Why we aren’t a paying market

Over the past 10 months since our website Lucent Dreaming opened for submissions we’ve been asked several times, both graciously and ungraciously, why we don’t pay our contributors.

It isn’t a tough question to answer: we currently can’t afford it.

When my friends and I started Lucent Dreaming with no money except the savings I had from university–which you can imagine wasn’t very much–I could just about afford a WordPress subscription and domain. Even though we wanted to pay our contributors, we just knew it wouldn’t be feasible right now.

You might be thinking what about all those magazines and t-shirts and notebooks we sell, but don’t judge a creative writing magazine by its social media reach. Our print runs are small and we haven’t sold all the copies of our magazine nor all our merch! We’ve still about £300 to make back to cover our initial costs.

And you…