I think stamps were 37 cents a pop when I
finally switched over to mainly email submissions. There was no Submittable back then, so no one
asked for “submission fees” money.
I could mail out 15-20 submissions a week
for less than $7.50 (it’s true – Do the math! Use your abacus!). That left me w/ some cash to play with (I had
some highly lucrative cooking gigs back in the day – one of my co-workers
referred to us as “grill jockeys”, which about sums it up. Shit pay, but free subs – yum yum!), so I
could buy chapbooks by authors that I liked, donate to presses that really
seemed to be going the extra mile (out of their own pockets) etc etc. In
short, I could be both a published writer and a patron of the arts.
No one expected to make big bucks (unless
they were all lying to me) off of what we were doing. The writers were happy to get published, the
publishers seemed to accept the fact that most of their publishing costs were
coming out of their own pockets. No one
EVER said “Hey, I’ve got this ass-kicking new zine I want to put out, but
everyone needs to send me $3 with their submissions!”
So what the fuck?
I sifted through the detritus of the
internet last week, found 15 likely-looking places to send work to, then got to
the “submit your work” part of their Submittable accounts, and found out that
12 of these places charged money for submissions. A total of $33. In many instances, a limit of only 3 poems
per submission.
So, no preaching here, I’d just like to
take a second to call BULLSHIT. Feel
free to explain to me the logic of these fees (WITHOUT telling me that “someone”
has to subsidize the cost of a Submittable account, because that’s another
BULLSHIT call). And then feel free to be
ignored. It’s one of my best things.
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