A Short Rant About Submission Guidelines
I followed a link to an open call from a new publishing company today. They set up writers guidelines telling prospective writers what they’d like to see submitted, but neglected to mention a pay rate. The comments thread on their submission guidelines involved two people asking about pay rates explicitly, and both times the editor/publisher ducked the question. I closed the page at that point. I won’t call out the actual publisher that did this, because they’re not alone in this particular habit. I’ve spent years looking at writers guidelines as a writer, with another five years working the Australian Writers Marketplace where checking guidelines was part of the job. The good ones tend to put the word counts accepted and pay rates in easy to find places. By and large, when figuring out whether to submit somewhere as a short fiction writer, those two things will influence your decision more than anything else. The very good ones – which
