In my post a few weeks ago about getting my novel accepted for publication by a small press I briefly mentioned a topic that really merits more discussion: Submitting my novel to publishers cost me some actual folding money.
Said folding money came in the form of submission fees to some of the 22 small indie presses I applied to over a 10-month period.
The submission and payment process for indie presses works a bit differently than it does if you’re going for a contract with one of the Big 5 Publishers. To get that kind of contract, you first have to send your novel to a literary agent, which is always free. Literary agents get paid by charging commission fees off advances and royalties—in short, they only get paid when your novel sells, and any agent who charges upfront reading fees is almost certainly running some kind of scam.
This is because the Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR) specifically prohibits its member agents from charging writers to read their work. This is an amazing protection for writers that takes money out of the submission equation, leveling the playing field so more writers have an equal chance of getting their work noticed regardless of how much money they have.
Submitting your novel to small presses, though, is more like the Wild West. Everyone operates differently, and a lot of them charge writers to submit on a pay-to-play model even if their work gets turned down.
In this post I’ll outline the basics of why publishers charge submission fees, including the pros and cons, and how this affected my own submission process.
Submission Fees Created a Culture of Charging Writers to Send Their Work
Submittable, the largest submission manager for writers, came on the scene in 2010 as a tech start-up in Montana. It allows both large and small publishers to manage the sometimes INCREDIBLE amount of online submissions they receive. Submittable charges publishers both a monthly fee and a per-submission fee for use of its service—and as a result, many publishers choose to pass that cost on to the writers who send them work by charging them submission fees.
Back in the pre-internet days, writers who wanted to send their work to literary journals had to print it out, stick it in an envelope, then physically mail it to the journal, usually with a self-addressed-stamped envelope for a reply. This cost both money and time, and created a natural barrier against writers blindly sending their story to a hundred places at once, since this would take a LOT of money and a LOT of time.
In the internet age, though, mass-emailing a hundred journals and magazines is comparatively easy through the miracle of BCC-ing, so one argument is that charging writers submission fees forces them to be more selective about who they submit to, thus preventing journals from being overwhelmed.
Submittable is also convenient for publishers—like, WAY more convenient than using email and a gigantic Excel sheet to track large numbers of submissions. This obviously gives publishers an incentive to use it, pay the fees, and subsequently pass those fees on to writers.
The idea of submission fees has carried over from magazines and journals to indie book publishers, many of whom now charge fees to read novel manuscripts—which, again, big-time literary agents don’t do. On the one hand, these fees can (in theory, at least) limit the sometimes overwhelming number of novel submissions these publishers get, while the submission manager makes it easy for them to track submissions using their limited resources.
Submission fees can also provide valuable income for a small press, since many are out-of-pocket operations that either break even or lose money, and need all the help they can get. Charging submission fees, then, makes more sense when a small business is struggling to stay afloat—especially if writers are used to paying submission fees anyway. That’s good for publishers because it gives them more financial resources to keep sharing interesting writing with the world.
BUT, Submission Fees Can Also Create an Uneven Paying Field
On another level, though, charging writers to submit limits the applicant pool to writers who can afford the fee. If I’m a young writer working three jobs and renting a studio apartment where I subsist mostly off ramen noodles and boxed mac and cheese, submission fees can create a real barrier to getting my work published. Or, if I choose to pay those fees, the cost will intensify my already precarious financial position and lead to further financial woes. Of course, these financial problems won’t necessarily exist for an upper-middle-class suburban writer whose parents paid for their college and gave them a bunch of money to pursue their goals….
Even if both writers have equal ability, the writer with more money can afford to send more work out, thus increasing their odds of being published. As this amazing Atlantic article points out, the odds of getting your writing picked out from a slush pile are slim anyway, and writers will often need to send their work out many, many times before finding someone it jives with. That can add up to a big upfront investment for a book that might not earn the writer back that much income—maybe not even enough to cover the cost of the submission fees.
Succeeding as a writer, artist, or creative person is difficult enough, and a system that makes it radically easier for people with more money to get ahead isn’t good for the rest of us.
There’s a BIG philosophical argument about whether people with more money should have access to more opportunities than people with less money. When richer people have more opportunities, they can become more successful more often, while people with less money who have fewer opportunities become less successful, even if they possess the same (or greater!) merit. Eliminating financial barriers helps makes those opportunities equal for everyone—whether those barriers are in health care, education, transportation, or the arts.
How Can We Make the Playing Field More Equal?
A lot of countries have specific endowments for the arts (including writing!) that makes money available to artists who need it, thus creating a more level playing field where artists can succeed based on their talent, not on how much money they have. The Canada Council for the Arts is a huge supporter of writers and small presses that publish Canadian writers—is it a coincidence, then, that Canadian presses like Biblioasis, Book*hug Press, and Insomniac Press don’t charge writers to submit?
Meanwhile, back in America, one of Trump’s first moves after becoming president was to attempt to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities as a smokescreen for cutting government spending—even though they only account for some $300 million out of the $1.1 trillion federal budget. His 2020 federal budget once again attempted to dismantle it, and the moves sent a clear message: when it comes to the arts, America wants people with more money to have more opportunities than people with less money.
On the flip side, creating more government grants for the arts would make it easier for writers, artists, and publishers to share great work with the world, as this article smartly points out.
I’m also a proponent of publishers finding alternate sources of income—for example, literary journals that publish ads, which are often for books, other magazines, and writing programs that the people reading might find interesting. Magazines also rely on subscription models, and in the digital age we have Patreon so readers can support outlets they care about.
Indie book publishers don’t really have the option of putting ads in their books, but there are other, more creative routes they can take. I’m all in favor of publishers who explore other options, including book subscription services where readers can receive new books as they’re released, or book bundles that encourage readers to check out books by writers similar to those they already like. Once again there’s also Patreon, Kickstarter campaigns where the number of backers determines the size of a print run, or a simple donation system—to summarize the Fry shut-up-and-take-my-money meme, people who are passionate about something want to support the people who make it happen so they can keep getting more of it—especially if they sense that the thing they love is in trouble.
How Much Did I Pay to Submit My Novel?
Of the 22 indie presses I queried my novel to, here’s a breakdown of the fees:
- 6 required no fee at all
- 2 accepted hard copy queries only, so I only paid for mailing and printing costs
- 5 required a fee of $5 or less (including one press with a lifetime submission fee)
- 2 required fees between $10-15
- 5 were contests that required fees between $20-35, but offered cash prizes of $1,000 or more
- 1 required a fee of $20 without being a contest
- 1 gave me the option of buying one of their books at a discounted rate and waiving the submission fee
In total I paid $193 in fees, plus about $13 for the hard copy mailings (which would have been much less if I didn’t live in Japan) plus another $13 for a book I fully plan on reading. Out of that $193, most of it ($153) was spent on presses with fees of $20 or more.
I chose to view this money as an investment toward getting my writing published and advancing my career, the same way I invested in business cards, printing fees, and web hosting for this blog. As such, I selected presses I thought would be a good fit for my novel regardless of their fees—and I certainly didn’t blindly submit to unsuitable presses that didn’t charge fees, because this would have been a waste of time.
In the end, I opened my wallet and paid as just another aspect of my (very small) business, but I found myself wishing that the presses with higher fees used different business models, especially if their fees went toward a contest with a cash payout, which I’ll discuss below….
Gambling on Writing Contests
My feelings about novel contests are mostly negative. Literary novel contests require writers to pay a fee (often between $20 and $40) for a chance at getting their novel published and earning a cash prize (often in the ballpark of $1,000). This is nice because $1,000 is higher than the royalty amount that writers are likely to earn off sales of most works of literary fiction, but not so nice in that $20 or $30 is on the high end of the submission fee scale, creating a barrier to entry that’s far larger than for getting your works seen by presses with lower fees.
Contests can also offer publicity for your book and honors that amount to real career credentials, especially in the academic writing world. This means that writers who want to boost their CVs and earn a better chance at a high-paying academic job have to invest more money for a chance at the fabulous prizes. This system seems especially exploitative because it’s taking advantage of writers who want to succeed in academia—the exact system that my own novel singles out.
On the whole, I’d rather have presses require a lower upfront investment from writers in return for a standard royalty contract, where they could get paid depending on how well their book actually sold. I prefer that to a system that provides a higher payout for the one lucky writer who gets the grand prize while the others lose a $30 submission fee—and that’s if they decide to take their chances on the contest at all.
Fortunately, as this article explains, the culture of submission fees and contests is different for different kinds of books, and contest fees are mostly non-existent for genre fiction like sci-fi and fantasy, so this should be a non-issue for these kinds of writers.
Smarter Ways of Handling Submission Fees
Contests aside, if indie publishers do need to charge fees to stay afloat, there are better ways of handling it than others.
Of the presses I applied to that required fees, many offered fees of $5 or less, an amount that provides some revenue to the press while also being roughly equivalent to the cost of printing and sending a manuscript via USPS media mail (depending on your printing costs). Reasonable fees like this can reduce the problem of writers mass-sending manuscripts to presses they clearly aren’t suited for, as Two Dollar Radio explains in its reasoning for its $3 fee. It can also provide some revenue to cover the labor costs of handling and reading submissions—all while leaving costs within the affordable realm for the majority of writers.
As the numbers for non-contest submissions get higher, though—up to $10, $20, or more—the numbers start to add up and become more likely to become a larger burden for more writers. Think of it this way: if a writer applies to ten presses with a fee of $5 each, that adds up to $50, but if the fee is $20, those same ten submissions come out to $200—which can be a big difference for writers on a budget.
I’m also a BIG fan of presses that allow writers in difficult straits to explain their financial situations and send their work without a submission fee—especially if this option is available No Questions Asked. I doubt that writers who aren’t in dire financial straits are going to spend a bunch of time making up a story about their financial problems—and if they do, well, that’s called lying. At the same time, allowing writers on a stricter budget to apply without a fee gets rid of yet another barrier to getting their work out there, and helps create a system where merit plays a bigger role than money.
I’m all for more creative options too: Atelier26 Books offers writers the option to buy one of their titles at a 20% discount in lieu of paying the submission fee. While the cost of the book is ultimately more than the submission fee, the option encourages writers to check out the books that the press is already publishing (which we as writers should all be doing more of!) and rewards those who were going to buy a book anyway. Plus, the press also offers a straight fee for writers who need a lower-cost option.
Unsolicited Press also charges writers a lifetime submission fee of $5, which allows them to submit multiple times for one fee. I like this option as well because it encourages writers to form a stronger relationship with the press by submitting multiple manuscripts over the span of their careers, and provides real financial incentive for them to try again with the same press.
There are other ways to level the playing field for getting published while helping small presses manage submissions and stopping anyone from going broke—again, I point to arts endowments as a solid option, and the more creative ideas I listed above.
Final Thoughts
I’m in a much more secure position financially now than I was at age 23, so I felt comfortable shelling out $200 bucks to query my novel around. I saw that $200 as a reasonable investment that I could take without it significantly affecting my livelihood. Had the costs been higher, or had I been in a less secure position, I probably would have thought twice and queried fewer presses—a choice many writers are forced to make every day.
While the press that ultimately offered me a contract doesn’t require submission fees (yay!!), others do, and submission fees are just one of the many financial expenses that writers and other creative people face in an uphill journey to establish themselves and get their work out there. When asking bigger questions about economics, we owe it to ourselves to consider this one too: Should it be easier than it currently is for creative people to share their work and earn a living from it?
I’m all for making it easier. Until that happens, though, I plan on using the time and money resources I have available to me as best I can, because in the real world, as this writer points out, not doing so feels like a waste.
In the meantime, I’ll still support systems of equal opportunity every chance I can :-)