Fuck Narrative Magazine

You don't like Narrative charging reading fees, so be it, there's an argument for it and against, but all this "fuck you" stuff is just a stupid and irresponsible response. You neglect to mention that they are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and award thousands of dollars of prize money every year.

You claim that they have no open submission period, ostensibly because they weren't accepting them when you tried to submit, yet you fail to mention that their submission guidelines state exactly when the open period is: "Narrative accepts open submissions during the first two weeks of April and the first two weeks of August each year. During these periods, you may submit work via the Open Submissions Upload page, which will be linked and accessible here. " That sounds like a month out of the year and if other popular magazines are a guide that means they're open to anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 submission without payment. Maybe you should have waited a few days.

You accused them of being spammers in your other post, linking to a place where they're listed to sell their mailing list, but guess what, you don't mention that they let you opt-out of that when you subscribe. I've been a subscriber for a while and have not gotten any spam through them. So they don't hide the fact they they sell their list and I don't see any difference between that and you riddling your site with Google ads.

You say they the publish "crappy" writing (crappy being the descriptive term that good writers often turn to), but on what basis? It's not hard to see - whatever you think subjectively of one piece or another - that what they're publishing is not "crappy" writing, but writing from a generally accomplished set of writers in a cross-section of form.

You say their subscriber base is not as high as they claim, so I'd love to see the basis for your claim, something you neglected to show.

Whether or not you agree with Narrative's policies, in my opinion they are creating something badly need for writers: prestige in publishing original work online where in the past one had to publish solely in print. This opens doors for writers and publishers, whether or not they charge a fee. This is a cause you are subverting with your childish, thoughtless claims.

That guy is definitely Tom Jenks!

Ha, I couldn't agree more! I'm ashamed to say that I paid to have a submission "considered", but gave up when I realized: 1) interns, not editors, actually read the submissions, 2) interns reject EVERYTHING that doesn't come from a "famous" writer, i.e. Narrative Magazine takes emerging writers' cash but doesn't give them fair consideration, and 3) not only does the fiction kinda suck, but the poetry REALLY sucks!!

Almost every "poem of the week" is from Copper Canyon Press, and these poems have one thing in common. They're bad. Now, I won't just say they're bad and run away. I will now explain WHY they're bad. First, arbitrary line breaks. The biggest difference between poetry and prose is line breaks, which change up the rhythm, allow for alternate interpretations and double meanings, etc. Yet I read through almost all the poems in the archives and could not find more than a couple examples of poets who knew what a line break was.

Second, and perhaps most important, these are LANGUAGE poems, not NARRATIVE poems! Hmmm... what's the name of the magazine again?

People can like whatever they want to like, but the fact is, language poems and narrative poems are on absolutely opposite ends of the spectrum! Likewise, these aren't even good language poems either. Most are tone-deaf, devoid of image, and childishly melodramatic. Case in point:
Formless Stanza by Stephen Berg. A friend showed me that one a few weeks ago and I'm still feeling sick to my stomach. I won't paste the poem here since I don't know if that's a copyright violation, but I encourage you to check it out--just to see how bad it is!

Calling this crap a poem is like calling a faith healer a surgeon, then claiming it's all just a matter of opinion. Childish lack of punctuation, bad line breaks, VERY poor rhythm, no attention paid to syllable/stress/unstress count, weak lines, arbitrary word choice, vague metaphysical ramblings reminiscent of somebody's pretentious diary, etc., all characterize this "poem". Sadly, though, the other poems at Narrative are just as bad (if not worse).

Bottom line: magazines can publish whatever they like, but soliciting reading fees means they're ethically obligated to give submitters a fair reading. Even laying aside the issue of quality, the near-total lack of "new" or "emerging" writers in the archives means this is basically just a pyramid scheme.

I'm fairly new to submissions. Thanks for the post.

Is it an unusual practice to charge a reading fee for contests? I was looking at one that charges $20.

I've been looking at different contests, and it seems a number of them -- Glimmer Train, for example -- do level entry fees. I was wondering if the fee is used to cut down on entries, cover prize money, whatever.

When I first saw the 20 dollar reading fee, I decided that Narrative was not for me. But okay, I didn't think it was a scam. And they have to pay some pretty big names, like Richard Bausch and Robert Olen Butler. So whatever. Some other, reputable magazines charge similar fees (I won't submit to them either, for the record).

Then I saw this: http://www.narrativemagazine.com/iStory The "new genre" the vampires at Narrative have created for their oh-so-trendy iphone app. It's a story of up to 150 words. That's it. 150 words. As in three times the length of the paragraph I am currently typing. And what's the reading fee for this exciting new genre? The same as it is for a submission of 10000 words: 20 dollars.

For those of you who aren't that good at math, that works out to 13 cents for every single word they read. To put that in perspective, if you were paid 13 cents a word for a standard short-story, say 5000 words, you would make over 600 dollars. Granted, that's less than the New Yorker pays, but it's still a crapload of money. And how long does it take to read and reject one of these stories? An average adult reads 200-250 wpm. Let's say Mr. Jenk and his editorial team take it real slow and careful and say 1 "iStory" per minute. That means the hourly wage they make reading iStories is 1200 dollars. Extended to a normal yearly salary, that makes 2.4 million dollars for one worker reading iStories full-time. I'm not saying this is what they make. But I just wanted to throw down some math to prove, beyond a doubt:

NARRATIVE MAGAZINE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND OR EVEN YOUR POTENTIAL PUBLISHER. THEY ARE CARPETBAGGERS AND LEECHES WHO HAVE FIGURED OUT THAT THE REAL MONEY DOESN'T COME FROM PUBLISHING. IT COMES, AS IN MANY BUSINESSES, FROM PREYING ON THE DESPERATE.

Also, I'd like to point out that, having worked in an editorial department before, I know that reading slush piles sucks, and that editorial work is not glamorous. But I also know that any editor worth his or her salt can reject most manuscripts after the first page or two. Even if you send them 10,000 words, they're reading maybe 600, in all but a few cases. Which is fine, so long as they're not charging you 20 dollars for the privilege...Which they are.

So yeah, FUCK NARRATIVE. This is the only lit journal I have ever hoped would fail. Ironically, it's probably also one of the only profitable lit journals. So once again, FUCK NARRATIVE.

P.S. If you try to tell me that what they take in with this sham is put back out in the 250 dollar payment to those they do choose to publish, you and I are going to have to sit down for a longer math lesson.