Lit Mags and Money (or the Lack of It)

Some thoughts on genre mags, literary mags, and trying to money on stories

When the semester wraps up, I always speak to my students about the business side of publishing. Queries, advances, submissions, and all that fun (read: frustrating) stuff that MFA professors often don’t like to talk about. I’m currently teaching “speculative fiction,” which means I’m also talking to them about the differences between the SFF world and “literary fiction” world. So it was timely today to have a discussion of this on Twitter with writers like Usman T. Malik and Nick Mamatas about lit mag sales and payments.

As I say in this newsletter a lot, readers and writers are increasingly happy to cross the supposed barrier between so-called literary fiction and SFF. But at the same time the ecosystems of the worlds remain largely separate. E.g., there are speculative works that compete for the Pulitzer and NBA and there are very literary works that compete for the Hugo and Nebula… yet with only a few exceptions they’re works published on different imprints and by different authors.

Another big area of difference is lit mags, especially when it comes to money. The tl;dr version is that genre magazines always pay (though not necessarily a lot) and literary magazines often don’t.

Much of this is what you might call cultural. The SFF world has a strong sense of professionalism to it—“money flows to the writer” is a popular phrase—and the idea of earning your income by writing is prized. SFF writers tend to refer to magazines and anthologies as “markets,” and professional organizations like the SFWA actually delineate what pay rates count as “professional.”

On the other hand, the literary world tends to think (or perhaps pretend) it’s above these more commercial concerns and say the focus is art. There is a sense that editing a literary magazine is almost an act of literary service in the same vein as running a reading series or writing blurbs. No one—or no one outside of a handful of big magazines—is making money on this and the most important thing is putting out good and interesting work that otherwise wouldn’t be published.

Honestly, I find merit in both of these attitudes. The literary world does produce a lot of interesting little magazines that don’t make any money but publish work that otherwise would never be published. There's a lot more support for poetry and other less commercially viable literary forms in the lit world. Running a small magazine is a labor of love mostly done by other writers who lose money on the project. At the same time, the literary world’s nonchalant attitude toward paying writers means that magazines that could pay—such as the many connected to universities—feel no pressure to do so. The ripple effects distort the entire short story market. And literary magazines don’t feel the pressure to try different fundraising or distribution strategies that might increase the overall readership of literary fiction.

That said, there’s often an impression in the SFF world that genre magazines pay better and that isn’t necessarily true. The big glossies like the New Yorker pay the top rates, of course, but outside of that I can confirm from personal experience that the big lit mags like The Paris Review and McSweeney’s pay as much or more than magazines like Lightspeed and F&SF.

The big difference isn’t quantity but consistency. All of the respected genre magazines pay and since prestige in SFF magazines is somewhat tied to the pay the best way to announce you’re a serious magazine is to pay well. The prestigious lit mags OTOH might pay or might not. The top 20 lit mags on the Pushcart Prize rankings for example range from paying nothing except contributor copies to over $1,000 for a story. For comparison sake, an average short story (let’s call it 4,000 words) would yield $320 bucks at the SFWA’s 8 cents a word professional rate.

Of course even at $1,000 bucks it isn’t possible to live on lit mag submission income unless you’re producing and placing at a ludicrous rate. (Part of why it was absurd to see people try to use ChatGPT stories to make a quick buck.) And the entire economy is precarious no matter what genre you’re talking. The big SFF still have regular subscriber and fundraising drives to survive, and the big literary magazines—even the ones with relatively big circulations—survive with university supporter, non-profit grants, and the like.

Malik initially asked how many literary magazines sell decently enough to survive. I’m not sure what most people would consider decent or not but from what editors have told me and what is listed publicly the big literary magazines sell between 5k and 30k copies. (I’m speaking of pure literary magazines like Ploughshares and The Paris Review. Glossies that publish fiction like The New Yorker and Esquire have exponentially higher circulations). I’m not sure how many magazines are in that range but probably not more than a couple dozen.

Things aren’t necessarily better in the SFF world. The first science fiction numbers I could find were in a bar graph for Asimov’s that lays out the fundamental problem:

Basically, not many people read literary magazines—of any genre—compared to decades past. When writers talk about the good old days of living on short fiction, well, those probably aren’t ever coming back. The reasons are pretty obvious. We can get our narrative fixes from a million other sources like video games and TV. Newsstands and bookstores rarely sell magazines anymore. Online subscriptions can’t make up the gap. And the big glossy magazines and newspapers that used to publish fiction are themselves failing left and right.

Of course, lots of excellent short fiction is still being written. Perhaps more of it than ever. And while magazines in any genre might not pay as well or have as many readers as decades past, there are likely more literary magazines and venues for fiction than ever before. There are endless stories at your laptop-touching fingertips, for free, right now. Anything you want, really. As readers, we’re living high on the hog. So if you care about short fiction, the best thing you can is find the magazines that put out work you love and then share and subscribe.

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If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout that The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.”

Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).