This is in response to posts regarding low paying fiction markets in SF magazines.
Well, I guess it was inevitable that I would disagree fundamentally with your post, Neil, and with Von Post ( a coincidentally aptly named poster of a comment on Neil's post). As an editor who does not pay professional rates to the slush pile, that is inevitable. But I am also a writer who has sold his work for pennies and been happy to do so for the exposure and the possible feedback and the chance to be seen and read and for reasons too many to enumerate (thank God for the spell checker on this thing).
But, like life and business, there is a food chain in the marketplace and everyone should have a chance to find a place in it. Why should amateurs and wannabees be paid the same as professionals. They aren't in any other business. When you're starting out people don't want to pay you the full rate until you have proved yourself. It's only natural. Also, there are businesses that can only afford to pay minimum wage. This may be because of profit margins in the industry or overseas competition or whatever. But their failure to pay top whack doesn't mean they are not doing a valid or even vital job in their market or within a given economy. So lighten up guys. If there was no-one paying low rates then there would be no premium market for the big fish to inhabit. Surely everyone being paid the same rate smacks of (I'll call it) socialism. But everyone is not equal in our Western society. And I believe that the best people should get the best pay. And just because someone doesn't offer the best pay rates does not mean that their market lacks validity or worth.
There are a lot of e-zines out there who pay pro rates. And that's fine - even if they do not present the writer with an actual product to hold in his hand and to archive. I happen to like hard copy and believe it has a value. That is why Albedo One has remained as a hard copy item even though the costs of production are outrageous and it costs more to post a copy from Ireland to the outside world than it does to actually purchase some magazines. But people like what we do (some of them) and some writers feel it is worthwhile to support our efforts even though our rates of pay are poor.
We have been struggling to keep our hard-copy magazine afloat in difficult circumstances in a minute market (about four million people live in Ireland) and we do it for no pay - yes we're amateurs - because we believe in what we're doing. I'm sorry so many people, writers and non-writers feel so strongly negative about low paying magazines. You have not shaken my resolve, but you have left me feeling saddened and absolutely unappreciated.
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On this end, you appear to be under the impression that I've called some sort of jihad against smaller and/or non-pro paying markets. This isn't true, as I've noted on my site.
ReplyDeleteThat said, there are a number of things you assert here which I find rather arguable. Among them:
"When you're starting out people don't want to pay you the full rate until you have proved yourself."
I've never been paid less than the "full rate" (which we may assume here is the SFWA qualifying rate) because a) I intentionally chose not to submit to venues that paid less, and b) because WHO you are in fiction is rather less important than whether the STORY meets the venue criteria. It's the story that's being sold, not the writer him or herself.
Making sale selection about the writer rather than the story is a fallacy, given the general selection process at most venues. My first story was paid "full rate" because it worked for the venue and the paid pro rates. This was in 2001, when no one knew who I was.
"If there was no-one paying low rates then there would be no premium market for the big fish to inhabit."
This makes really no sense at all, I'm afraid. The pro-paying venues exist independently of the smaller venues; they do not rely on them economically, of course, and as I've pointed out, it's not in the least necessary to "work one's way up" through lower-paying venues to submit to (and to be accepted by) better-paying markets, so long as one's work is of sufficient quality.
In any event in a general sense the economic migratory path of a story is from the higher-paying markets to the smaller-paying ones, as most writers prefer to get paid as much as possible for their work, and if that's not possible, then to move down the economic ladder. That being the case, there's an argument to be made that without the "premium" markets, the lower-paying markets might not exist, as their submission pool is often the work NOT selected by better paying venues.
Now, in the real world, it's more complicated than either your assertion or my argumentative counterassertion suggests; in either case it's not wise to assert the existence of one tier of publication survives because of another.
"I believe the best people should get the best pay."
Surely you mean that the best *work* should get the best pay? Because in my opinion it should be about the work, not about the writer, except in a distaff way, in that the writer has developed skills as a storyteller and has done the basic fiduciary duty of exploring the market to find the best and most desirable venues for his or her work. That said, the *best* work for a venue can come from anywhere -- including from a writer whom no one has ever heard of before. That work deserves to be judged on its merits, not its writer, or that writer's overall experience.
John,
ReplyDeleteNone of the arguments can avoid the fundamental point that if many of these webzines or magazines were paying the SFWA rate, they would have gone out of business (if what you call doing work for free producing a magazine and NEVER getting any pay as an editor is a business).
I know you're not declaring a jihad on small magazines, but reading some of the responses on your blog and at SFSignal, it certainly feels like that's what happened, from the perspective of someone who actually produces these magazines.
As an editor of Albedo One, I feel we have published some great work in our time, and maybe some not-so great work. Others have occasionally widely agreed that some of the stories we've published have been great. I think our existence is validated by the fact that some of the work we've published has been great.
I am 100% sure that most of those stories were submitted first to much bigger and better-paying magazines (makes sense for an author), but weren't accepted there. I'm sure we weren't the second place that these stories were submitted to, nor the third... but probably down near the end of the list, near where the authors in question would have given up submitting those particular stories for publication.
So some of these stories would probably never have seen the light of day unless we had existed to publish them. We were able to exist because we a) didn't pay SFWA rates and b) didn't pay ourselves as editors ANYTHING AT ALL. I'm sure that many semi-prozines are in a similar position.
You're a great writer. No need to argue about that. And maybe you were from the first story you ever submitted for publication to a pro market. But many others have taken time to build their skills and reputation. I think it would have been a great loss if after submitting to the pro markets but being rejected, that they then just let those particular stories sit in their drawers and rot, because they have ran out of pro markets to submit to. It's worth pointing out that some of these stories can be very worthy indeed. Being rejected from the pro markets does not always mean that your story was worse than the ones these markets accepted.
I know, again, that you are NOT telling authors not to submit to semi-prozines, indeed, you're not telling them to do anything. But you may have noticed by now that what you say holds weight for many people, and again, on the evidence of the responses to your posts and over at SFSignal, there are now many people claiming it is not worth submitting to markets paying below the pro-rates. I'm not trying to blame you for this. At least some of these people probably felt this way before your post.
But I would echo Bob Neilsons statement that this leaves me feeling quite saddened. We may only ever have been paying a token rate to writers. But we never paid anything to ourselves.
Frank, I had never even considered the fact that editors and publishers at magazines like Albedo One don't get paid. Getting paid for what I do as an editor never even crossed my mind.
ReplyDeleteSo why should writers published by a magazine get paid more than the editor?
In fact why should editors who are not in it for the money pay writers at all?
If anyone reading this is bothered to do some digging I've got a question. Two in fact:
How many markets are there for fiction (SF/Horror/Fantasy specifically) that pay the FULL PRO RATE.
How many markets currently paying FULL PRO RATE have existed for longer than Albedo One.Maybe if I'm still around I can ask that question again in five years.
Sorry, I missed out the question marks in my last post.
ReplyDeleteSo, here's a couple.
ReplyDelete??