#poetryhasvalue

Interview: 

Your name(s), your journal, your position with the journal, journal website:

We are Nicole Brewer and William Kemp, founding editors of the micropress words(on)pages. We started publishing our bi-monthly literary magazine, (parenthetical), in May 2014, and just published issue five. You can find all the info about (parenthetical) at wordsonpagespress.com/parenthetical.

We’re Canadian, which feels like it’s worth mentioning, but may not actually be significant.

Tell us a little bit about your literary journal: 

We’re a two-person team running an independent print and online-based bi-monthly literary journal that we hand-make ourselves—binding, trimming, all that fun stuff. We publish short literary fiction, poetry from the visual and experimental and weird to the highly personal, and non-fiction focused on Canadian literature in an attempt to help the CanLit community grow. We also focus on emerging artists (our tagline is “for emerging artists, by emerging artists” after all), because we feel that they’re undervalued and underappreciated in Canadian literature. As a mandate, we try to publish at least one person per issue that has never been published before, and someone under the age of 21.

In a world where literary markets don’t often pay poets, why did you decide to do so?

We’re both writers, one poet and one fiction writer who’s dabbled in poetry, and we’re also both recent graduates trying to get a job in publishing. It’s pretty exhausting to devote your whole adult life so far to doing these things, and at every corner, people are expecting you to do it for free: blog for free, unpaid internships, non-paying markets, and so on. After a number of interviews for impossible unpaid or barely-paid internships, and after one incredible volunteer opportunity at the small Canadian press BookThug, we realized it’s bullshit to ask people to do things for free. So we knew from the start that we would never do that. We know our payment isn’t much, and we’re always sure to tell people it’s just a token payment, to encourage them not to write for free, and to feel like they really do deserve to be paid for their work. 

What are the funding sources for your magazine?

This is all out of pocket with a little (read: a lot) of help from a very, very nice brother who covered the initial costs of buying our printer. We’re looking into grants/will be eligible for grants soon, but the actual production costs are all paid for out-of-pocket. We don’t just do this literary magazine. We also have a monthly reading series where we launch each issue as it comes out, and that is pay-what-you-can for artist expenses. We pay the readers a set amount, and then try to make up that cost with the pay-what-you-can, and we try to use the money from journal sales to cover its production costs—which we initially pay for ourselves. We almost break even or break even on each issue, and we get most of our money back—between 50 and 75 per cent—at the launches of the issues themselves, with the rest trickling in from online sales: contributors picking up a few copies at a discount, or people picking up an issue after word of mouth gets around.

We also get a pretty good number of sales at fairs like Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market or Word on the Street or Canzine—we make our table back and then a bit more. Our endeavours by no means pay for themselves, but we generally makes up whatever we’ve put into the journal (and other projects we have going on). Maybe 15 to 20 per cent of our income comes from fairs—they’re more so a means of exposure, and being happy we’ve made our table back, more than going out there and expecting to make a buttload of money.

The rest of our income comes from subscriptions—admittedly, not much, but we’re a new publication that only just came out with subscriptions. Our publication comes out in both print and online. Anyone can read our issue for free online, and much of our “fanbase” is in Toronto where they can come and pick up an issue at our launches, so it isn’t too surprising right now that we don’t get a lot of our income from subscriptions.

What does your journal pay for accepted poems? 

We offer every contributor a token payment of $15, whether that’s for a story or a poem or artwork or whatever. It took a few tries to get the model right: at first we offered $10 for each poem and $15 for each story or piece of art, and every contributor got a free copy of the issue. That lost us a ton of money, and we realized it was stupid to have a $5 difference between fiction and poetry: all it did was tell poets their work was less valuable, since it’s not like $5 really made a difference to either them or us. So then we started giving every contributor $15, but no issue—they can buy it at a discount, for $10. So now, for the last two issues and going forward, we’re offering people the $15 token payment, or they can get a copy of the issue and $5, and most people opt for that.

If it were up to us, we’d pay, like, $500 per poem (or story, or review, or piece of art, or whatever) if we could, but as we said before, we do this out of pocket without any kind of grant money at the moment. We’d like to pay more, but we can’t simply due to our current financial situation. We feel very, very, very strongly about not taking art for free, though, so we try to offer as much as we can whilst still being able to keep words(on)pages afloat.

What is your acceptance rate for poetry?  Do you think that acceptable rate is in any way affected by your pay model?  Do you think the number of submissions you receive is affected by your pay model?

Since we are primarily a print publication, we’re doing this out of pocket, and we are making a handbound product, we have our limitations on how much work we can fit into each issue. We probably get about 50-60 poetry submissions per issue and accept between 5-8 poems per issue—so something like 15 per cent? Sometimes we’ll hold onto a poem (or anything, really) for an upcoming issue if we really, really, really like it but can’t fit it into issue at the time because of aforementioned spatial constraints.

Our acceptance rate definitely is also influenced by how much we pay, but just as much, if not maybe more so, our acceptance rate is influenced by the physical nature of our publication. And we wouldn’t want to divide our publication into an “online” vs. “print” thing where, say, more work would be published in the online version. That would feel like we were cheating the readers of our print publication, as well as the contributors. We pride ourselves on the fact that our publication is not only producing awesome work, but a literary journal that looks and feels good—that our publication is worth the money people are willing to spend on it. We’re going off on a tangent now. But we’d say that our acceptance rate is just as much influenced by the physical nature of our publication—we can only fit so many pieces, and accepting more or fewer pieces would change the way the publication looks and feels; as it stands right now, we’re not really into that.

As for whether our number of submissions is affected by our payment model? We don’t know, really. It surprised us to hear that a lot of poets were surprised we paid at all—for both the publication and our reading series. Maybe a poet here or there will look at our publication and decide not to submit to us because we don’t pay “enough”, but we try to be as transparent as we can be with why we pay what we do, and a lot of people are just as into being part of the community we’re a part of as they are getting paid for their work. A lot of poets want to be a part of this publication and the discussion that it contributes to—we’re part of a big, weird Canadian family that fosters emerging voices and people seem to like that. A lot of people are submitting to contribute to this community, and payment is just very appreciated, it seems; and that’s a cool thing.

We’re only just coming up on our one year anniversary and we’re a two-person team out of Toronto and our submission numbers have been steadily increasing each issue without much actual need for, say, marketing, or calls for submissions, so all things considered, we must be doing something right, no?

If your journal charges for submission fees, tell us why you chose that route, how it’s worked out and what you think about that system:

We don’t charge submissions fees. We give feedback on every submission, and colleagues have recommended we start charging fees for that, but that just seems insane.  Our main goal in all of this is to create a community of emerging writers that values their own work and the work of their colleagues, that understands you get out what you put in, and is willing to go above and beyond the norm in order to get the same in return. So we want to go above and beyond, get people involved in this process, knowing full well lots of these writers are doing it in their spare time, making their money at some crappy retail job, working just as hard as us but with a bit less experience, and fewer connections. They’re sending a piece of their life to us, right? So the least we can do in our rejection notes is say, “Hey, thank you so much for trusting us with this. We have to pass on it, but here’s why.” And that seems like common courtesy to us, not something we should charge for.

With a contest, say, we might since we don’t have grants yet, but we would strive to be transparent about why we were charging—to cover the cost of paying our winners—and we would offer every single entrant something valuable in return for that fee: detailed, in-text feedback on their writing, and comments on the quality of the submission itself.

Do the staff and editors of the journal receive any compensation?  If not, how did the decision come about to pay writers and not those who work at the magazine?

We receive compensation in the sense that we might take a few bucks here and there and treat ourselves to a coffee. As we said before, the money we make goes back into covering our expenses. And we aren’t against paying our staff (read: ourselves) so much as we’re just a two-person team that’s trying to do something we love and keep making enough money to make sure words(on)pages can sustain itself so we can keep doing something we love. If we were a bigger team or we had a wider readership, we’d certainly make sure that we or anyone who worked with us was compensated. We’ve had to turn down inquiries to intern with us or work with us because we didn’t want to put someone in a situation where we wouldn’t be able to pay them. It’s meant more work for us, certainly, but we’d feel like hypocrites if we “hired” someone and didn’t pay them when we’re all about valuing people’s times and effort and compensating them for it, whether that’s submissions readers, designers, proofreaders, or any of those seemingly “essential” staff.

What advice (whether concrete, logistical, philosophical or all three) can you offer editors who would like to switch their journal from a non-paying model to a paying model?  And are there any particular resources you suggest they check out?

First, we would offer encouragement! It seems like there are a lot of grants out there that are pretty accessible if you’ve demonstrated a willingness to pay your writers, perhaps to the detriment of the staff, so probably one bit of advice would be to persevere, and not lose hope. Because another bit of advice is to just do it out of pocket for a year—maybe that means the editors take a cut to their wages or salaries, maybe that means the page count has to go down for those issues to cut production costs, maybe the number of contributors has to shrink. Probably, all of those things will happen. But it’s worth it, right? Because it’s going to help get the ball rolling. We’d probably also advise not to get hung up on how much you can offer, at first. Like we said, we only pay $15 a poem. That’s not enough for anything. But we try to do other things to make up for that, and it seems to be going a long way. So if a journal wanted to start paying writers, but could only pay $10 a poem, just figure out other, less tangible ways to make up the extra $10, $20, $50 you wish you could pay them.

Perhaps most importantly: be prepared to lose money. Maybe not a lot, but definitely some. And if they’re like, “Well why should I lose money so that other people can make money?” follow that up with, “Why should I be making money while the people who literally fill the pages of this journal I run not get paid?” If it’s a labour of love for them, it’s a labour of love for us and hopefully you, too. Particularly because they and us are often one in the same.

What advice would you give to those starting a literary magazine who don’t plan to pay writers?   What about to those starting a literary magazine who do plan to pay writers?:

For those who don’t plan to pay their writers: Don’t. That sounds harsh, but simply don’t. If you are planning on not paying your writers, you better have a damned good reason for it. For example, we know of a publication that doesn’t pay its writers, but it also distributes a print issue for free with a desire to spread awesome literature far and wide and any money it gets is to make up for its print costs. We know that its editors are all for paying people for their art, though, and we’re confident if they could afford to do so, they would. If you’re not paying your writers for any other reason than you can’t afford to do so at the moment, then don’t start up a literary magazine.

For those wanting to start a literary magazine that plans to pay your writers: first off, you are awesome. A million thank yous. For at least a little while (at least a year, maybe even a bit longer), expect to operate at a loss or near-loss. Unfortunately, publishing a literary magazine isn’t going to make you a billionaire. Also, be honest and transparent. If you can’t pay much, say why. If you have a submission fee to cover your contributor costs, say why. People really appreciate honesty and transparency.

Also, it sounds simple and “marketing-y”, but you need some kind of physical product if you’re going to try to pay your contributors. It is virtually impossible to make money as an online-only publication because people on the internet love not paying for things. You also need quite a reputation to say “You have to pay to read our articles.” And when you’re starting out, you probably don’t have that kind of reputation. So hand-bind your issues, or get in touch with a local printer. It will not only get a tangible product out there and get people talking about your publication, but it’s really fun and rewarding to put together a publication. You can also forge an awesome identity and platform as a publisher with a distinct, rad publication. Set your publication apart and give people a reason to feel like they ought to buy it so you can take that money and pay your writers.

The Poetry Has Value project was created to spark conversation about poetry, money and worth, since it seems taboo to consider poetry in terms of financial compensation.  Why do you think this taboo exists?

Money has always been a taboo subject, whether it’s in relation to poetry or not. And when money gets tied up in art, it seems like it’s really easy for people to cry “sellout!” or “shallow!” and that kind of thing. We get to look back at our inspirations and tell ourselves, “Those people were writing because they couldn’t stop, because they had important things to say and they just needed to say them,” and we don’t want to taint that image of our idols by imagining them craving payment for their work. And hey, a lot of them didn’t even make a lot of money from their work until after they’d died. So when you’re a poet wanting to be the next Ginsberg, the next Whitman, the next Plath, the next cummings, you don’t want to make it seem like you also want to make money off of it. “I’m doing it for the sake of poetry,” we want to say.

But of course we are, that’s why we’re writing it. That’s why we’re publishing it. That’s why we’re putting our own money into it. Why the hell would you write poetry unless you felt like you just couldn’t stop writing poetry? Why else would you publish poetry unless you loved poetry? Mainstream fiction writers like Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk and J. K. Rowling and countless others have given elitists—because let’s be honest, many literary writers and poets are at least a little bit elitist—an example to dangle in front of writers who want to get paid: “See what happens when you get rich off writing? You sell out! You can’t be honest anymore! You shouldn’t want that!” And it’s especially hard for poets, because the audience is often so much smaller and so much more critical than the audience for fiction, even for literary fiction.

We pay people for their “services”—cooks, mechanics, athletes, whatever it may be—and poets serve us in the sense that they give us poems that we enjoy reading, that we enjoy hearing, that inspire us. And these people need to, you know, eat food, so why shouldn’t we pay them for toiling away for hours upon hours writing and editing and in the end, producing something that we read and love?

What, if anything, do you think could help change the system in place now? Whether as writers, editors, readers or just people: what can we concretely do to work toward a system that compensates poets for their work?

Exactly what you’re doing here: talk about it, make a personal commitment to change it on an individual scale, and encourage other people to do the same. We go to undergrad classes—and we hope to go to high school classes in the future—to present workshops on how to value yourself and succeed as an emerging writer (among other things): a key part of those workshops is “the tricky non-answer to the ‘should I write for free?’ question.” And we always say no, you shouldn’t. But if you do, think really, really hard about why you’re doing it—so we think everyone, regardless of their role, just has to start thinking a lot more critically about how we talk about, spend, and expect money in this industry. Supporters have to be ready to actually purchase work, with real money. Publishers and editors have to be ready to take a hit in order to be more equitable in how their meagre resources are distributed. And writers have to feel like they can take a stand—not just by publicly lamenting how shitty it is to not get paid, but by demanding payment. We’re all in the same boat, and it’s almost certainly sinking. Don’t hog the goddamn life jackets. 

Would you like to highlight a piece from your journal that you’ve especially loved lately?  

The second fear was that this project would appear to negatively judge publishers and editors who run non-paying journals, or poets who submit work to them. This fear was much harder to overcome, because I can deal all day with people looking at me negatively, but I hate the idea of people thinking I judge or look negatively on them when I don’t.  And I really hate the idea that the many amazing editors who have published my poetry might think I’m that worst of all qualities: ungrateful.  

Because, holy hell, I’m not.  I am so amazingly grateful for the editors who accepted my work.  In her post on this blog, Dena Rash Guzman said she was tired of hearing writers talk about how humble they are to be published, because perhaps we shouldn’t be humble that someone accepted the product of our hard work without paying us.  And I get her point, but in this impossible, cut-throat world of poetry, whether it’s crazy or not, we are grateful.  We are humbled when someone likes us enough to give our writing to the world.  I certainly am (and I know Dena is, regardless of the point she was making in that context), and taking this pledge doesn’t change that.

So I guess this post exists to set that record straight.  I don’t think every journal has to pay.  I don’t think every journal can pay, and I would never suggest that people stop putting their earnest labor, as staff or writers, into something they love.  (Though I do want to offer resources for editors who perhaps think a paying model is impossible, but don’t know some of the options available.  To that end, I’ll start posting interviews with editors of paying markets soon!)  Anyway, though, the biggest question on this blog isn’t whether all journals should pay or whether all poets should only publish for money. It’s this: are we okay with the idea of NEVER getting paid for our writing?  Are we okay with the rote expectation that poets don’t need to be paid for their work, or the rote assumption that we never will?  Are we okay with the fact that almost every other genre of writing offers some possibility that at some echelon of success one can sustain a career, small as that possibility might be, but poetry doesn’t?

For me, the answer is no. It’s not okay.   But it’s complicated.  And it’s difficult.  And the idea of paying for poetry is stymied by a lot of obstacles, from the utilitarian (i.e. no money) to the logistical (i.e. no audience) to the philosophical (i.e. poetry, of all genres, is the most spiritual and can be ruined by commodification).  I recognize all these things, and I want to hear about them and I want people to write about them here.  And the more complicated it is, and the more angles and perspectives people share on the issue, the more I know there’s a need for this blog.  And so, I let my fear go.  And keep trying to share my gratitude for those who share poetry with the world, paid or unpaid.  And I keep my uncomfortable pledge that I hope serves as an over-the-top, extreme springboard for a sorely needed conversation.

I found a pretty comprehensive list of book-length manuscript contests at Entropy Magazine. Most prizes listed have a reading fee of $15-$25, most have a page count between 50-150, most award a prize of $1000-$1500 plus a number of copies of the book itself, usually 15-20. Those reading fees mean the presses need an average of 50 entrants to cover the prize money alone, and another ten entrants to cover what I hope and assume judges are being paid for their time because they are also professional writers. That doesn’t even begin to cover the actual cost of producing and distributing an actual, real live book.[1]

So maybe 100 entrants per contest, just to break even. That’s 100 hopefuls paying twenty-five bucks a pop so that one – ONE – person among them can have the opportunity to publish a book for which she hardly gets paid (correct me if $1,500 is normal for a book sale). The entrants are in effect covering the publishing costs, and 99 of them don’t even get a consolation prize: no books, no feed back, no nothing. Entering a book contest is like a cross between paying understandable reading fees and hardcore gambling. The money you put into the house builds the pot the house is able to dole out, but it can only dole it out to one lucky winner. No matter how good you are, it’s hugely statistically unlikely that that winner will be you. It’s all stacked against you. But you can’t win if you don’t put the money in, so you put the money in. It’s a pretty sick system.

But I don’t think the presses are to blame, nor are evil jerks trying to force you to pay their writers without even getting the writers’ books in return. They just don’t have many other regular sources of income. Book sales don’t generate enough to take risks on publishing new or little known authors, forcing them to get the money from somewhere else. There just isn’t space in the universe for that many Kickstarters, and even if there were, Kickstarters can’t keep up a catalogue year in and year out. I can name several indie presses that are 501-c3 operations, and so can ask for tax deductible donations, but the reason I can name them is because they are constantly emailing me, asking me for money. I pay out either way, with limited to no (fiscal) returns on my investment. No matter how it’s gotten, the money to fund these operations largely comes from us, the potential authors.

So if there’s no consolation prize, what do book contests get you for your twenty five bones?

1) A guaranteed response within a specific timeframe.

2) All the distribution and publicity any other book published by the press would enjoy.

3) The press holding the contest gets to exist thanks to proceeds from the contest, allowing you to submit work during no fee, non-contest times.

4) If you DO get selected for publication (i.e., you “win”), you receive a previously agreed upon payment – no negotiating (this can also be a negative, really).

5) In addition to this payment you get your complimentary FUCKTON OF GLORY SWEET GLORY!

The all caps there is not meant as an exaggeration. You really do get glory above and beyond just getting published, even though, for all intents and purposes, winning a book contest (or any writing contest) is not a whole lot different from being selected for publication either way. Like I said earlier, your submission is the best in a pool of submissions, so it gets selected, just like regular publication. Yet we value prize winners way more than regular old writers who just publish books or whatever. We inflate the value of the piece enormously. Sometimes we even assign it a higher monetary value in our imaginations.

As an example, I was discussing this topic with my fiancé (not a creative writer, though an academic one), and he recalled someone he knew a few years back who’d won ten grand for a book of poetry. Ten grand plus publication of the manuscript. A $10,000 prize isn’t impossible, but it’s rare and I was hugely impressed. El Fiancé looked this writer up to find out more about the contest, only to discover that the prize had actually only been $1,500. Still nothing to scoff at, but El Fiancé had hugely inflated the value of the book monetarily, and I can’t help but think that inflation was because the manuscript was a prize winner. It just seems like it’s worth more. We are willing to part with these fees, I think, mostly because of that potential for prestige. Prestige becomes its own currency, highly valuable in the exposure economy we’ve all been operating in for so long. Prestige is just Exposure’s sexy older sister, and we all chase her skirt in spite of ourselves. We chase it like it’s worth more than the money itself – why else would we part with money to get it?

Ultimately, entering a book length contest is a huge and expensive gamble. It is so statistically unlikely you will win, and very often more money goes into the pot than the house is even going to be paying out (the contest discussed with El Fiancé had about 300 entries, at $25 each, with $1,500 prize. Do the math on that.). The house will always win. But in this instance, I think it’s okay for the house to win. As long as the house wins, indie presses can stay open and publish the books they pay (even a little) money for.

So what’s up with this?  I get that poetry might not have the same readership. But if pay is for work, prose and poetry are totally comparable in terms of time and energy put into a piece (at least for me, as a writer who works in both fields.) And in the grand scheme, sure, Fancypants Magazine has way better subscriptions than, say, College Lit Mag X*. But subscribers of both magazines get to read my poem, right?  I mean, the particular issue of Fancypants that I was in SOLD OUT and now goes for stupid prices on eBay, much to the chagrin of my grandmother who missed her apparently tiny window to get a copy at Books-A-Million.

I have no words for how this feels. No words. Only obscene gestures.

I’m sure Fancypants Magazine isn’t the only magazine that has this pay discrepancy between poetry and prose. In fact, you just have to take a peek at Duotrope.com’s definition of “semi-pro” rates for poetry (US $5-$49 per poem) vs. prose (US 1-4.9 cents per word or more).

Pause for indignant rage: Seriously? $5 for a poem is semi-pro? Seriously?

Anyway, you may also find, after surfing around for a bit, that there are tons of mags that pay pro rates for prose but semi-pro or token rates for poetry. 

I’m not sure what the solution to this is. And I hardly think we should be taking money away from the hard-working short story and essay writers publishing in these excellent magazines. But, as you might have seen when you clicked this link, poetry has value. And I want to see this value respected by the magazines that publish poets. Is that too much to ask?

*Magazine names have been changed to protect the stingy keep the author from being blacklisted.