Business of Writing – Words Deferred

AI Art is Inverted Patronage

I happen to know a painter. Imagine for a moment, that I just moved into a new house, and I decide that I want new art to decorate the place. I tell my artist friend that I’ll pay her to create twenty paintings to my specifications.

Now I’m edgy, and I’ve already painted the walls black, so I decide what I really want is a bunch of paintings that look like H. R. Geiger’s work, specifically the movie Alien. I tell my artist friend that I want a shadowy techno-biological spaceship bridge for the entryway, and a carapaced, eyeless monstrosity for the living room, and for the bedroom, three damp corridors that look like the inside of an esophagus.

She rolls her eyes, but agrees to the terms. She paints the paintings and presents them to me. I like them, mostly, but I want a few changes. She makes a few modifications, I pay her the agreed-upon sum, and the deal is complete.

Here’s the question: am I an artist? I clearly have an artistic vision for my house—a vision so singular and intense that nobody seems to want to come over anymore. But should I be credited in the act of creation?

The Inversion

We already have a term for arrangements like this. It’s been around for quite some time. This kind of arrangement is artistic patronage. I pay you, and you create art to my specifications.

The general concept has evolved, from nobility and the wealthy supporting individual artists, to platforms like Kickstarter and Patreon allowing fans to support their favorite artists, to the many and varied forms of modern contract-worker abuse, where artists are treated more and more like machines that turn money into art, and preferably at the highest possible rate of exchange.

The twist in our current moment is that AI has provided a new type of patronage—cheaper and faster and even more heavily mediated by Silicon Valley technology. Instead of the wealthy paying human artists, the AI companies are attempting to build an ecosystem where mostly less wealthy patrons pay LLMs, and indirectly, their wealthy investors.

Since the process of training LLMs divorces the training inputs (the work of human artists) from the outputs, it has so far been treated (from a legal perspective) as transformative of the original work, and therefore fair use. And since machines cannot be copyright holders yet, nobody owns the rights to the resulting output.

Expression and Skill

Proponents of LLM-generated art argue that gen AI is a tool like Photoshop, and prompting is simply a new artistic skill. They argue it can be equally expressive.

As an extreme comparison, let’s look at scanning or photocopying. Photocopying generates an artistic output, a nearly exact copy of an artwork, but has little expression or skill. The only skill is identifying art that you want to copy.

AI images are more than this, certainly, but how much more? They aren’t direct copying, but the popularity of prompts “in the style of X” show that this remains a strong element. Especially since most prompters do not bother to analyze the techniques that contribute to the desired style. Most users cannot explain why the Simpsons looks like the Simpsons, or Ghibli looks like Ghibli, they just know they want a profile pic that looks “like that.”

AI art does takes creative input from the user: a description of something imagined. In this, it is similar to traditional art. While some artists, especially abstract artists, may start with a technique or a set of colors or a mood, most will start with some idea of concrete subject.

Many non-artists assume the process of creating art is all about getting that imagined thing from brain to paper with as little deviation as possible. This, I think, is simply not true. The process of generating a piece of art can be broken down into hundreds or thousands of tiny micro-expressions.

Each line and brushstroke in a painting is an atomic particle of artistic expression. Each word in a novel is a choice the artist had to make. The canvas is ten thousand interconnected empty spaces, and the artist chooses how to fill each one, accounting for the spaces around it that have already been filled.

AI proponents will say an AI prompt is constructed of many tokens, and LLM users will iterate repeatedly, tweaking their prompt. But how do brushstrokes in a painting compare to tweaking words in a prompt?

Determinism and Intentionality

LLMs are non-deterministic. With the exception of some very tightly constrained outputs, the exact same prompt to an AI will generate different outputs on each attempt. The user’s input is only partially responsible for the output. The rest is dictated by the ineffable statistical noise of AI inference. Some elements of the resulting work are inherently external to the user’s prompt.

We could argue about whether the same brushstrokes by the same artist over multiple paintings can result in identical paintings, but if they do not, then it’s due to small differences in environment, in tools, or inconsistency of skill. The artist, in the process of making ten thousand micro-expressions of their art, responds to these tiny, incremental outputs and adjusts the rest of the piece.

Differences between outputs are an expression of the artist, an interplay between the intentional and the accidental. Differences between nondeterministic AI outputs are not an expression of the user-patron. They are a mindless side-effect of AI generation. They are noise, not signal.

Art is Process, Not Product

By being directly involved in every micro-expressive decision and adapting and adjusting to the results with every output, the process of “traditional art” is a conversation between the artist and the art in progress. Even if two processes result in nearly identical pieces, the traditional process provides many more opportunities for making decisions, and adapting to the work as it’s created. These are direct expressions of skill and artistic intent.

Even if we treat generative AI as an artist’s tool, it is a blunt and wildly inaccurate instrument. It allows for relatively little input, and that input affects the output in highly variable and nondeterministic ways. Despite allowing for much faster iteration on “fully completed” pieces, there is scant mechanism for interplay between artist and art within the process of creation. It remains a black box.

In short, you don’t create a piece of art in collaboration with gen AI. You ask as best you can, then evaluate a finished output and decide if you need to ask again, trying to come up with the magical incantation that provides something approximating the desired result.

Vibe Check

Many of the most vocal advocates of prompting as artistic expression were not making art before widespread availability of LLMs. Most professional and long-practicing artists are disdainful of AI art. Yes, this is a broad generalization, and admittedly anecdotal to my own personal experience. But all I’ve seen from those in the pro-AI camp is equally anecdotal, so I figure my personal experience is as valid as someone else’s.

Why are artists not embracing AI wholesale? I believe it is because practicing artists are already used to exercising their creativity and skill constantly. They tend to recognize that prompting an AI is a fundamentally different thing from painting or drawing or writing fiction, even if painting is mediated through technological tools like touchscreens and tablets, and writing is done in a word-processor will spelling and grammar check.

Artists recognize that prompting doesn’t allow for the depth of creativity that they need and expect. They feel the way it takes away granular control and intimate feedback.

Gatekeeping

There is an argument, frequently deployed by the pro-AI crowd, that artists are gatekeeping art and resisting its democratization. A parallel argument is that AI is an artistic accessibility tool for the disabled and, weirdly, the unskilled.

This argument seems easily debunked by the many incredibly accomplished disabled artists in the world, many of whom have developed remarkable skills despite the challenges they face. Again anecdotally, it also seems like it’s rarely disabled artists actually making this argument, and much more frequently someone making it on their behalf.

There are examples of artists suffering disease or injury that made it impossible to continue creating art in the same way. Some are able to work around this. For some, using AI is an opportunity to gain some expressive ability back. But it is of a substantially different kind.

However, the frequent discussion of “lack of artistic skill” in these contexts is absurd to me. It implies that skill is inherent and not learned. It suggests that lack of effort or determination is on par with real disability, and that we should have pity on the would-be painter who hasn’t picked up a brush since grade-school and is offended that artists would dare deny them the tools to express themselves.

What these would-be artists fail to understand is that they are cheating themselves. They have not experienced the complex interplay between artist and art that is fundamental to the act of practiced creation. They believe that their AI-prompted art is giving them the same sensation, the same creative outlet, that the practiced artist gets from drawing or painting by hand. But it is only a shallow facsimile.

The artists are not trying to keep these people out of the walled garden of art. They are trying to get the prompters to understand that they are depriving themselves of a far richer experience by choosing the tool that seems more approachable.

Making Art

The sudden advent of tools that allow us to speak a few words and generate a painting is interesting and worrying and weird; embedded in complex and often problematic cultural and technological contexts. It’s that shocking sensation of science fiction suddenly become real.

Prompting AI clearly allows for some creative expression that influences the output, and that output can look quite competently rendered. But it is a fundamentally different and less expressive activity than traditional, “manual” forms of creation. It is less human. It should not be classed as the same thing as making art.

It also reveals broad cultural misconceptions about the artistic process, where only the final output is valued, and the process is not. That may sound cliché, but it is a meaningful cliché nonetheless. The process is valuable, and ignoring it is crass materialism and commodification of art; indifference to the meaning and mysticism of human creation.

Art can be sold, so corporations care about the output. They see artists and process only as a cost center. They have trained us on their viewpoint, to care only about the product (and it is purely a product to them). They call it “content,” so indifferent to the actual thing that it’s given this bland, meaningless label. The plain cardboard box of art.

I think I will have more to say on this subject, but I’ll stop here for now. I’d love to hear what other creatives think. Am I misrepresenting you? Do you see value in gen AI as a tool for artists? How much of the value of art is in the output vs. the process of creation? Let me know in the comments.

Reblog: The Anthropic Class Action Settlement — Writer Beware

As usual, Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware has some of the best coverage of the Anthropic settlement. If you haven’t been watching this lawsuit, the court determined that Anthropic’s AI training falls under fair use, but its illegal downloading of millions of books from pirating websites does not.

Anthropic apparently felt it was too risky and expensive to see the case to completion, with the real possibility of a judgement that falls close to the maximum statutory penalty of $150,000 per pirated work. That payout for even a fraction of the millions of books starts to look like the GDP of a small country. So they settled.

The settlement in this class action will likely grant a payout of roughly $3,000 per claimed work, but with a number of caveats. It only applies to works with proper copyright registration, currently estimated at around 500,000 books. The lawyers will get paid, and for books with a publisher who still holds rights, the publisher will also typically get about half.

If you think your work might be included, check the links from the article. There is an easy search function to see if your work was identified as pirated.

Writer Beware — The Anthropic Class Action Settlement

Unfortunately, many authors will be excluded due to the copyright registration requirement. Many self-published works, and even those with lazy “professional” publishers who never bothered to register their copyright cannot participate. For those who can, it will be months (and maybe longer) before any money sees the light of day.

Victoria also notes that this potentially record-breaking settlement is attracting the scavengers and parasites of the legal world.

Writer Beware — Predatory Opt Outs: The Speculators Come for the Anthropic Copyright Settlement

At least one law firm has targeted authors in the settlement class, trying to convince them to give up their right to participate in exchange for potential future lawsuits and the vague hope of a payout closer to the $150,000 maximum. Participants in the current lawsuit are already complaining that these advertisements and the website backing them amount to outright fraud.

Of course, the current settlement is just about guaranteed to pay something if you’re a qualifying author, and there is absolutely no guarantee that anyone opting out will get a better deal. This is a prime example of trading a bird in the hand for two in the bush.

That said, the current settlement terms are a lot less than many authors were hoping for. Part of the class-action structure gives legal right to any qualifying authors to opt out of the settlement if they have reason to think they can somehow get a better deal.

There are at least 50 other lawsuits pending against the big AI companies over copyright issues, and it’s quite possible that we haven’t heard the last word on the fair use issue, even if it’s not looking good so far for authors’ and publishers’ rights. Judging by the haphazard and questionable ways many of these companies have scraped the internet for training data, there may still be more big payouts yet to come.

Some Short Story Submissions

After focusing intensely on submitting short stories in 2024, I have to admit, I fell off hard in 2025. However, I haven’t been completely dormant. I’ve been writing a little and submitting a little, so I figured it’s about time for an update.

The Joy of Simultaneous Submissions

I have two stories out on submission right now, and both have been rejected a few times, mostly by big pro markets.

I submit to these big markets first, simply because an acceptance will come with a bigger check and more prestige. It would be fun to have my name on a cover that has been graced with genre greats; the magazines that I read when I was young.

Am I confident that my stories are a high enough caliber for those markets? No, but judging the quality of fiction is such a personal, opinionated thing, and doubly so when you’re the one who wrote it. So why not? It’s worth a shot.

The big magazines and websites can afford to be picky and demanding. They often have months-long slush pile backlogs, and don’t allow multiple or simultaneous submissions. Once you’ve submitted, your story could be in limbo for a quarter, six months, sometimes even longer. All for that <1% chance at a big acceptance.

The stories I have out right now are past all that. They had their shot. Now I’m submitting to lower-paying and less well-known markets. There are three reasons why this is nice.

There are a lot of them! Even in the face of limited reading windows, narrow topics/genres, and themed issues, most stories have at least a couple reasonable places to submit in a given month.
They have smaller slush piles, and that often equates to higher acceptance rates and faster responses.
Many of them accept simultaneous submissions, which means you can send a story to several places at once.

So even though I only have two stories I’m currently submitting, I’ve been able to make 11 submissions, which isn’t too bad.

Timing the Market

Another thing I’ve noticed is that there seem to be a lot of markets that open for submissions in the summer, and close at the end of July or August. There are reading windows all year round, but there are also these larger trends. December and January seem to be the worst times to submit, with so many people out on holiday in the US and Europe.

I still check the Duotrope themed submissions calendar and publishing news pages fairly frequently. Their “Fiction publishers that have recently opened to submissions” list is a great way to track reading windows without trying to keep tabs on all the markets in your genres. The theme deadlines list is easy to glance through to see if anything matches any of the stories that I’m currently shopping around.

Drafts and Critiques

I’m still very behind on my rough drafts and critiques. I wrote a couple stories this year, and I’m now sitting on four that are somewhere between “technically complete” and “needs a final polish.”

The downside of using Critters for critique is that I’m not very good at keeping up my three(ish) critiques per month, so when I have stories I want to submit, I tend to have to do a couple months of critiques to get caught back up. However, with my finished stories out on submission, I really have no excuse. Aside from revision being the toughest part of the job.

The rest of August is going to be busy. I have a family vacation planned for the end of the month, and the kids are back in school the week after.

I’ve set myself a lofty goal of trying to get all four stories edited before the end of the year. That works out to almost one story per month. Doesn’t sound too implausible…until you compare it to my track record for the year so far.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print. How is your summer writing going? Let me know in the comments.

Reblog: Contract Controversy (and Change) at Must Read Magazines — Writer Beware

I feel very out of the loop.

Apparently some of the longest-running genre fiction magazines still in print were bought up by a single entity at the start of the year: Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Unfortunately, print magazines feel like a relic of the past, and even though sci-fi/fantasy has managed better than most fiction markets, it’s a tough business to be in.

There is some hope, as the group that now owns these magazines at least claims to be in it for the love of the fiction and the community, and not just to leech the remaining value like most private equity. Still, simply combining several similar magazines under one operation probably isn’t enough to keep things profitable. It appears that part of the strategy will be to try to leverage stories and IPs beyond magazines. This is at the heart of recent contract controversies, with the company using some pretty broad legal language.

Twenty years ago, when I was first getting serious about writing, these magazines were the most prestigious places a sci-fi/fantasy author could place their story. They are now sadly diminished, but some of that prestige still lingers. Let’s hope that they can find ways to keep the lights on without taking advantage of their writers and tarnishing the reputations that made them so beloved.

Check out the full article at the link below.

Contract Controversy (and Change) at Must Read Magazines

What do you Want from Writing? — Quick Note

I’ve been reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, and I was struck by one of his anecdotes. He had secured a limited edition 500-book print run of a novelette with a small press. To promote the release, he arranged an interview with Wired.com, and a quick blurb on BoingBoing.com. To get these, he worked with the publisher to provide a link to a free download of the same story in PDF—a link that would eventually be clicked 20,000 times.

VanderMeer’s description of the back-and-forth of promoting his story wasn’t what surprised me, it was my own reaction to it. My first thought was that it was a bit of a waste. Surely some of those people downloading the story would have bought a physical copy, right?

He was pleased with this result, at least partly because it led to other opportunities down the road. But I had to interrogate my own reaction. Why did the free download strike me, at least initially, as a bad idea?

The answer, of course, has to do with money. My thought was that this is a fairly successful professional author. Why give work away? The actual answer is complex: the high number of downloads led to later opportunities, the promotion helped sell out the print run, and the market for novelette-length work is very limited (and was even more so ten or fifteen years ago when this occurred.) However, my own reaction made me wonder if I’ve become overly-fixated on getting paid as a measure of the value of writing.

Like many amateur authors, I’ve spent years wondering what it would take to be able to write as a full-time job. Writing is a competitive field, and on the whole, not well-paid. It’s no surprise that so many of us become laser focused on seeking any opportunities we can find. But is that really why we’re writing? Does getting paid do us any good if it becomes the reason to write?

I realize these are not new questions. Artists have always struggled to find balance between art and commerce, and that isn’t getting any easier in a world hell-bent on commodifying art into “content.”

It’s good to sit down every once in a while and think about priorities. Is it better to be paid, or be more widely-read? Is it better to be published, or to improve your craft? Better to write in the format that has a market and a readership, or in the format that interests you? Are you motivated by making the stories you love, or the ones someone else wants to read?

In short, what do you want from your writing?

Carter Vail’s Five Rules for Being An Artist

There’s a chance you’ve come across Carter Vail if you ever find yourself scrolling through Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, or the other short video platforms on the handful of social media sites that make up the modern internet.

He may be best-known for his goofy songs about eating coins, using karate against aliens, or protecting yourself from the Dirt Man, but his “real” songs have been in heavy rotation on my drive-time playlists.

He recently released a concise and honest how-to video for building a creative career. It’s tailored toward musicians, but most of the points he makes can be easily translated to other artistic endeavors.

Watch below, or click through to YouTube.

The List

Find an *art of your choice* community
Become indispensable to that community
Cash in favors to make *your kind of art* ferociously
Make people care
Stay in the game

Thoughts

It’s interesting to note right away that this list assumes art is a collaborative endeavor. It’s possible to be a solo singer-songwriter, but I think most people will agree that music is among the most collaborative of the arts, perhaps only behind TV and movies in the number of people who have to come together to make something.

Writers and painters are more likely to balk at this. Many of us are used to working alone. But even in the world of fiction, there are beta readers and writing groups and agents and editors and marketing people. You might find yourself writing for other media, for comics or RPGs or video games. As you progress and do more, chances are good that you’re going to have to interact with some or all of these people. No man is an island.

“Make people care” is innocuously simple at first glance, and immediately stands out as the hardest of these steps for most of us who have tried to do it. Today more than ever, there is an infinite abundance of art out there. It’s a struggle to be seen and connect.

I see the fifth step, “stay in the game,” as an extension of this. Rare is the artist who never thinks about giving up. Making people care takes time. You never know when (or if) your work will reach the right set of eyeballs. It may be tomorrow. It may be a decade from now. Do you give up or keep going, harder than ever?

As Carter says, “Stay in the game, make art, and put it out into the world.”

Monetizing Myself

Being a writer is strange. You have to be full of yourself to believe that others will want to read these things you’ve written, but you also need to be insecure enough to spend endless hours obsessively revising and improving those same things.

Gone are the days when a moderately successful writer could live out of a Parisian hotel. Now, you’re lucky if you don’t have to be your own marketing department and shell out thousands up front for an editor, while still holding down a day job.

Money and writing often feel like a Venn diagram that’s just two separate circles. The writerly split self-image is necessary here too. You’ve got to simultaneously think that someone might actually want to pay you, and continue working hard even when nobody does.

This is all a very roundabout way of explaining that I’ve added a new page to the menu where you can support me by buying things on Bookshop.org, signing up for Libro.fm, or directly sending me a dollar. I don’t expect that anyone is clamoring to give me their money just because I run this little blog, but now the option is there, just in case.

Monetization Options

That begs the question, what would I need to do to be “worthy” of a random dollar here or there from passing internet pedestrians?

In the modern futuristic gig economy, the cool thing to do would be to set up some kind of crowd-funding or techno-patronage system like a Kickstarter or a Patreon. I’d be interested in doing something like that some day, but it would require having a plan, a good sales pitch, and an exciting product or service provided on a deadline.

In the writing and fiction space, there are a few successful examples of this in print magazines and web zines. It varies from just another magazine subscription system to added bonus content or physical editions, to just regularly begging for donations. I also occasionally see individual authors monetizing, which usually involves either a Substack/Medium blog subscription, or a little storefront for selling self-published work.

The paid blog route really requires a time and effort investment in blogging or newsletters. That’s something I know I could do, because I’ve written fairly consistently and frequently for this blog in the past. However, it would make this feel more like a job—without any guaranteed paycheck. I enjoy blogging and the meta aspect of discussing everything writing-related, but I see it as a fun side project to my fiction. Monetizing the side project would force it to be the main project, and I don’t want fiction to be a side gig to the blog.

For the Patreon route, I’d want to send out fiction as a reward. I’d be hesitant to commit to something like a new story each month, but building up a set of 12 stories in advance sounds feasible. Heck, it could be a good way to give new life to stories that have already been published, without the hassle of trying to sell reprints to magazines or anthologies.

I could also see doing something with Razor Mountain, if I ever get around to properly revising it. A novel might be more appealing for some readers than a collection of short stories, and I could add in some of the material I documented about the process of writing a novel, which was the main appeal (at least to me) of that whole project.

Finding an Audience

Crowd funding doesn’t do any good without a crowd. The real challenge is getting any project like this in front of people who might be legitimately interested in it.

I’ve blogged long enough to know that it’s not easy to build an audience. Having work published and blogging with focus and consistency are probably the two best ways to build that, but there’s also a strong element of luck. Even with all three, it can take years or decades to find people, and it’s easy to lose them by shifting focus or just taking time off.

I have been hesitant to put any monetization on the blog because my audience just isn’t very big. On the other hand, it’s not clear when the right time is to start monetizing. My current thinking is that as long as it’s unobtrusive, it’s unlikely to turn people off, and I can start small and figure things out as I go.

What’s Next?

As usual, I’ll treat this as an experiment and try to be open about it in case the information is useful to others. I don’t have any specific plans and I don’t expect to add more monetization soon.

I’m interested to hear from any other bloggers/authors who are doing any kind monetization. What have you tried? What works or doesn’t work for you? Let me know in the comments.

7 Duotrope Tips and Tricks

Anyone who has been keeping up with the blog lately will know that 2024 is my year of short stories. I’ve been writing short fiction and submitting it to publications. As a result, I’ve been using Duotrope quite a bit.

Duotrope includes a database of publisher information and a submission tracker for authors. (It’s not the only one: Submission Grinder and Chill Subs are out there too. Duotrope is just the tracker I’ve been using.) So, I thought I’d write about a few tips and tricks that I’ve discovered that make the submission process a little easier.

1. Search by Title

The Duotrope publisher search has a lot of options, so you might be surprised (as I was), that there is no option for the actual title of a publication.

For some reason, Duotrope decided that this belonged in its own section. The “Find by Title/Name” option in the Search menu gives you the option of inputting a partial or exact name. If you don’t quite remember the name of a publication, you can also try searching by alphabetical index.

2. Find Publishers for a Piece

Once you’ve added a story to your Duotrope submission tracker, it will show up on your “List of Pieces” page under Account -> Pieces.

When the piece is ready to be sent out, you can always search for publishers by manually entering the length, genre, and other parameters. But you don’t have to.

Instead, just click the “Publishers” link next to your story on the “List of Pieces” page. This will automatically populate a search with the information you’ve entered in the piece’s description.

3. Publishing News

The Publishing News section of the site shows publishers that have been recently added. Since brand-new publications are inherently less well-known, they may represent a good opportunity to get a story in front of editors that are hungry for content, with relatively small slush piles.

Publishing News also has a section for publishers that have recently opened to submissions, which can be another good way to find fresh options, especially when those publications are only briefly open to submissions.

4. Track Themes and Deadlines

Some publications are only open for submissions during specific windows. This is especially true for themed issues or anthologies. Duotrope can track these submission windows and deadlines.

On a publisher’s detail page, general submission windows will be listed under the Dates heading, and specific themes will be listed under Theme(s). In each of these sections, there will be a Track link and a colored bubble listing the number of Duotrope users who are already tracking.

In the Account menu, you can visit “Themes and Dates” to see a convenient list of everything you’ve chosen to track.

5. Deadline Calendar

Whether or not you’re tracking any Themes or Deadlines, you can access the Theme and Deadline Calendar under the News section of the menu, or from the link at the top of the Theme tracking page.

By default, the calendar shows a list of all the themed submissions and deadlines in Duotrope, but you can filter by genre, payment, or your personal favorite publishers.

6. Overdue Responses at a Glance

Duotrope’s Submissions view shows information for all your tracked stories that are out on submission. It includes a trove of information, including some that makes it easier to decide if you need to follow up.

This view shows how many days each submission has been out, as well as the average response time reported by Duotrope users and the estimated response time provided by the publisher. But the status icon also has four different color options for pending responses.

Normally, the status is gray, but it will turn yellow if the submission has been out longer than the normal response time, and red if it exceeds the publisher’s stated response time. In some cases the publisher may state that they don’t always respond to submissions or don’t respond to status queries. In these cases, the icon will turn purple.

Of course, as with all things, you should confirm the publisher’s information on their website before blindly trusting Duotrope. It’s usually right, but occasionally there are discrepancies.

7. The Reports

Reports may sound dry and boring, but there are a few useful lists available there.

Authors who are sick of waiting for long response times can check the 100 fastest publishers to respond. Looking for feedback? Check the list of publishers most likely to send a personal response. Just trying to get a story accepted somewhere? Consider the list of publications with the highest reported acceptance rates.

What Else?

Do you use Duotrope? Are there any interesting features I missed? If you use a different tracker, I’d love to hear what they offer that Duotrope does not. Let me know in the comments.

Submission Fees for Short Fiction

There is a truism among authors that has been passed down for many years: “Money should always flow toward the writer.” In a world where many writers are desperate for recognition and the opportunity to be published and read, and where many unscrupulous people are happy to prey upon them, this is a good default attitude to have.

However, the publishing landscape has changed drastically in the decades since this truism was popularized. Traditional publishing, with its gauntlets of gatekeepers, is no longer the only path to success. Many choose to self-publish, and in self-publishing, sometimes it takes money to make money. Readers, editors, cover-artists and myriad other paid contractors are often used by successful self-published authors to polish their work and attract a wider audience.

I’ll admit that I’ve always been more focused on the traditional routes to publishing, so I was even more surprised to discover that fees paid by writers have crept into the world of short fiction as well. And this isn’t even self-publishing. It is now widely considered normal for literary magazines to charge several dollars in reading fees to authors who submit short stories for consideration, even when those journals pay little or nothing upon publication.

How Did This Happen?

In reading about this topic, I’ve come across a few explanations (or excuses) for this sea change. The audience for short fiction has been shrinking for years, stolen by games and movies and social media, so it’s harder to sell magazines. Publishing has always been a hard business, and it’s getting harder. Editors need fair compensation. Too many writers are submitting, and the slush pile is unmanageable.

There is no shortage of voices, both writers and editors, who claim that submission fees are “worth it.” Fees allow more literary journals to survive, which means more short fiction is published. These journals provide a valuable service: a place for up-and-coming writers to show off their work and grow their audience.

Publishing is not a business that moves quickly or embraces technology easily. That’s why Amazon was able to take over the ecosystem from publishers that dominated for decades. However, most of these journals have finally moved online in recent years. In fact, many no longer have any print presence whatsoever.

Many of the costs of running a journal are fixed: editors and readers are needed to trawl through the never-ending slush pile of submissions. Websites have maintenance costs. But there are also costs of printing that scale with the number of issues printed. Moving online should result in some sort of savings. So why are submission fees still becoming more popular?

There’s another reason for these fees, whispered wherever authors and editors gather: Submittable.

Fees as a Service

Submittable, according to its marketing, “streamlines workflows for publications of every kind, so you can get your content to more audiences, faster.”

Submittable is a private, VC-funded startup that provides software-as-a-service. I don’t think there are public numbers, but it’s likely that literary magazines are only a small part of their overall business.

For these journals, Submittable provides a means to accept, track, and respond to electronic submissions. No more piles of mail. No more paper manuscripts. Organize the slush pile, and send responses with a few clicks.

Sounds like a great thing. Except that Submittable makes its money by charging a fee for each submission it processes. This means that more submissions cost the journal more to process. Thanks to the pressure of these fees, Submittable’s business model often becomes the journal’s business model.

Cause and Effect

I don’t find the pleas for understanding from editors particularly sympathetic. They suggest that editors consider their own difficulties more important than any hardship their writers might face. I’ve seen more than one editor suggest that it’s unreasonable for writers to be mad. After all, don’t their staff deserve to be paid a living wage? Never mind that even full-time writers often don’t make enough to get over the poverty line.

Are these editors publishing as a side-job? It’s not uncommon. But it’s still uneven treatment to suggest that their side-gig deserves pay more than the authors that actually fill their publication.

I’m even less sympathetic toward submission fees when the journal doesn’t pay upon acceptance. What other profession requires the people producing the work to pay? This only makes sense under the assumption that art doesn’t hold any real economic value.

Is it really a valuable service to show off the work of upcoming writers while costing them money? If the publication isn’t being read enough to actually make money, how effectively is it promoting these writers? There are tons of ways authors could put their own work out into the world effectively for free, so the value of a journal must be prestige a or gatekeeper that ensures quality.

Nowhere else in publishing is this considered acceptable. Authors with a book in hand are warned never to work with an agent who requires up-front fees. Agents take a cut of the actual profit as motivation to get their clients a good deal. Book publishers who charge authors up-front fees are condescendingly referred to as “vanity presses.” So what makes short fiction (and especially short literary fiction) different?

Misaligned Incentives

Publishing works best when all the incentives align with the goal of creating a good product. A publication that relies on purchases and subscriptions from readers is incentivized to provide the most satisfying product to those readers. When less of the overall budget comes from readers, the incentives change. A hypothetical magazine that makes all its money from submission fees is incentivized to maximize the number of submissions, not the number and satisfaction of readers. It wouldn’t matter if the magazine had no readers, if they could convince authors to keep submitting.

Reading fees also skew publishing even more toward the privileged, and add yet another obstacle for struggling writers. A $2-3 fee isn’t a lot, but it is an emotional, mental, and sometimes very real financial barrier that a writer must overcome to submit. Determined writers aren’t submitting a couple times. They’re submitting dozens of times, sometimes for a single story. Fees add up.

Some publications have fee-free periods, or reduced and waived fees for specific underprivileged groups. This is a good thing, because it tries to address the problem, but it only goes so far. It’s a half measure that admits there is an issue, while only offering a partial solution.

But What Are The Alternatives?

It’s not easy to run a small publication. But that doesn’t make it ethical or justified to charge writers. Writers may seem like an infinite resource, and they are often abused because it is easy to do so.

For many writers, making a living (or something closer to a living) involves diversifying their income streams. They take writing contracts or work as journalists, copy-editors and proofreaders. To survive in challenging times, publications need to also diversify and be clever about their income streams. Luckily, we live in a time where there are a lot of ways to diversify.

Patreon, Kickstarter, and other crowd-funding platforms make it possible to build a community where the people who care about what you do can contribute directly to it. Many publications crowd-fund their regular issues and kickstart anthologies or other special editions. This requires good community engagement and providing a product that people like.

I’ve seen a few publications with optional submission fees. This is another form of patronage where authors who are well-off can offset the costs for those who aren’t. This can also take the form of payment for feedback, which is sometimes a nice option for those who are looking to improve their craft and struggling to understand why they aren’t landing more stories.

Merch, ads and sponsorships are other possible avenues for funding, all with their own upsides and downsides. With all these options, it’s easy to forget the original and simplest business model for literary journals: readers paying for stories. This can take the form of subscriptions, per-issue pricing, freemium models, and a million other variations.

Dumping Submittable

When it comes to Submittable, with its problematic fees, I think there’s a straightforward way to make things better. Just stop using it.

The speculative fiction (sci-fi/fantasy/horror) community is lucky to have an unusually high percentage of tech-savvy people working in it. There’s a reason why we have sites like Critters. Unlike other communities, spec-fic has pretty much completely eschewed Submittable. Instead, they’ve worked together and pooled resources to build tools like Moksha, or the Clarkesworld submission system. And none of them charge submission fees.

Don’t Settle

I come at this topic with a biased perspective. I’m a writer, and I don’t like paying fees to submit my work. But I don’t think it’s biased to say that submission fees for short fiction have a negative effect on readers, writers, and publishers. They might be the easiest solution to a hard problem, but that doesn’t make them the correct solution.

Writers shouldn’t excuse submission fees as a necessary evil. We should expect more from literary journals, even if that means these publications need to explore a creative mix of funding solutions to remain viable. Rather than accepting overpriced tools like Submittable, publications should work together on community tools that serve the community’s needs.

Writers and editors should be pursuing the same goals: a vibrant, healthy fiction ecosystem that not only produces great art, but also values that art and the writers producing it.

(Don’t) Write Every Day

Last week, in the second post of my series on writing short stories, I had already missed my weekly goals. Hardly the end of the world, but I was still a little disappointed in myself.

I have a notebook from NaNoWriMo that says “Write Every Day” on the cover. It’s exactly the thing that NaNoWriMo advocates. It might be the most commonly given writing advice. After all, if you want to be prolific, you’re going to need to write a lot. Right?

Well, yes and no.

The reason we have this mantra is because it’s hard. Most of us don’t write every day, even if we aspire to. However, simple aphorisms usually obscure a more complicated truth. Writing every day doesn’t guarantee success, and success doesn’t require writing every day.

The Self-Designed Job

Most of us who write fiction on spec are writing entirely on our own. There is no job description, no education or work history requirements. Nobody evaluated our resumes. We woke up one day and decided to write. Even those of us who have more formal writing jobs are often freelancers or contractors.

It can be powerful to choose your own goals and working hours. It can also be difficult. It’s not as simple as going into the office 9–5. It’s not as easy as having work handed down from a boss. Being self-directed means there are no defined boundaries to the job. You can work too little, or far too much.

I realized a few years ago that I was always setting goals for myself, and almost never satisfied with my own achievement. My performance reviews for my self-defined job were consistently bad. But this is really just my own personality issue. It doesn’t actually reflect my performance. Understanding that, I can more easily recognize that feeling and let it go.

Writing is More Than Writing

It’s not surprising how many writers hate talking about their own work, or trying to sell it. We write because we love writing, not because we want to do writing-adjacent business stuff. Unfortunately, that’s not the real world. If you want people to read what you’re writing, there’s probably some amount of business and self-promotion that needs to be done.

Beyond that, writing is more than putting words on the page. There’s work to be done before the first draft, coming up with ideas and refining them. There’s work to be done after, revising and editing. There are classes, books, and blogs about craft.

There is even the undefinable work of being out in the world, observing people and things, having the experiences that will inform the work. Fiction can only be as interesting as the inner world of the author. That stew of ideas requires ingredients and time.

I’ve even found blogging or journaling to be incredibly useful for my writing. Sometimes experience isn’t enough; it takes reflection to unlock that understanding. I can’t count the number of times that writing about my process resulted in exciting new ideas.

Moving Toward the Mountain

If you’re like me, and you have that voice in the back of your head that complains when you’re not writing “enough,” there are a few things you can do to address it. Make a list of all the things that contribute to the writing. Include things like ideation, editing, and critique. Include that fun business stuff, whether it be sending work to traditional publishers, working on self-publishing, or something as mundane as accounting for taxes. Include reflection, like blogging or journaling.

Ask yourself honestly if you’re allocating enough time to rest, recharge, and feed that stew of ideas that will, in turn, feed your stories. Don’t be afraid of taking a break, or even a vacation. If you want writing to be a “real” job, it should come with sick days and vacation time.

When pursuing goals, there are a lot of different ways to move toward the mountain. Sometimes the path isn’t straight. We have to put words to paper if we’re going to be writers. But not necessarily every day.