April 19, 2002

By
Meg Weaver, Editor, mweaver@woodenhorsepub.com

Hi everybody,

"Reader" fees, or submission fees, are sneaking into the magazine industry!

Just like some book publishers and literary agents, the now online magazine MOXIE has begun to charge a fee for reading submissions from writers; submissions they solicit and encourage!

We felt this matter deserves serious attention and have devoted today's entire News Alert to this issue.

We asked for a comment from Moxie's Editor & Publisher, Emily Hancock, and received the following, which we decided to publish verbatim, with a few follow-up questions from Wooden Horse. The interview was conducted via e-mail.

WOODEN HORSE: "I understand that moxiemag.com has instituted a $10 "reader fee" on submissions to the website. We are Wooden Horse Publishing at http://www.woodenhorsepub.com and report on news in the magazine and online world for writers and would be interested in telling our readers about your rationale for going to a 'reader fee.'"

EMILY HANCOCK: "I don't know that any magazine needs a rationale for charging a reading fee. There are others that do it and they do not provide a rationale. It is certainly not unheard of. But I will tell you what our thinking is.

WOODEN HORSE: "Can you give me the names of some of those other magazines that charge reader fees?"

HANCOCK: "Terribly sorry, but I do not have time to research and report on other magazines just now.

First, we pay authors. Unlike other alternative magazines and ezines, Moxie has always paid authors for work we publish. This is one thing that has always set us apart. Bitch didn't, Bust didn't, etc etc etc. As Moxie has no corporate funding or other financial backing, all of these payments (and there are hundreds, as you can see from our website, to say nothing of eight print issues) are out of pocket - mine. Obviously, the "payment" is just a token, but it means a lot to a great many authors, particularly those who are new to publishing. But my pockets are not deep. They are empty.

Second, we provide feedback and editorial services. Moxie has a volunteer posse of editors who read submissions and email their comments to me. I look at every submission before forwarding it to the posse. Those that are obviously unpublishable I reject out of hand without sending it on to them.

WOODEN HORSE: "Do you refund the reader fee to those people?"

HANCOCK: "Yes.

Authors whose work is forwarded are sent an email acknowledgement that tells them that their work has been forwarded and told to "nudge" us about the progress of their submission.

Instead of just a "yes" or "no" when rejecting a piece, I send an amalgam of the editors' comments and mine to authors who nudged, whether their work was accepted, rejected, or sent back for revision -- before we were completely deluged with submissions. I then edit the pieces we publish. Established authors in particular have been very pleased with the edits. (Their testimonials are on file). This range of services, from feedback to professional editing, is our forte; it also sets Moxie apart from many others. If I have a gift, it is my talent as a wordsmith and developmental editor. It is what makes Moxie a labor of love.

Third, Moxie will not be able to continue, even online, unless we find a way to pay Moxie's webmaster -- the only paid member of our "staff." We have considered and decided against charging readers to view our site. That leaves the question of how to garner the funds to pay him.

Probably because Moxie specializes in first-person stories that weave feminist theory into the narrative, (another thing that sets us apart,) we receive submissions from many, many "new" authors. We are happy to give serious consideration to their work, and we are even happy to publish work that is raw and unsophisticated, as long as it is authentic, "real," makes its point effectively, and will make a difference to Moxie's readership -- women who are putting together lives that work. However, the writing of new authors requires an enormous amount of time just to format, to say nothing of cleaning up spelling, punctuation, grammar, and the like before even turning to editing it so that it makes its point(s) as effectively as possible. Our authors are the beneficiaries of all this work.

New writers in particular, perhaps because they find out that we publish first-person narratives and almost no one else does, submit material from their journals, or drafts, or other unformed fragments that have no value to anyone other than the writer herself. Often we will get three, four, or even five emailed submissions from a writer in the space of ten minutes. Some of them repeat each other; too many are careless and sloppy. Many lack a title. Almost none have the author's name and contact information on them. Lots of them are loaded with mystery characters -- a common phenomenon when people write something in Microsoft Outlook on a PC and then send it to a Mac. Moxie's editors have balked at submissions that are riddled with them. Within the last 10 days, we have gotten many.

Consider this excerpt from one of them: ÄúAh, well, about once a month, unless I'Äôm on my period.'Äù I wasn'Äôt sure whether to be shocked at once a month or that she still had a period. 'ÄúNot sexual relations, Sharon, relationship. Do you talk to each other?'Äù

Consider this from another: Oh, and my breathÖletís just say I donít make a habit of kissing anyone pre-mint.

When Moxie's editors do wade through these hyrogliphics, I am the one who cleans them up. A few weeks ago Moxie posted 50 stories on the website. Fifty. It took about an hour to clean up each piece before it could be edited. You can imagine the effort this took, to say nothing of then forwarding my edit to each author, awaiting the author's response, reworking the piece based on her response, sending it to the author again for approval, etc etc etc before finally sending the whole set or "issue" to the webmaster.

Moxie is about to post another 25 or 30 stories, including a new department we will launch within the next day or two. After those go up, we will still have another 50 or so in inventory that have been accepted but not yet posted. We are DELUGED with submissions. DELUGED. Over 200 came in, were logged, forwarded, etc., between January 1 and March 31 of this year. That does not include those that were rejected out of hand.

Our decision to charge a reading fee is an effort to get authors to take their work seriously instead of just shooting off something they happen to find in a journal. It is an effort to get them to choose carefully among the pieces they have written instead of emptying their writing drawer and sending us the whole "box" of them at once. We hope that a reading fee will give writers pause about doing that. It is easy to send email. It may take an author only ten minutes to send us 5 pieces. It takes us five times that long just to look at them, log them, acknowledge them, and forward them to our editors, to say nothing of later responding to them with editorial feedback based on the editors' comments. There is something very wrong when editors struggle over a piece more than the author does.

We settled on the $10 fee based on several things: first, it is minimal. If an author does not think enough of her piece to attach $10 to it, then should she really be sending it around? Second, if the piece is accepted, she gets the fee back when she is "paid" for the piece. Third, it will allow us to accumulate funds to award cash prizes. Moxie authors get tremendous exposure: the site gets about 4,000 unique visitors/25,000 hits a week and Moxie articles are occasionally picked up by Utne's website and others. We are very happy to "compensate" our authors for work we publish, and will be ecstatic when we can give cash prizes to our contest winners and announce them on our homepage to an ever growing number of visitors to our site.

All that said, this might not work. If writers are "concerned" I would certainly like to know why. If they stop sending work to Moxie, we will have to reconsider, although our operations will not be affected for quite some time while we are busy getting the work we have already accepted onto the site. But we will obviously have to cancel the contest and refund the fees.

I will paste our new guidelines below. This is what authors receive from us telling them about the new situation. As you can see, they contain a great deal of free advice."

The following are the writer's guidelines Emily sent along:

"Hello! And thanks for contacting Moxie!

We have been flooded with submissions since Writer's Market profiled Moxie and Writer's Digest named us one of the 25 best websites for authors. Winning a Maggie award for Best Cover and being pictured in the New York Times feature on brash new feminist magazines has added to the onslaught.

Despite all of this media attention, lack of advertiser support has forced us to suspend the print edition of Moxie. The last issue we printed, Ties that Bind, Bindings that Break, came out in February, 2001. We continue to expand moxiemag.com, which now includes hundreds of stories and gets tremendous traffic.

SUBMISSION FEE

As of April 1, there is a $10 reading fee for each submission to Moxie. You can use PayPal on our website or mail a check to cover the fee.

What this gets you is feedback on your work from Moxie's editorial posse, and, if your piece is accepted, professional editing as well as a writing credit in an established magazine. It also automatically enters your piece in our new contest (see below).

MOXIE CONTEST

Twice a year, Moxie will award a $100 cash prize to the authors of the best fiction, best first-person narrative, and best poem published in the past six months.

Winners and their authors will be announced on Moxie's home page, which gets nearly 4,000 unique visitors/25,000 hits a week. The announcement will be linked to a special section of Moxie's site where winning pieces will be featured.

CRITERIA FOR ACCEPTANCE

-Does the piece exemplify or inspire moxie (courage, guts, daring)?
-Will it matter to women who are putting together lives that work?
-Does it embody a positive point? Will it inspire or embolden women?
-Will it make a difference to women who are putting together lives that work?
-Does it fit one of Moxie's online departments or themes?

ADVICE TO WRITERS

Moxie welcomes new writers, but we do not welcome spelling, grammar, punctuation, and formatting errors. Stories that are riddled with errors will be rejected without comment.

We make these suggestions:

-Run a spell check on your work before you send it to us.
-Look it over to see that each sentence begins with a capital letter.
-Read it out loud to see if words are missing or repeated.
-Check to make sure that the piece is either all in the present or all in the past tense.
-Put open quotes at the beginning of dialogue and close the quotes at the end.
-Eliminate stray spaces, extra line breaks, squiggles, and other mystery symbols.

We also welcome personal narratives, but we do not welcome journal entries. One way to distinguish between the two is to ask yourself if your piece has a beginning, middle, and end. Moxie is more than willing to publish writing that is raw in emotionality and unsophisticated in form as long as it is real. However, if it is simply a rant or a lament, it will not be accepted for publication.

Finally, is your work original and "real" or is it written according to a formula you got from a book or a class? If it is formulaic, it would be better to submit it somewhere else.

METHOD OF SUBMISSION: email only. We do not accept queries, attachments, or snail mail.

-Paste the text into body of email and send it to emily@moxiemag.com.
-Put the title - just the title - in the subject line of your email.
-Put contact information on the piece. In addition to the title, include your name, address, phone number, email address, and a word count. Remember to indicate whether it is fiction or non-fiction.
-Indicate whether it is fiction or non-fiction
-Indicate whether it is a simultaneous submission.
-Include a word count at the beginning of the piece.
-Make sure that you are using a font we can read...nothing smaller than 10 points, please. If you are using Arial, a common email font, make it 14 points.

Length: 500 - 2,000 words

Compensation: -One copy of Ties that Bind, Bindings that Break (the last issue Moxie published on paper, now a collector's item),
-OR $10 (don't spend it all in one place).

PRACTICAL MATTERS

Remember, submit work online by emailing it to emily@moxiemag.com.

Follow up on your work. Nudge us (by email) in a couple of weeks. Be sure to put the title - again, just the title - of your submission in the subject line of your email so that we can look it up.

Finally, have fun, and watch for a big announcement about our first contest winners in October, 2002!"

The last lines in Emily's e-mail to Wooden Horse were: "So, now it's back to you, Meg. Why are you, and the writers you have heard from, 'concerned?'"

If you like to tell her, her contact information is Emily Hancock, Editor in Chief, moxiemag.com, moXie magazine, 1230 Glen Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94708, 510-540-5510, emily@moxiemag.com.

WOODEN HORSE TOOLS FOR WRITERS
Marketing tips from a long-time freelancer:

WRITING QUERY LETTERS - Special Report #3
HOW TO SEND 50 QUERIES PER WEEK - Special Report #4
KNOW THE ARTICLES EDITORS WANT (AND WHEN) - Special Report #5

Each is $5.95 and you can find them here: http://www.woodenhorsepub.com/spreportssales.html

These are stories we have just posted or are working on:

BUSINESS 2.0 has a new editor.
PIPELINE AND GAS TECHNOLOGY has launched.
ENERGY DECISIONS has folded.
IN STYLE has a new executive editor.
LOG HOME DESIGN has a new associate editor.
HEMMINGS MOTOR NEWS has a new owner.
WIRED will be reformulating its content.
COMPLEX is new.
LUCKY has a new special projects editor.
REAL SIMPLE has fired three top editors.
EMPIRE NY is new.
ONE2ONE MAGAZINE is new.

The details are on the Home, Fast News, and Content Watch pages of the site at http://www.woodenhorsepub.com.

I apologize (sort of) for the length of this newsletter but I felt it was important to publish Emily Hancock's complete explanation for the reader fee she has just instituted.

The fact that someone is asking the *writers* to, not only write for free, but to pay the magazine's expenses, is unconscionable. Times are tough in the publishing business and editors and publishers have to be creative to keep afloat, but to ask naive dreamers to foot the bill is not an acceptable business practice.

She asked for your input, so please tell Emily what you think (but be professional in your language, please) - and forward this newsletter to your writing friends and colleagues, post it on mailing lists and newsgroups. We'll also have it prominently on our website, http://www.woodenhorsepub.com.

Don't let this practice proliferate.

Keep writing,

Meg

To subscribe to the News Alerts or unsubscribe, just e-mail Meg at mweaver@woodenhorsepub.com.

Copyright (c) 2001-2003 Wooden Horse Publishing. Please feel free to forward this News Alert but only in its entirety.