For a number of years now, reading fees have been a hot topic in the writing community. Why should we be paying to be rejected? These fees have become a norm, with many prestigious (and not so prestigious) journals succumbing to relying on the writers looking to be published for their support.

Some of these journals are struggling just as hard as the writers, and use the fees, as advertised, to pay for things like the use of Submittable and their WordPress account. They charge about $3 per submission, which adds up quickly but individually is less than we would spend on a coffee. Other journals are not so honorable, charging as much as $20 dollars for submissions to contests that never declare—or reward—a winner. 

The debate on reading fees is a circular one that has gone around in the industry until no new argument feels new anymore. Besides, the debate has essentially resolved itself into a reluctant acceptance of reading fees, considering how prevalent they have become. However, I want to introduce something I didn’t see in these spiraling disputes: my ideas for a possible solution. People are always eager to say they don’t like something, or see it as a problem, but solutions are precious currency.

The core of my solution? Revenue from the readers rather than the writers.

I posit that we can be both true to ourselves and our art, and make the money needed to survive. 

Lit mags and journals are not a lucrative business. In fact, many would argue that they are no business at all—the vast majority are non-profits running on donations and grant money. Persistence and goodwill. The consumption of that kind of media just isn’t very popular anymore. So, they stay alive any way they can. Volunteer staff, reading fees, not paying contributors. 

It still feels criminal to financially gatekeep publication that way. I’m luckier than many in that, as a grad student, my parents still help me pay bills. However, I can still only afford to send out a couple of submissions per season, unless I limit myself to the rapidly dwindling number of free-submission journals. I’m a student. I hardly have $10 for Taco Bell, let alone $30 that I may as well be taking a match to for my likelihood of publication. 

I have paid more than $60 dollars in submission fees for my three instances of publication, without payment in return. According to an anonymous article in Lit Mag News,

“A writer submitting work who is trying to place multiple pieces is easily looking at spending at least $200 a season.”

Four seasons in a year, that makes about $800 a year in reading fees, when most journals these days either don’t pay at all, or pay in a free copy and $10. Writers are paying to write, instead of being paid to write.

But, if the publications are struggling just as much as the writers, it feels a bit like a zero-sum game. I can’t really fault them for asking less than it costs to get a coffee. Still doesn’t mean I can afford it though. I have been stuck as an “emerging writer” for almost five years because I can only afford to submit so many pieces, and the small journals willing to look at unpublished writers are the ones more likely to need those reading fees to survive. So, what’s the solution?

I think there are different solutions depending on the publication, because something that works for a print journal might not work for a solely online journal and vice-versa, but the most interesting to me is the dynamic paywall. What if the lit mag industry took a page out of journalism’s book?

More than a few publications see not insignificant success this way. Dagens Nyheter, a major Swedish newspaper, gets 78% of its revenue from its readers using a dynamic paywall model. One of their main strategies is opening up free content options before and during major events. For instance, offering free subscriptions to first-time voters during election year, or dropping all paywalls blocking COVID-19 coverage during the depths of the pandemic. More than 30% of the subscribers that signed up for free before the election were converted to paying subscribers after.

I took a look at a couple of successful literary journals that still charge reading fees—Ploughshares and The New England Review. Both already have subscription models, but they are very static. At Ploughshares there are three subscription options: print copies (4 issues per year) and access to the archive, just access to the archive, or digital issues (for Kindle, Nook, or Kobo). At The New England Review, you can purchase a year’s subscription (also four issues), or single copies. Both also have free online content. 

However, their subscription rates are prohibitive to lower-income readers and online-only readers. What if they had more options? Ploughshares could offer lower archive access rates to students. The New England Review could do a newsletter subscription of issue sneak-peaks. Both could have part of their issues only accessible to subscribers, and have more varied levels of subscription than “all of all four issues or nothing.”

Of course, these dynamic paywalls raise their own issues of software and staff to manage it, but we have a plethora of cheap or free rising services in the creator world that could be easily adapted to serve that purpose, such as Patreon or Substack, and that use the self-same dynamic models. Tiny journals could get by on free versions or cheap personal plans, larger ones on the more expensive, more powerful “premier” or professional versions.

None of us like talking revenue, but writers and editors are still human, and still have to eat. It’s a sort of industry social norm to consider art and business as antitheses of each other–if you consider revenue, monetization, and how to live off your art you have “sold out.” I disagree. We still have to eat. I posit that we can be both true to ourselves and our art, and make the money needed to survive.