This week on the CLMP listserv all the other magazine and journal editors have been talking about money. Seriously, sixty emails in one day, all about money. Specifically, about how to make more of it, what demographics these magazines can target for donations, etc. Someone suggested that magazines all band together - under one umbrella organization - and start standing up for themselves by asking regular submitters to send in a reading fee with their work.

Money is the perennial issue at most literary magazines, so this idea isn't as off the wall as it initially seems. There's absolutely never enough money to go around. If a lit mag is part of a university, you can be sure that it gets the shaft almost continuously, getting funding only after every other organization has gotten theirs. If the journal isn't part of an institution, it is constantly struggling to milk money out of various under-funded arts commissions and grant-making programs.

I completely understand the concept fo reading fees for literary contests. Our Wabash Prize for Fiction has a $10 reading fee, and this goes to the overhead necessary to run the contest. We have to pay postage and copy fees for advertising, we have to have lots and lots of man hours in order to deal with the influx of submissions. Reading them and determining finalists takes time, and then it's traditional to offer a "celebrity" judge a small honorarium for their time.

But a reading fee for regular submissions? I would condone it if authors got some kind of service in return for the fee - brief comments and criticisms, for example. But to ask for reading fees in order to boost income seems full of hubris. As a writer myself, I'm not looking for an editorial service, I'm looking to offer work to a magazine for possible publication. And as an editor, I see the submissions we recieve as an honor - it is our good fortune to be able to read the submissions we recieve and to put together a magazine of the best ones.