Does Charging A Reading Fee Gatekeep for BIPOC and Disabled Writers?

Anyone who has ever tried to submit a piece of creative work knows that most literary journals and small presses charge what they call a reading fee. It’s to pay the editor and to keep things running smoothly, typically. Sometimes, it’s to pay a prize for a particular prize. It used to be reading fees were maybe at most $15 for a majority of small presses, but in recent years, even small presses sometimes charge $25-30 for the regular reading fee, not including a separate entry fee per piece submitted and another if you want to submit to a writing prize or award. Most writers submit a piece multiple times and this can mean hundreds of dollars over the course of a year. It got me thinking, who just has that kind of money?!

Obviously, this is a barrier to submitting for a lot of writers who don’t have discretionary income to set aside for their writing, but it made me wonder who these writers were most likely to be. Thanks to prejudice and ableism, most writers of color and disabled writers never get the opportunities they deserve, and that’s just fact. According to the Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey, as of 2023 (2024’s stats haven’t been published yet) the publishing industry was still 74% white. And only 16% identified as disabled.

Systematically (at least here in the US), creatives aren’t well cared for, particular creatives from diverse backgrounds, which is why affinity groups have popped up in later years. And writing in and of itself isn’t the most lucrative of careers, unless you hit it pretty big. In a personal conversation I’ve had with Nana Adjei-Brenyah (Friday Black, Chain Gang All-Stars) his advance was only $10,000. For someone living in New York, that’s enough to pay rent for a couple of months, but about it. Moreover, we all know that people of color in the US are more likely to be overworked and underpaid compared to their white counterparts.

I’m a reader for a well-known magazine and have been a reader for other magazines in the past as well. One of my previous reading jobs was with Cleaver Magazine which only charge writers a fee if they wanted to enter a contest. Other than that, you could submit for any particular call. In reading through these submissions, I came across far more culturally-rich names and characters. Now that I read for a magazine that charges for every submission ($25 even for micro fiction) I see more Anglo and Slavic names, and rarely if ever see a character that can be identified as either a person of color or disabled. And the truth is many of the stories sound the same, but that’s another topic for another day.

It got me thinking. America doesn’t take the best care of those who are disabled and oftentimes they have to pay ridiculous amounts for medications and health-related concerns, so would they have the money to spend $25 on every 500 word piece they submit? Probably not. I also started thinking about “blind” submissions and how it’s been proven that journals who do blind reads are more likely to relate white western narrative styles with quality writing. So often times, writers of color are overlooked because they write from a perspective and style not showcased in the canon. I asked the question: can it be the same for charging fees?

Personally, I refuse to submit to anything that charges more than $15 and even then, it has to be a publication I absolutely love. I spend hours deciding whether I want to submit somewhere or not or if my piece is good enough because I don’t want to waste money otherwise. But I know this isn’t the case for everybody. I even give myself a budget on how much money I’m allowed to spend on submissions a year (and it’s not a lot). While I would love to be published, I also want to be financially responsible. In my case, reading fees have created a barrier for me and I am sure they have done the same for others, but I might be alone in thinking that.

So what are your thoughts?