On one hand. Would be great to pay more. Always the goal to pay more.

On the other...

How many of the volunteer or near-volunteer editors who put in thousands of free work hours per year does he want to start paying first, is my question. https://twitter.com/firesidefiction/status/1289361210878590976

Spec mags don’t often have seed funding or sponsorships. They also don’t make much more than the money they pay their authors—if they make it back at all.

See, without seed funding or fundraising (the big kind, the tech kind) there isn’t enough $$$ to find a broad market.

I’m a marketer. You don’t get a market because you deserve one. You get a market because you buy one.

Spec mags, as generally non-sustainable businesses, aren’t going to funnel money away from authors and into the marketing that could make them profitable. There isn’t enough $$.

Augur is lucky. As a Canadian organization we have access to the types of arts grants that simply don’t exist in most of America. That means we’re able to have a little more freedom than exclusively our Kickstarter funding. But still nowhere near enough to fund our team.

Applying for a bigger grant this year, I was asked to calculate how much volunteer labour we expected to use.

Valued fairly (over CND minimum wage to show our editors’ value) it was over $100,000 in hours.

Our annual budget is currently $10-15k.

So why do it? Why do editors do this if it’s so much time? So much unpaid labour?

Because we know how hard spec fic is.

And we want more opportunities for writers. So we give up our family time, our free time, our creative time, to make that happen.

Because we love SFF.

Magazines are broken. Absolutely they are. With the time and energy my team has put in the last three years, we made it to pro in two years and simultaneously became one of the highest paying markets in CANADA.

I still don’t think the rates are fair. But look at the comparables.

And I think, at this point, if we’re going to talk about fair rates. It has to be for everyone. It has to be a conversation about free labour by the people who own these mags. About opportunities that can and will disappear bc of editor burn out and devaluation.

I’ve been around this space for a ghost of a moment. But I’ve seen so many mags close. As an emerging writer, I’d rather place a story somewhere that paid me a token amount and loved that story and shared it...than look down the barrel of the gatekept, hyperpro markets & despair.

But SFF markets are going to keep closing without support for editors. Because of the volunteer hours. The emotional labour.

Our options are to let them, and de-democratize the opportunities to have pieces published, or to create sustainable, long term plans to support them.

Talk about paying authors more. Please. Fucking YELL from ROOFTOPS. But not without the context of how hard, unsustainable, and demanding running these spaces can be.

We should be figuring out how to GROW as a community. Not criticizing the gifts that community has been given.

Because from where I’m sitting, spec mags are unprofitable, volunteer spaces because they’re already funneling all their money into authors rather than marketing or team pay.

Because every hour spent fundraising goes to creators rather than what you need for business growth.

And without substantial funding models and patrons investing in us, there simply aren’t enough volunteer hours.

That said, I condemn predatory markets to the ends of the earth and back and those are not the spaces I’m talking about here.