.

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