The Submission Fees Debate: Both Sides, Honestly
Reading fees split poets into camps that stop listening to each other. A working contest judge lays out both arguments at full strength, shows the real math, and offers a filter before you pay anything.
Last March a poet I mentor sat at her kitchen table with a spreadsheet, eleven browser tabs, and seventy-five dollars to spend. Three contests wanted twenty-five each. One magazine wanted three dollars just to look. She asked me the question every serious poet eventually asks: am I investing in my career or quietly funding someone else's? The submission fees debate has been running for decades, and most takes on it are useless because they argue one side at full volume and pretend the other side is stupid. Neither side is stupid. I have judged contests funded entirely by fees and edited for a magazine that refused them on principle, and I want to lay out both arguments the way each camp would want them made, then give you a filter you can use tonight.
What the Submission Fees Debate Keeps Getting Wrong
The loudest voices treat all fees as one thing. They are not. A three-dollar tip-jar fee at a magazine that pays its contributors is a different transaction from a thirty-dollar contest fee funding a thousand-dollar prize, which is different again from a twenty-five-dollar fee at a journal that pays nothing and answers in nine months with a form rejection. Lumping these together is how both camps talk past each other, and how poets end up either paying for everything or boycotting everything.
The honest question is never whether fees are ethical in the abstract. It is three questions stacked together: what does this specific fee purchase, who ends up holding the money, and can the poet paying it afford to lose it. Keep those three in view and the debate stops being a shouting match and becomes something you can act on.
The Case for Fees, Made at Full Strength
I have sat on the funded side of this. A mid-sized journal receives somewhere between four hundred and twelve hundred poems a month. Someone has to read them, and that someone is usually an editor working nights after a day job, or a graduate student paid in experience. Submission platforms charge the magazine money. Printing costs money. Paying contributors, which every poet says they want, costs money. Most literary magazines lose money every single year of their existence, and the ones that survive do it on some blend of fees, donations, and institutional support.
Here is the pro-fee argument at its strongest:
- Screening is real labor. Reading a thousand poems well takes well over a hundred hours, and asking that labor to be free forever is its own kind of exploitation.
- Fees can fund payment to the poets who are accepted, which moves money from many writers toward the few whose work an editor loves. That is roughly how prize culture has always worked.
- A small fee cuts spray-and-pray submissions dramatically, which shortens response times for everyone and means your poem is read by less exhausted eyes.
- Without fees, magazines lean on universities and wealthy patrons, and that dependence shapes editorial taste in quieter, less accountable ways than a public price tag does.
That last point is the one fee critics rarely answer. A magazine funded by a donor answers to the donor. A magazine funded by three-dollar fees answers, at least a little, to poets.
The Case Against Fees, Made Just as Honestly
Now the other side, and it deserves equal muscle. Fees are a regressive tax on the poor. The poet stacking shelves for minimum wage and the retired professor with a pension pay the same twenty-five dollars, and only one of them feels it. Poets writing from countries where that fee equals a day's wages, sometimes two, are effectively locked out of entire ecosystems of publication, which quietly narrows whose voices get read at all.
Then there is the lottery problem. A fee-funded contest is a pool where hundreds of losers fund one winner, and unlike an actual lottery, nobody publishes the odds. Worse, many fee-charging journals offer nothing back to the ninety-nine percent: no feedback, no note, no reason. You paid twenty-five dollars for silence. The slush pile is also unpaid market research; editors learn what poets are writing, what themes are surging, what the field sounds like this year, and the poets funding that education get a form letter.
Both cases are true at the same time. That is why the argument never ends.
The Math Nobody Prints in the Guidelines
Take a typical book or chapbook contest. Nine hundred entries at twenty-five dollars is twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars. The prize is a thousand. The judge's honorarium might be five hundred. Printing the winning chapbook costs perhaps two thousand. Where does the rest go? Sometimes staff salaries, sometimes keeping the press alive another year, sometimes profit. None of those answers is automatically scandalous, but you deserve to know which one you are funding.
Now flip to your side of the table. If nine hundred poets enter and one wins a thousand dollars, the expected return on your twenty-five dollars is about a dollar eleven. Nobody should enter a contest for expected value. You enter for the deadline that makes you finish, the credential if you place, and ideally something you receive whether you win or not. So the practical rule is this: never pay a fee where losing buys you nothing at all. Feedback, a score, finalist publication, a subscription copy, something has to come back across the table.
The Submission That Taught Me My Own Rule
Two winters ago a poet from Manila emailed me before entering a contest I was judging elsewhere. The twenty-dollar fee, she told me plainly, was her groceries for most of a week. Her draft opened with this line:
I keep sending my heart to strangers, hoping one of them writes back.
True, and limp. We worked on it for twenty minutes, and it became:
Each entry fee: a stamp
on a letter to a stranger
who owes me nothing.
The revision is better because it stops pleading and starts pricing. And that conversation changed how I think about the whole debate. She was not asking whether fees are ethical. She was asking whether this fee, this month, for this poem, was worth her groceries. That is the only version of the question that matters, and it has a different answer for every poet, every month.
A reading fee is a price tag, not a bribe and not a donation, and price tags exist to be read before you buy.
A Seven-Point Filter Before You Pay Any Fee
Run every fee through this list. It takes five minutes and will save you hundreds of dollars a year.
- Total the pot. Estimate entries times fee, then compare it to the prize money and what the press publishes about costs. A wild gap with no explanation is a signal.
- Check what non-winners receive. Feedback, scores, a copy, finalist listings. If losing buys silence, be very reluctant.
- Apply the twenty-times rule for contests: the top prize should be at least twenty times the fee, or the odds are working too hard against you.
- Look for fee-free windows and hardship waivers. The most poet-friendly venues almost always have them, and using a waiver is not shameful, it is the system working.
- Set a monthly fee budget in actual dollars, and when it is spent, you are done until next month. Treat it like postage, not like hope.
- Never pay a fee to a venue that also pays you nothing on acceptance. One direction of money is a market; zero directions back is a donation you did not agree to make.
- Track everything: fees paid, acceptances, cost per publication. Most poets who do this discover two or three venues eat most of their budget and return nothing, and they cut them without regret.
Poets who follow a version of this list, in my experience, submit less, place more, and stop feeling vaguely swindled every quarter. There are more tactics like this in our writing tips archive if the spreadsheet mood strikes.
Pay Like an Editor, Not Like a Gambler
Here is where I land after years on both sides of the table. Fees are neither a scandal nor a sacrament. They are a market, and markets reward the people who read the terms. The poets I watch thrive treat fees as line items in a small business, spent deliberately on venues that give something back, and they walk away from anything that sells pure silence. The poets who burn out treat fees as lottery tickets and resent every one that does not hit.
Transparency is the standard I hold everyone to, including the contest I work with. Writory's monthly contest takes entries from the 1st to the 25th, posts results on the 30th, and every single entrant, not just winners, receives a five-criteria score breakdown across creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme, with free entry rewards for winners and three-month streaks. Whatever you decide about fees in general, that is the shape to demand: money in, something real back. If you want to see what that feels like, send a poem this month and read your scores when they arrive.
The debate will keep raging on social media, and both sides will keep being partly right. You do not have to pick a team. You have to pick, one fee at a time, whether this price tag is worth this poem. That skill, more than any manifesto, is what protects both your money and your nerve.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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