Why Electronic Submissions Are Necessary

I asked on Google+ whether folks would be interested in this post.  A few people said they were, and so here I am telling you about why people like me (i.e., the poor) need electronic submissions.  For a different take on this issue, see Mari Ness’ troubles with accessing a post office due to physical constraints.  My constraints are primarily financial. I’m not going to pretend that I am the poorest person in the world.  Nor am I going to suggest that I cannot truly afford the occasional hard copy submission.  Anyone with the extra time can probably poke holes into my finances and find the money to pay for postage, whether by cutting out my social life (which isn’t all that glorious to begin with) or making other kinds of sacrifices.  But it seems to me that poking holes doesn’t really change the point, and it certainly doesn’t change the fact that fewer and fewer markets refuse to accept electronic submissions. In any case, here goes: Not All Writers Have Mountains of Disposable Income I’ll use myself as an example.  I have a guaranteed income of around $12,600 annually for the next two years.  That is not an exact figure, and my income does increase if I get summer teaching and it will increase because I am taking up an adjunct position at a local community college (for which I am not paid terribly well).  But for now, let’s only talk about the income I know I will have this academic year:  $12,600. With that amount of money, I have to be able to afford the following:  rent, utilities, college fees, school books, food/various necessities (toilet paper, over-the-counter meds like vitamins, cold medicine, etc.), health costs (medication, doctor appts., etc. — I’m an asthmatic and a cancer survivor), and career “maintenance” (making sure I have a working computer, conferences, etc).  You could also include the things I buy as a consumer and the little I get to spend towards maintaining a basic (and I do mean basic) social life.  I think a healthy social life is crucial to mental health (for me, that means occasionally having lunch with friends, not running off to binge drink in Vegas).  But I won’t include that below. If you’ve ever lived on $12,600 a year, then you know that buying all of those things is not easy.  Even taking a rough estimate from my own life (minus a few of the above categories) isn’t exactly inspiring: Rent:  $575 x 12 = $6,900 Utilities:  $156 x 12 = $1,872 (it should be noted that I have been reducing my consumption and hope to bring my utilities bill down considerably once the “year” switches out) College Fees:  $630 x 2 = $1,260 School Books (rough estimate):  $200 x 3 (Fall, Spring, Summer) = $600 Food (Gainesville ain’t cheap, and I don’t consume endless amounts of garbage):  $150 x 12 = $1,800 Prescription Medicine:  $25 x 12 + $25 x 2 = $350 That by itself (dropping “various necessities,” “career ‘maintenance,’” and so on) adds up to $12,782, though it does not include other expenses which I can’t yet anticipate (health complications, etc.).  That means I have less guaranteed income than what I have to spend on necessities, which also means I have to find ways to make up the difference in other ways (selling things, advertising revenue, praying I get summer teaching, etc.).  That also means that whatever extra I can get isn’t going to be spent on shipping charges to F&SF (who seems to be the only relevant holdout) or Interzone, who I am desperate to submit to.  I’m going to save that extra dough for emergencies, such as if I get extremely ill, or for other necessities, or even for giving myself a day off somewhere other than in my apartment (i.e., doing something for my mental health). Where in that lot am I supposed to “easily find” the $2-$3 per package shipping cost I have to pay in order to send my work to all those pro markets that don’t take electronic submissions?  And if it’s so hard for me to cook up the money, or justify spending it based on always being unsure what my actual income will be, just imagine how difficult it is for people living in other countries, where shipping to the U.S. can cost ten times as much (adjusted for local currency value)… This is the problem.  It’s not about being too lazy to take my work seriously enough to print it out and send it to publishers.  It has always been about the cost to me as a writer to send my work to a publisher.  That is not an investment I am willing to make, because it’s not actually an investment.  Investments have reasonable guarantees, and that’s not how writing works.  There is never a guarantee that you’ll receive something in return, as well there shouldn’t be.  I don’t expect a critique of my story, nor do I expect an editor to publish my work simply because I sent it to them.  What I do expect is that the financial burden doesn’t fall upon me when the technology is clearly available to make such burdens non-existent. From that perspective, markets which do not allow electronic submissions have remained relatively invisible to me.  Because they must.  Their policies exclude people like me simply because I am not financially able to feed the post office in order to regularly send work to magazine publishers.  And they exclude plenty of other writers simply because they don’t live in the United States.  I see that as detrimental to the genre.  How can you say that you represent the best of the genre when you have artificially excluded entire segments of the world’s writing population?  The answer:  you can’t (though some publishers make exceptions for foreign writers, which is kind of like a kick in the balls for us poor people). I am fortunate, though.  My income will be