Mythbusting the submission fee, part 2

A brief follow-up to part 1.

Versal 10 will be 168 pages.

That's over 3x larger than our very first edition.

That's big.

Our fears that we wouldn't get as much great work or as much work in general are clearly proven unfounded by the shear breadth and awesomeness of our upcoming issue.

Get your mailboxes ready. You're going to fall in love with the literary journal all over again.

Mythbusting the submission fee, part 1

So we implemented some big/radical/scary changes ahead of our reading period for Versal 10, one of them being a submission fee. GASP.

You may remember us talking about this quite a bit back in the fall (and you can jump over here to read some of that).

Now that our reading period has closed, we can look at the numbers to assess how those changes affected our submission numbers as well as to what extent they helped our financial goal to become more self-sustainable. I promised that I'd be open about the results and post some numbers, so here they are in all their glory.

Overall, submissions were down 39%. Though in the opening days of the reading period we received three emails condemning our new fee, those three emails were the only three we received. And though it's impossible to pin down the exact cause of the lower submissions, we strongly suspect the lower numbers were due to Duotrope's no-fee policy: that it will not list journals that charge fees. The numbers support this hunch: we received a major boost during our Free Week in October, when Duotrope listed us as open, and another large deluge starting Friday, January 13 when Duotrope changed its listing policy (what brought about its change of heart?) and Versal was again listed as an open market.

Last fall I was having dinner with a few visiting writers, and our submission fee came up. One of the visiting writers, a poet from California, strongly opposed the practice and suggested that Versal print only fiction because (and I'm paraphrasing), "fiction writers are more likely to pay. Poets won't pay, they're out at Occupy Wall Street protesting this kind of crap." I was polite in my responses, but seething. I mean, really? I'm a poet, I support Occupy, and I also pay sub fees. Her black&white world made/makes me sad.



Now that we're through the four months of our reading period, I can say with confidence that the numbers prove her wrong. (We can talk another time about her conclusions on the inherent nature of poets vs. prose writers...Eeek.) We had almost two times the number of poetry submissions as prose, which is not abnormal for us, but what is notable is that the poets were more likely to pay the extra $1 for a matched contributor payment from Versal, preorder a copy of Versal 10, or buy a subscription. And not just by a small margin either. Poets were two times more likely to add the matching $1, almost four times more likely to preorder, and no single prose submission came with a subscription.

I'm not making judgments about the moral character of poets vs. prose writers, because that's stupid. But I want the numbers to speak back to that day last October in a way I could not then. I want them to say, look, poets are generous, they are not as precious as you paint them to be -- assuming of course that any sense of character can be gleaned from this at all, which is disputable and probably entirely wrong. But that's exactly the point. The whoo-ha around the lit world -- and among editors -- about the submission fee is really a bunch of whoo-ha, and we should stop making so many assumptions about our communities, stop casting lines in the sand between "types" of writers and editors and journals, stop assuming every writer is a vulnerable sheep facing (against) the editor-wolf, unable to make their own decisions, come to their own conclusions, "doing everything it takes" just for a publication credit. The power dynamic, if anything, is exactly the opposite. Times have changed, and yay.

But anyway, I can talk about that some other time. What I want to talk about today is that the news for us is very good. What's more, the news for our contributors to Versal 10 is pretty damn cool. 220 writers and artists chose to add an additional $1 to their submission fee, which will be matched by Versal and the total funds divided equally among all contributors to the new issue. As we've stated elsewhere, this is our small but important step towards paying the people who make Versal great. Total donations from writers and artists: $220; total matched funds from Versal: $220; total funds to be equally divided among our contributors: $440.

We still have a lot of financials to look at, and I'm especially curious how we fare now compared to this time last year, but minus the $1 contributor donations, we made $1863.14 through our new system. On the surface this seems to strongly support our original case for changing our funding source from labor-intensive, pricey and long-running local workshops to sales related directly to the journal itself (in 2010, we made about €1300 from a full year's program of workshops in Amsterdam).

I'm also excited that we've already sold 36 copies of Versal 10!

There's obviously a lot of refinement to do on these calculations, and some solid assessments and projections to be made (I gave up math in 6th grade to join the drama club), but I am happy to report that, on the whole, the changes have been positive for us. And I would say for our community both here in Amsterdam and abroad.

Once we finish reading, I'll share what our team thought of the quality of the submissions compared to previous years. There's two theories running about the lit world, in terms of quality of submissions and fees. One is that quality goes up because those who send work are really familiar with the journal; the other is that quality goes down because those who send work are "desperate". I hope we'll debunk both of these simplifications…but stay tuned.

Going Dutch

So it seems that the capitalist system is failing small press publishing in America.

Though I'm no economist, the economics of this look pretty straightforward to me. The literary economy is saturated with presses and journals. The consumers in this economy are consuming what they reasonably can. But the revenue is spread so thin that, in general, no press or journal can survive without external cash injections from grants or credit cards.

In the wake of BlazeVOX-gate, lots is coming out about small press publishing. For the first day or so I think I really did read almost every comment, because I'm really interested in what good can come out of this discussion, for writers and publishers alike. I've admittedly fallen behind on my reading but have a bazillion tabs open in Firefox.

The following list is a generalized distillation of some of what's rising to the surface (at least of what I've seen so far):

• A general consensus that we (writers and publishers) value transparency where (at least) money is involved (and I think we may be starting to admit that money is always involved, even if it's in an "intangible" form like doing one's own book promotion)
• Professionalism is a pretty good default to stand by
• A general consensus that there are not enough consumers for the number of presses and journals (or that the level of consumption itself is too low)
• There are people who believe that the right of publication should be free, and people who believe in shared economic models (for lack of a better term)
• There are people who believe art and money cannot or should not coexist, and people who believe that they can (or at least have to)
• Many publishers are experimenting with new business models, or considering them
• We all at least seem to agree that we wish things were different, or easier, or both

A few months ago I asked on this very blog how we, writers, could improve our participation in the literary economy. I am a writer and an editor, so I include myself in this question. I have thought about this a lot over the past few months; the BlazeVOX discussion has, if anything, helped my vocabulary along so I can grapple with it better.

In a nutshell, answering this question starts with me just being me. In other words, what do I do and what more can I do? (Now I feel like Johannes and the hippie.)

I asked myself what my consumption is in the literary economy (what I take out of it, so to speak. I'll leave out what I put in to the economy for now). In brief, it is, in no particular order:
- Supporting KickStarter campaigns of presses and journals I like
- Subscribing to my favorite literary mags
- Subscribing to one or two "seasons" of presses I love
- Buying a literary journal I haven't seen before but want to submit to
- Buying extra copies of journals in which my work is published
- Registering for AWP
- Buying about a suitcase full of small press books at AWP
- Purchasing gifts for friends and family from small presses and online bookstores like Powell's
- Writing checks for contest fees (which isn't easy, because I really do forget how to write a check)

So let's say all of us are doing roundabout the above. But that's clearly not enough to sustain all those presses and journals out there that we love. What else can we do?

When I saw that 1913 a journal of forms was actually open for submissions, I rushed over to its website. I freakin' love 1913. I saw it has a small reading fee. I didn't hesitate. If anything, I thought, hell, there's no chance my poetry is going to be accepted by 1913 but I'll throw this journal $3 so other people will be and can be and so that 1913 can be a journal.

And that's when it hit me.

I'M A SOCIALIST.

Blame it on Holland. Blame it on my hippie parents or my Montessori preschool. Blame it on my feminism or big Catholic family or the fact that I'm short. Or gay.

I believe in the basic tenants of socialism because I believe in sharing. And I'm starting to see the literary economy like I see my healthcare coverage in Holland:

I pay €135 a month for premium healthcare coverage. On top of that I pay (highish) taxes for healthcare based on my income each year, and a max €175 co-pay (for the whole year). I don't see additional bills once I've hit the yearly co-pay max. And here's the kickers: I have a chronic illness. I take medication daily and see doctors and have blood tests regularly. I also go to a physical therapist once a month for preventative care so that I don't injure myself climbing. Massages are covered. Dentist trips are covered. Hell, until recently, vitamins were covered. Oh yeah, EVERYONE IN HOLLAND IS COVERED.

It ain't perfect, but I don't pay out of pocket for an emergency ambulance ride either.

Imagine we all took a socialist attitude towards publishing, but one of course that didn't rely on "outside" government support. What if we said to ourselves, sure, I'll pay this $3 reading fee or this $20 contest fee or I'll share the costs of my book's publication so that not only I can continue to enjoy the privilege of print but others can as well.

I don't mean to demean the seriousness of our human right to healthcare, but it serves as a good example of where my head's going. It's going away from the economic model I was taught growing up (me! me! me!) to the one I've learned to love in my adopted home (all! all! all!). Johannes Goransson brought up the problematized "Author" in his post and I'd like to take that a step further and complicate the MY WORK IS GREAT AND YOU ARE PRIVILEGED IF YOU GET TO PUBLISH IT idea as being the major contribution any of us make to the world of literature.

Clearly I'm simplifying things. But I hope I'm at least making my point. If we all agree we're committed to seeing writing in print, esp. non-mainstream writing that is not part of the normal capitalist Amazon economy, then does it not follow that we all join in the economics to make that happen? And thus change our minds a bit on what that looks like? The world has changed drastically since I was taught to detest submission fees and vanity presses. Can we not change as well?

I also just want to point out one more thing. In my final post about the help Versal got from some €3000/day strategy consultants, I mentioned that one of the first ideas the consultants had was to charge a fee for submissions. Keep in mind these guys have no idea what's going on over there in the American literary world. They purposefully didn't come into the meeting with much background because we all wanted to see what would come out of the brainstorm if we had a blank page. And the idea came up almost immediately, because they felt that the fee would be a good "channel" to increase writers' participation in the literary economics.

How very socialist of them.

A summary of advice, part 3

So by now, hopefully, I've explained the crossroads where Versal finds itself and I've listed several directions the consultants thought we could go. In this final post, I'll list those ideas that we are considering - and I'm sure, for those of you still reading, this may cause some debate. Please be kind, I think comment flame wars are lame.


Ideas we're considering

1. Expanding sales/reach into the broader arts community
Versal, as most of you know, is "more" than "just" a literary journal, and it's been that way since we started in 2002. It's a veritable object, an artistic archive, a coffee table book, if you will. In the last few years, our editorial reach into the arts community has expanded considerably. Translating that into copy sales is a good next step. For example, we recently joined the shelves at the Stedelijk Museum here in Amsterdam.

2. Professionalize
This may seem like a somewhat vague step, but with the consultants' help we could give form to a Versal that is not run like a non-profit, but like an enterprise. Sounds scary, I know. But I can see some advantages: a bank start-up loan, for example, might allow us to rent office space, get a few of us on a payroll, and help us inch towards economies of scale if we want. One potential element of professionalization would be if members of the editorial team become shareholders - essentially buying Versal and realizing later financial return from the investment. I could definitely see this model working for a brand new journal, where each editor joins in with an investment of funds, and once the journal reaches profitability the editors get "paid".

3. Leverage our contact moments
"Contact moments" is industry speak for the times when Versal comes in contact with a person. Each of these moments is a sales opportunity. For example, we could leverage pre-ordering during the submission process by asking folks if they would buy the issue, whether published or not. A non-binding agreement, of course, but an indication for us of how many buyers we may get from our submitters, and a nudge to those who send us work that supporting the journal may be a good thing.

4. Charge for submissions
Corollary to #3 is to charge a small fee for submissions. This idea came up pretty quickly in the brainstorm, as the consultants felt it was more than reasonable to ask a few bucks for the time we invest in work review. And a few bucks would be no more than the old SASE costs, especially the international ones. Since Versal's review process is editor-only (no interns, undergrads, or the like reviewing the "slush pile" - we read it all), and we give frequent personal feedback, there's added value to sending your work to Versal. Plus, if you're accepted, your work will never have looked so damn good. The consultants were convinced a submission fee could help. I explained that there's a lot of controversy about this, and industry-disparagement of the practice (e.g. Duotrope does not list journals that charge for submissions), but I am pretty sure as both an editor and a writer that this is where things are going. The recent discussion on HTML Giant seems to agree. And personally, if I really want to get my work into a journal and it charges me $3, I think that's $3 well spent.

5. Engage our network
In 10 years, we've crossed paths in one way or another with hundreds of people. Writers and artists who have sent us work, people who have bought copies, editors we have exchanged copies with ... the list goes on and on and on. I would recommend to any new literary journal that it starts an Excel spreadsheet or database of some kind to keep track of all of its contacts. These people can be tapped for later sales (that sounds bad, but you know what I mean), sent questionnaires to gain insights into the market, asked to reach out to their networks, etc. We have probably a dozen different spreadsheets by now, so our systems in that sense are a total mess, but we could better leverage our contacts to boost sales - I'm sure of this.

6. Editors' better engage their networks
Here's an example. The strategy consultants are one of my clients (I am a freelance editor, writer and translator, working with Dutch companies to improve their English texts), and are 70-strong at their Amsterdam office. So I pitched Versal 9 to their account manager as the annual Christmas gift. We'll see if he bites. Another idea: those editors who teach in schools could teach Versal 9 - and the school pays for students' copies. It's not just about sending an email to our families, it's about tapping our professional networks too.

I hope this has been helpful, not only to other editors struggling with sustainable business models for their endeavors, but to writers out there who want more than a glimpse behind the curtain of the journal world. Though this post concludes my series on the advice we got from the strategy consultants, I will no doubt continue to share insights that we've had under their guidance, our thoughts on some of the potential directions we can go (like submission fees), and maybe a few pie charts.