Forum / Death to Reading Fees

• 
  strannikov

  Nov 27, 06:08pm

  One reason our love for Fictionaut endures is that we contributors here are free to post what we will without editorial intervention or comment.

  One challenge of getting work published elsewhere for other audiences, however, is that the writer routinely encounters publisher appeals for the assessment of "reading fees".

  "Reading fees" are an insult to all creative writers working in any domain.

  "Reading fees" are a sign of dubious publishing management, especially when a venue or journal is affiliated with an academic institution.

  Writers of any kind and of all kinds might innocently think that any journal affiliated with a university and presumably the beneficiary of some size of university subsidy and/or paid subscriptions would be able to solicit content submissions without recourse to requesting odious or onerous "reading fees" from aspiring contributors. That even nominal "reading fees" are expected and demanded with a submission is a certain sign that the publisher and the editors are poor business managers.

  Regardless: "reading fees" remain an insult to writers who are not at all earning their livelihoods from their literary work.

  If publishers cannot regulate their staff sizes and operational budgets any better than to insult writers by asking for up-front "reading fees", they deserve to go out of business.

  Death to reading fees.

• 
  David Ackley

  Nov 27, 06:35pm

  And not only, Edward, for I would add for execution, the equally dubious practise of charging exorbitant entry fees for meritless "Contests," sponsored by journals in order to subsidize their operating costs. Traps for the desperate hoping to pad out their writing resumes by "winning," a contest by some magazine nobody's ever heard of.

• 
  strannikov

  Nov 27, 06:58pm

  Si oui ja da and yes, David: perils abound.

  Even through the online submission portal Submittable, using the "No Fee" filter is no guarantee itself: once you get to a venue listing, even though its listing has been filtered through the "No Fee" filter, some venues still show up with their piddling nominal reading fees, the discovery of which wastes no more than a few minutes at most, but still . . .

  Ditto for Poets & Writers: even though the site descriptions might indicate that reading fees are not assessed, if the description has not been updated appropriately, would-be contributors can be surprised to discover that, no, wait, YES, they too assess reading fees! (Another few minutes of wasted effort.)

  Truth-in-advertising should not be so hard to come by with all the modern conveniences at our command.

  I steadfastly avoid sites demanding reading fees and refuse to pay them. --and I never enter contests.

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