I appreciate the changes you made to the submission process (i.e., not charging a fee / making the writer buy the magazine). I think that was the right thing to do.

I also agree pretty much completely with everything Mark said.

And to address this: What I want is a magazine to be proud of and I want to attract writers that want to appear in my magazine. I want writers who enjoy short stories for themselves and would happily read a great selection of them. So is it such a leap asking them to make that commitment to the publication ins some way before they submit to it?

Yes. It is.

1. To have one person control the content might not work. It's a big responsibility, and will take up a LOT of your time. You will probably come to resent it, which will reduce the likelihood of it being a long-term thing. (This I have experience with – from both my Masters in Journalism, to my own magazine/rag that I produced for a few years.) I would recommend a panel of readers, who would double as the editors/proof-readers/etc., and ideally would work for free.

2. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to charge writers to submit (especially if you’re considering paying them for inclusions), and certainly not to receive an issue they are featured in – every publication I know of, gives a free copy with inclusions (this even includes my own experience with academic journals, which cost an arm-and-a-leg per issue).

3. Mark CN’s comments seemed pretty reasonable. I certainly agree with him about authors not being charities. Authors should be paid a little for their work, and not have to pay for anything that they get published. They should, however, consider the publication they are submitting to, and recognise that not all of them have the budgets of The New Yorker or others that feature fiction. Therefore, even a nominal fee should be welcomed.

4. To return to the issue of paying for submissions… Well, why not? If someone is being paid (even a little) for anything included in the magazine, then it’s sort of like getting a refund of your submission fee as well as payment. If Gavin needs to read copious numbers of short stories (some of which WILL be crap – the combined laws of nature and amateur-short-story-writers suggest that many will likely be utterly unreadable), then £1.50 for his time to read it isn’t too excessive. It is, however, unusual.

5. Mauricio’s comments: Well, yes, now that everyone can publish any old thing on the internet, it does mean there’s a lot of dross out there. But then, if someone is in opposition to paying to get something published in any NextRead magazine (regardless of the size of the fee), then they might just choose to do it themselves for free on the “Internets”. My main response to his comments: Writers wanting to be paid for their work is anything but pretentious – do you work for free? Didn’t think so. This, incidentally, also goes to my comments about Gavin making a couple of quid for his time – I have no problem with this. But, as he says himself, the money would go to pay the authors. Again, completely for that.

I guess my main recommendation would be: share the burden. Consider the editorial board (or whatever you want to call it) the ones who do it because they love it, and want to make this a reality, and pay the writer.

If I had the opportunity or time to write a short story to submit here, I would happily do so. £1.50 isn’t a huge amount (certainly less than I paid to apply to Journalism school, undergrad, or PhD), so I suppose I wouldn’t have a problem paying it. I don’t think many people would – they would probably all assume they would be getting it back through inclusion-payment…

It will (quite rightly) put people off and the people it will put off are the very people you want to attract. You are after “excellence” but you will be lucky to get competence. Any serious writer is going to submit to serious markets, the only people who will submit are people who have no chance of making a real sale. As such, yes, it does become a form of vanity publishing.

Putting that aside though, you are still being much too ambitious. You are giving writers six weeks to write stories to your brief and you are expecting to publish 6-8 stories. You want excellence from that? Even the professional magazines can't manage that.

I also stronlgy agree with your sentiment that the writer submitting to a magazine should have an interest in that magazine. And for a magazine that's already published I think enyone submitting that is not actually a reader is an idiot. Of course one should know ones market, no matter what business you're in.

Of course this is a bit difficult when you're putting together the first issue of a magazine. I wish you'd used your not inconsiderable online prescense to invite people to write for the first issue. If you did, I think the magazine would be up and running from issue one. And you would have avoided all this.

I don't think you're doing this out of anything but the best intentions, and I wish you luck with your magazine, and hope it will be a succesful one.

“Is it arrogance or naivety on my part to be selective about where I’d like to see my work appear?” Like you'd have the choice! You should be chuffed no matter what you achieve and where, because the probabilities and odds are for most people that they won't get anything published. You'll be rejected time and time again, and if you're lucky, and strike at the right place at the right time, you'll be published. But you don't choose a thing.

“So is it such a leap asking them to make that commitment to the publication ins some way before they submit to it?” This is a dangerous route, because irrespective of what you think, a sale to the mag will be interpreted as “oh, they only got published because they paid for it”. It's a tainted “jobs for the boys” sale, and you can't control that bit.

“I’m not really interested in writers that are out to make NextRead Magazine market sale #64 and see it as a another sale on their list.” All sales on the list are thought of with respect, by writers, and encouraging them to shell out a quid won't make any difference to their affection for it. I'm not sure why this is an issue?

“I’m probably foolish in thinking that this might improve the quality of the submissions” You won't put off the most desperate and talentless souls with a quid barrier to entry. Look at those who self-publish. In fact, you're putting off many good writers by making them pay for the chance to submit, so you'll probably have a good proportion of submissions from the “more determined” of the vanity published writers.

“The payment for the is a form of ownership and taking pride in where you want your work to appear rather than a form of vanity press.” By paying money for your story to be published? You're fucking over the most basic rule of publishing, and that is: money flows towards the writer.

Don't take the criticism to be personal – welcome to the industry. It's tough. It's a hassle and a ball-ache for everyone involved. People don't make progress in it by being half-arsed.

Quality writers will want to know how much they are being paid. They're not charities. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere yet, but I might be being blind.
And there are loads of ways to fund this magazine. Advertising, sponsorship, even http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/by/recommen...

Anyway – ultimately, I think the set-up and submissions system isn't beneficial for anyone, but the concept is a good one. Even if you choose to make people pay – go for it. It's your magazine, not mine or anyone else's. Just throwing in my thoughts…

For me it's pretty simple. Follow Yog's Law. Money flows toward the writer, not away from them. Follow it, and everyone is happy. Breach it, and people won't like it.

So if a writer submits a story and pays the £1.50 fee to submit, this doesn't gaurantee publication? So it's not even pay-for-print/vanity, it's actually a little worse than that, it's pay-for-consideration?

I think you're looking at it backwards. You want to pay writers for their stories – excellent. But £20 per writer is a hell of a lot. Make it £5 or something. You want to pay for editing, proofing, etc? That's your choice, but the funds from this should come from sales of the successful issue, not from the vanity fee you're charging the writers. If the magazine is good, people will buy it. If people buy it, you'll get your money.

In fact, look at it just in terms of scale:

Each magazine has 6-8 stories. Let's average it to 7. At £1.50 per submission, you get £10.50. That's not counting payments for all submissions, including the ones that were not accepted. Actually I think you need to clarify this point pretty quickly!

So you've made £10.50 from the contributors. Say you sell ten copies of the first issue. That gets you £15.

But if the magazine takes off, you might sell 300 copies, netting £450. From your seven contributors, you've still only made £10.50. The difference is so great that the contribution fee is pretty meaningless.

Going back to the submission fee, if you were considering a charge of £1.50 for every single submission, accepted or not, then I think you're in pretty dangerous water. Say you hit that 300 sales mark. Because the magazine is popular, if you are (at that point) receiving say 100 story submissions, and charging for all 100, that's a large sum of money. If you thought the reaction was bad now, just wait until that day comes.

Personally I think a short fiction magazine as you describe (electronic, £1.50 per download, themed stories) is great, but you've got to rethink the submission fee. At the moment you're looking at it as a contributor supporting the magazine. It's not really. You're just charging them a fee. It doesn't matter if it's “just” £1.50 for this, or the £8,000 a big vanity press charges for a “publishing package”.