Poll: What do you think of under 30 writing competitions?

What do you think about age-targeted writing competitions?

There seems to be a rash of new competitions for writers under 30. Narrative hosted a cleverly-titled 30 Below contest recently and Kenyon Review just announced the winner of their under 30 contest. It is not a blatant attempt at name dropping to say that winner Cara Blue Adams was in my workshop at Kenyon last summer. I think that's pretty cool. However, in defending the contest guidelines, which he noted were controversial, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky says,

"Yet, it is all too easy for a literary magazine to fill its pages with established authors, allowing the polished work of those at the height of their literary powers to push aside work that is new and cutting edge."

I think he may have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick there. I'm guessing the controversy wasn't so much over old making way for new as whether new and cutting edge" necessarily equates with being under 30.

So what do you think? Leave comments below and vote in our pole.

New Poll: Do You Click on Internet Ads?

The filing for Chapter 11 by Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News is another indicator of the morbidity of the news print (and print in general?) industry. I've posted before on why I believe newspapers are so important, and there remains a serious question as to whether they can survive on the internet where, to this point, most online editions have been available for free. 

Because of my own behavior, I've always assumed that the ad model doesn't work online, but I'd like your input. Please vote in my poll and let me know. 

I'd also be interested in comments as to why you do or don't click on ads or if you have had any experience purchasing through one of those ads.

The poll closes in one week.

Paying To Be Read, Cont'd

I posted a reference in the Poets & Writers Speakeasy Forum to my recent blog Narrative: Paying To Be Read. It got quite a discussion going. (That's not hard over there, and I did wish more people would come over and cast a vote.) You can check it out yourself, but a majority of the posters were like my writer friend Kat, who kindly left a comment on my post, saying she strongly opposed submission fees. Though most of the P&W posts were more vehement in style.

At first I simply posed the question of what members thought about the Narrative model of charging for submissions. I must admit, I became increasingly frustrated as more and more posters inveighed against this model, but, no matter how many different ways I posed the question, didn't even attempt to propose another model that would provide enough income for better publications to continue online. Worse, as seems to be commonplace in our current culture, posters took strong stands on how things "should" and "shouldn't" be without bothering to find out why they are the way they are.

My point in continuing this line of posting is not to be combative. We are at an important crossroads when it comes to writing and publishing with more and more of it moving to the Internet. So it would seem to me that we need to come up with some model that turns a profit or at least makes enough to pay contributors, unless we want creative writing to become solely the purview of the wealthy and "news reporting" the purview of opinionated bloggers.

I've been working with online publications in one capacity or another for nearly ten years. That is, nearly since their inception, and here are some things I've learned that need to be taken into consideration when examining this problem.

The Information Super Highway
What has drawn more and more people to the Internet is the possibility of getting information and exchanging ideas for free. This is such a part of the Internet culture that for a long time users felt entitled to download copyrighted materials like music and videos at no cost. While the government clamped down on that, the culture of getting things for free hasn't gone away. In fact, many of those who provide information online are dedicated to keeping it free, like Duotrope's Digest. Others, like newspapers, magazines, and literary journals, that might find it useful to charge reasonable subscription fees soon realize that the model simply doesn't work on the net. If your site isn't free, readers will find another one that is. Even venerable print journals like The Kenyon Review do not charge for their online version, nor do they restrict access to print subscribers.

Online Publications Can't Pay or Pay Very Little
The consequence is that online publications were among the first to publish work without payment. In the early days, as I noted in my first post on this issue, online publications received a lot of flack for this and, consequently, appealed to only "new and emerging writers"––read, writers who hadn't been published anywhere else. Ironically, several online publications now pay token fees––$25 or less––while more and more print journals pay nothing at all.

Little or no payment, whether by an online or print publication, has led to a two-tiered system where the big names gravitate to the big pay, filling the slots and making it tougher for new writers to break in. Some, like the New Yorker, don't even accept unsolicited or un-agented fiction. So unknown writers often remain unknown with little chance of breaking into the big-time, publishing only in online or small independent journals that may or may not even count as a rung on the ladder and from which they will never, ever make a career, sometimes despite thousands of dollars spent on workshops and MFAs.

Online Advertising Doesn't Work
Or maybe it works too well. The old media sold advertising based on the number of viewers/listeners/readers, but beyond primitive surveys it was difficult to pinpoint just how many customers at Macy's pre-Christmas sale read about it in the Main Street Observer. Internet advertising is based on click-throughs. I don't have media-wide statistics, but I can tell you that, whether Amazon Associates or AdSense, no online publication I worked with ever made more than pennies per month from these ads. Anecdotally, most people I know see these ads as spam machines and have learned to block them from their peripheral vision.

Let me point out that I am not talking here about anyone walking off with big profits, as one commenter on P&W sees it. Most of these journals are nonprofits and usually the majority of staff, if not the entire staff, work for free. Many Managing Edtiors even fund journals themselves, paying out hundreds of dollars for each issue in order to provide at least some small payment to writers.

So let me pose the question a little differently this time. Now that you know what doesn't work and why, any ideas on what could work? After many years of pondering this issue, I continue to come up dry. So let me know what you think.

Narrative Magazine: Paying to Be Read

Narrative Magazine has taken an interesting and novel approach to publishing. The magazine is free to readers. They pay a healthy sum to published writers, but they charge a reading fee for each submission––$20 for a short story and $10 for five poems.

Not so long ago when I first began submitting, experienced writers were scandalized at the proliferation of publications––online and small print start-ups–-that didn't pay. Now paying markets are more the exception than the rule, and online publications are more likely to pay than print, though payment is usually a "token" of $25 or less. Add to this that many novelists published by the standard houses often put more money into marketing their work than they get out of it. You may say that paying to have your work read was the obvious next step.

Narrative is hardly a small start-up publication. No less a writer than Rick Bass chose to serialize his novel in the online magazine. For writers like Bass and Oates and Lahiri, for whom publication is pretty much guaranteed, $20 amounts to a very small charitable donation to keep literary magazines alive. But for the rest of us, it's like playing the slots. So, is it fair? And more important, is it the model for the future?

I'm on my third submission to Narrative, but one was a contest and just about every contest charges a reading fee. Plus the fee included a three-month subscription to Backstage––a $50 value. So for these purposes, let's say I've spent $40 on submitting and stand to receive $150 if my "Story of the Week" is accepted. That would put me $110 in the black for that particular publication, though for my entire writing year I would still be far in the red.

As the costs of being a writer go, the return value for submitting to Narrative is at least calculable. Even better than slots or the lottery, when I pays my money I know exactly how much I stand to gain if I "win." Based on that I can make a quantifiable decision that works for me, and I've decided on two submissions per year. When I compare that with my other expenses––conferences, workshops, writing magazines––with no quantifiable return, it begins to look a lot better.

More apropos to the topic is the "several sample issues" you are encouraged to read before submitting to any literary publication. You can read everything in Narrative for free, so in a sense, the reading fee covers what those other magazines make on samples. Of course, more and more print journals, even if they don't maintain an online counterpart, make sample work available online. As a writer I see this as only fair, since many of these journals don't pay and sample issues can add up to hundreds of dollars per year. However, what will happen to these journals if writers don't have to buy them? I'd venture to say prospective submitters make up the lion's share of most literary journals' readers.

In a world where literary publications just can't make money and more people are reading online and expecting it to remain free, something is going to have to give in order for these publications––online or print––to survive. For my part, I think I'd rather make an upfront payment on the chance of making several times that if my work is published than being nickeled and dimed with no chance of payment and, eventually, fewer and fewer places to submit my work.

What do you think? Cast your vote in the poll.

Poll of the Week

Leave comments on the Poll of the Week here.

Poll of the Week

Since last week's poll was so much fun, I thought I'd start something new–-a poll that will open for voting every Monday. Each week I'll talk about the results of the last poll and then post a new one.

Last week's poll asked what was your main reason for reading literary magazines or journals. Okay, the sampling wasn't huge, but the majority said they read to find good writing no matter who wrote it. This question stemmed from something I posted in the Poets & Writers Speakeasy where I wondered why print literary journals don't move to an anonymous review policy where the writers name does not appear on the work. The idea got a lot of support though some felt the big names were what sold the journals. If this poll is any indication that might not be the case or it may reflect the very different tastes of those who do most of their reading online, where, for the most part, names don't matter.

So, now I'm going to work backwards polling on my original question. Do you think an anonymous review policy (one where the author's name is not available during the review process would improve literary journals?

Let me know what you think. Also, if you have ideas for polls, comment here or e-mail me.