The Fraught Practice of the Poetry Submission Fee

Poet Rachel Mennies penned a piece for The Millions about submission fees in poetry publishing. Off the bat, she offers a mode for reception: "Despite this essay’s abundant economic wonk (you’ve been warned), I refuse to make a capitalist argument for poetry on behalf of poet, press, or journal. None of us should turn to profit as the sole engine driving our artistic and professional decisions. I wish to distinguish, early on, this commodifying argument from the claims regarding fair compensation and best financial practices in poetry publishing that follow below." Mennies pursued data on submission fees in preparation for a 2017 AWP panel on "Money, Power, and Transparency in the Writing World." Some of her findings:

I found that nearly all surveyed poets spent out-of-pocket money to publish their books, up to—in this survey—$3,000. Royalties and prize money recouped costs for some poets, but not all, and inconsistently. This means poets who financially depend on recovering their costs post-publication cannot dependably publish their books in this model (more on that below).

If the submission-fee model means only poets with a couple hundred (or thousand) discretionary dollars in their bank accounts can afford to publish their books, should presses and journals stop charging them? First, we must consider the degree to which—or whether—our presses and journals can operate without them. The data confirm the wide-ranging degree presses depend on fees to function: while book sales (good news!) still yielded the greatest funding share for surveyed presses, submission fees still comprised a sizable, integral portion—which means we need to consider what might replace them if we ban them as a practice.

In contrast, my findings for literary magazines found that journals have access to radically less institutional support and sales revenue, whether private or public, than do the surveyed presses, and many more editors pay out of pocket to run them. This troubles our ability to remove submission fees as a publishing practice for journals unless more people pay for magazines/subscriptions, or other funding sources emerge as sustainable.

(For a more detailed analysis of the data for all three groups, I’ve written up my findings here. It’s wonky, but important.)

If a sizable majority of poets must spend money to secure publication for their books (and, ever increasingly, to submit to journals), and it’s uncertain whether or not those costs will be recouped upon publication, is the submission-fee model equitable for poets? By equitable, I mean accessible across, here, class: can a poorer or working-class poet submit her manuscript as often as a wealthy or institutionally supported poet? The data is unequivocal: no. So long as we maintain poetry publishing’s status-quo reliance on the submission fee, this system will favor publishing poets with money—poets for whom it’s more of an inconvenience than an impossibility to lose money or break even on a book, or to recover fee costs slowly or unpredictably. And when considering a published collection’s role in accessing other markers of success, including financial success, in the poetry community—the ability for poets to apply for certain academic jobs, be eligible for certain prizes, or secure well-paying reading gigs—this inequality magnifies even further.

Food for thought. Read all of "Paying to Play: On Submission Fees in Poetry Publishing."