Tomorrow, Aug. 3, at 2 p.m., a wonderful story will be published. I know you’ll love this new fairy tale by Melissa Yuan-Innes.
But in the meantime, I’d like some opinions, and I hope you’ll give them below, even after Melissa’s story is posted. Read both!
This post is about payment to writers. Right now, EC costs me about $4,000 out of pocket per year. That mostly includes paying writers, plus a lot of other smaller costs. I enjoy what I do here, so I’m not going to whine, but I did want some feedback on what you think is fair payment to writers.
The rates I have currently: $100 for stories and $50 for nonfiction are actually pretty high—not pro rates, but not bad. Many places pay nothing. Some pay token amounts. Over the years, I’ve paid anywhere from $10 to $200 for works. I am on the side of paying, because I can, and because I think I should. I do not, however, look askance at publishers who pay very little or not at all. If that’s what it takes to keep a market open, I say go for it! There’s room for all of us.
The current pay, noted above, will probably not be in place in 2021. Fiction will no longer be prioritized in terms of pay. I will probably be paying the same amount out each month: $200, perhaps even a bit more, but the pay will be a flat $50 per work—that’s for a poem or a story or a nonfiction post. To keep the payment rate fair, I’m cutting back on word count: poems can be any length, but stories or nonfiction will be between 750 and 1,000. This way I’m not actually lowering the per-word rate (or not much).
I want to bring poetry back, period. I miss it. And, I’ve come to the decision that poems should not be paid less. How do I know it doesn’t take as much time to get a poem right as it does to write a flash fairy tale? Poetry should not be the unloved stepchild, financially.
Also, although I cannot understand why, people have not been sending in many nonfiction submissions. I get a lot of fiction. Tons. The competition this month is fierce. But nonfiction? Very few. I have, however, been delighted with what I have gotten. The quality has been high. Also, nonfiction gets a lot of traffic. The exception is the angel card readings, which are ending. The numbers don’t support the effort.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Nonfiction is just as important to me as fiction, so the pay will reflect that in 2021.
The final reason why I’m going for four works at $50 each is so I can have a new work per week. The site traffic really stays up when new works come on a weekly basis.
So, questions:
1) What do you think of the proposed 2021 pay structure and the attendant length requirements?
2) What do you think of fiction vs. nonfiction? Do you even have a preference?
3) It looks like EC’s going to need a crowdfunding campaign. Would you be willing to give a one-time gift? A monthly gift? What do you think of the whole crowdfunding thing?
Finally, and this is just an idea: What do you think of EC adding a small press component, specializing in fairy tale anthologies? IF I did this, and it’s a big if, I wouldn’t start it until 2022, but it would take a lot of planning.
I look forward to some comments below.
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The image is a Vogue cover of a woman reading, by Helen Dryden.