New York Literary Magazine: A Series of Unfortunate Events

It’s not every day that I’m indirectly accused of ruining someone’s business, but 2017 has been a hell of a year.

On Christmas Day, I – along with many other writers in the SFF community – received an email from something called the New York Literary Magazine, informing me that I’d been nominated for their Best Story Award. For a number of reasons, both the email and the site to which it directed me pinged as fishy, not least because nominees were directed to pay a submission fee in order to be eligible for the award itself. In response, I ended up writing this Twitter thread about it. Many other writers chimed in – some of whom had paid the fee, most of whom had not – and the whole thing was quickly reported to Writer Beware as a scam, or at the very least as an operation to be wary of.

Because, at first glance, there’s quite a lot that’s wrong with the NY Literary Magazine – hereafter referred to as NYLM – and its Best Story Award, and as such, it’s worth examining those issues in more detail.

The email NYLM sent out very clearly stated that works had been “nominated” for the award, with nominees encouraged to list the nomination in their author bios. However, even once the reading fee was paid, entrants weren’t told for which of their works the nomination had been offered, or on whose recommendation. Instead, they were asked to upload the works themselves in a digital format.

The NYLM site is full of pull quotes detailing the advantages of award nominations for both would-be and established authors, framed in such a way as to suggest the quotes are about the NYLM award specifically. This is born out in the wording on the main contest page, which claims that “winning an award from our magazine gives you great credentials which will impress readers, agents, and publishers.” On investigation, these supporting quotes are easily shown to be about either awards in general or a couple of major prizes, like the Pulitzer, in particular.

This same section of the website also states that the Best Story Award has “monthly winners in each category, unlike other contests which only have 1 or 3 winners per year… We accept ONLY 200 entries per month, per category. Other contests have thousands or even tens of thousands of entries. It’s like trying to win the lottery when you enter them with average chances of 1:5000. Chances of winning our Exclusively Limited-Entry contest are much higher. Your chances are 1:200.”

How many categories are there, you might ask? Eleven in total: fiction; mystery, crime & thriller; action & adventure; dystopia & apocalypse; horror & paranormal; sci-fi; fantasy; children’s stories; MG; YA; and non-fiction, memoirs and bio’s [sic].

And that’s before you factor in the additional question of what type of works are eligible. The NYLM Best Story Award rules states that the contest is open to “books/stories,” and as the only categories relate to genre rather than length, the unsettling implication is that short stories, novellas and novels would all be competing in the same weight class.

This is, to say the least, a staggeringly broad mandate – and as writer E.B. Brown pointed out on Twitter, the sheer manpower required to read through all such works in the allotted time period is considerable. So considerable, in fact, that I broke my normal rules and engaged in voluntary maths.

Assuming the contest filled up each slot in each category each month, with no duplicate submissions – which are permitted under the rules, provided you pay an additional fee each time – then that’s 2,200 potential entries. If even half of those were full-length books as opposed to short stories, then that’s 1,100 books to read and assess PER MONTH. The usual minimum wordcount for an adult novel is 80k, with a YA work starting at around 60k, so given the muddled categories, let’s split the difference and assume these hypothetical books average out to 70k a pop. If it takes the average person about four hours to read that many words, that’s 4,400 hours total. Given that there are only 730 hours in an average month, and assuming that each reader works 12 hours in every 24, including weekends, you’d need a minimum of twelve people employed just to read those submissions alone.

Now, given the kind of operation the NYLM appears to be, I don’t for a minute believe that they sell out every slot in every category every single month. But even if, as shown, they only receive half the possible number of entries for each contest, that’s still high-volume traffic with a hard, repeating deadline. The NYLM insists that the Best Book Award is merit-based, yet I find it very hard to believe that so many judges, whether paid or unpaid, could be found each month for each category – but if they could, the NYLM site ought to tell us who they are, or at the very least give some information about how submitted works are going to be judged, especially if short stories and books are going to be in direct competition with each other.

But no such information is listed. And you know what? I’m pretty sure that’s because it’s a fucking scam.

The NYLM, however, begs to differ – and has, in fact, taken the rather extraordinary step of using its mailing list to send out an open letter that is ostensibly addressing, but in reality complaining about, the criticism to which its contest has been subjected. The whole thing is some eight pages long, and if you want to subject yourself to the entirety, I’ve made it available here.

Says the NYLM:

There have been many inaccurate accusations circling around and cyberbully attacks upon authors who were awarded our award. This has ruined our business and caused us to permanently shut down our magazine and contests.

Everyone who purchased an entry into our contest has been refunded.

After years of work on this magazine, we have had to fire our entire team of loyal, hard-working, full-time employees.

Yes, you did read that correctly: the NYLM – which, at the time of this writing, is still online – is claiming to have been so harmed by a Twitterstorm over Christmas and Boxing Day that they’ve been forced to fire their entire full-time staff. Unless those staff were solely paid for out of contest entry fees – which, granted, is not beyond the realm of possibility – and unless those fees have further been cancelled forever, this decision makes literally zero sense. If the NYLM, which repeatedly claims to be a “distinguished publication,” is a genuinely a legitimate literary outfit, then the obvious response to the accusation of scamming is greater financial transparency: show the fee structure of the company and how the employees are paid, explain what aspects of the business the submission fees support, list the qualifications of the award judges, and, if revenues still stay down over time, then make personnel changes as necessary. Firing everybody overnight because the internet got mad at a shitty, unsolicited mailout is the kind of thing nobody actually does unless they’re either completely fucking incompetent or – you guessed it – a scam company full of lying liars who never had any employees to fire in the first place.

What happened?

Regretfully, we outsourced our marketing to an Asian company to help us spread the word about our Best Story Award contest.

We believed they were experts and could help us reach authors.

It was our terrible mistake to entrust the entire marketing campaign in their hands including the marketing methods, approach, and text.

They sent out a marketing email on our behalf, from an email at nyliterarymag.org, at an unexpected time for USA time zone on Christmas.

Unfortunately, it appears they chose the wrong approach and terminology when inviting authors to our contest by telling them they were nominated instead of simply informing them of our contest and inviting them to join it.

It was our terrible mistake not to closely supervise and monitor each marketing action they did and the text they used.

Pardon my French, but that is some goddamn bullshit.

If, as this explanation implies, the NYLM is really so monumentally incompetent as to okay a global mailout on their behalf without vetting the contents, then they still deserve criticism for terrible business practice; but if they did vet the contents, then trying to pass that failure of judgement onto their contractors is skeezy in the extreme. But do I actually believe that there was a random “Asian company” involved in the marketing of NYLM’s contest in the first place? No, I do not, and for three main reasons: firstly, because it would be exceedingly simple to name that company itself, especially given the comfort with scapegoating them; secondly, because it makes little sense for a literary publication to outsource its marketing in the first place, let alone to a company with no experience in marketing to authors*, regardless of their worries about costs; and thirdly, because of what the letter says in the following paragraph.

For other businesses such as VIP Entrepreneur clubs (with ~$1,000 annual membership fees), sending a nomination email instead of an invite to join their clubs worked very well. Our marketing agency, therefore, presumed this was a good way to approach authors as well. They even thought that authors who didn’t want to/couldn’t afford the $15 entry fee to our contest would still be happy to be nominated and be able to mention it in their bio.

They did not think there would be an issue with nominating multiple authors.
Nor did they think it would annoy authors to be nominated.

We apologize to all the authors who feel they were misled by being nominated.

Look very carefully at the wording here. We are being asked to believe that this author-ignorant marketing company was astute enough in its research to know that award nominations should go in a writer’s bio for promotional purposes – the very same argument, coincidentally, that NYLM sells on their website, constantly, ad nauseum – but not the very crucial distinction between what it means to be nominated for an award versus invited to submit to a contest.

And then there’s that final telling sentence (my emphasis): “We apologize to all the authors who feel they were misled by being nominated.” Not by being invited, which they’re trying to claim was the real intent, but by being nominated. If the NYLM is truly trying to pass off the whole debacle as an act of linguistic confusion, with their “Asian company” to blame for one word (nominated) and their intentions kept pristine through use of another (invited), then it makes zero sense to continue using the two interchangeably, and especially not in a way that suggests they really did mean nominated in the first place.

So this is, of course, exactly what they proceed to do, as per the following section which addresses what the NYLM calls “inaccurate accusations.”

“They say you were nominated but have to pay to be nominated.”

Authors nominated were not required to pay anything to be nominated.
Some nominated authors posted the picture of our trophy statute they were nominated for and used it for their marketing without paying to enter our contest. They didn’t have to pay to be nominated.

I mean, honestly. “The picture of our trophy statue that they were nominated for.” Meaning, the statue that you can only win if you enter the contest, which you just tried to say was a different thing entirely to being nominated/invited, such that the “Asian company” telling authors to use nomination in their bio was a mistake.

Which is it, NYLM? Was nomination a slip of the digital tongue that got all mixed up with an invite, or does nomination entitle us to say we’ve already been selected? Either way, having admitted in the same section that yes, you used a mailing list; having doubled down on your claim that the award is truly merit-based; and having likewise included a section on your submissions page instructing authors on how to submit their manuscripts to NYLM when they pay their fees, it should be painfully fucking obvious that being nominated for the NYLM award isn’t remotely merit-based, because you haven’t seen any stories until “nominees” send them in to you, which is after their nomination.

And then comes the tale of woe (all bolding my emphasis):

For two years, we’ve been running free-to-enter poetry and short story contests and publishing free-to-read digital magazines and print anthologies. We even spent time training and monitoring 20 interns who read through thousands of free poetry submissions this summer.

We made tens of writers around the world happy… Even our interns enjoyed working for us and were grateful for all the things they learned.

Since our anthologies are free, our poetry contests are free, and submissions to our magazine are free, we needed a way to sustain our magazine for the future, which is why we launched the Best Story Award contest.

We are completely devastated and shattered from the extent of hate mail, comments, messages, tweets, lies and false accusations that were posted online which have totally blackened our name and destroyed our magazine – all based on a single email with one wrongly-worded sentence…

Worse still, it is truly horrible to see how cruel some humans can be.
Some unsuccessful, jealous authors are spending days contacting the fans of authors who won an award from us or received a book review, telling their fans lies in an attempt to ruin the author’s reputation, turn their readers against them, destroy years of their hard work to build up their careers and readership, and ruin their lives for no reason and under the guise of “saving them from a scam”…
We have closed our contest. Refunded everyone who entered.
There will be no more free-to-enter contests. No more free-to-read anthologies.
No more articles. No more anything.

We had the heartbreaking task of firing our team of loyal, hard-working employees. 10 people are now jobless after Christmas.

 I honestly can’t even.

Remember that math I did earlier, where it worked out that you’d need at least twelve people working continuous twelve-hour days to read even half the submissions the NYLM was trying to attract each month? Here, they’re saying they’ve had to fire ten full-time workers, which they’re calling their entire staff – meaning, people whose duties must also have included the creation, management and promotions for the website and its anthologies. THAT IS NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE, KAREN.

I’ve already said this, but it bears repeating: if the contest was legitimate, there was no need to fire anyone. All you needed to do was apologise for the mix-up and show some transparency! If we’re truly meant to believe that the NYLM was capable of doing everything it claimed it could with the number of employees it says it had; if it was a solvent, successful business able to take on twice as many interns as employees – if we’re truly, honestly meant to believe that everything was above board and legitimate, and that the whole thing was a big mistake, despite those several paragraphs where they made the same one over again without any outside assistance – then these business-savvy dumbfucks have just fired a two year team of literal superheroes over Christmas because of a marketing copy error and their own profound incompetence.

Or, in the alternative scenario: they are lying liars who want us to feel bad for pointing out that their scam was, in fact, a scam.

(Also: the idea that people have been “spending days” harassing authors over Christmas when this entire boondoggle is still less than 48 hours old is kind of amazing.)

I have no doubt that many of the people published by NYLM were happy to see their work in print, whether digital or in hardcopy, but that doesn’t make them a legitimate publication. At a preteen, I was over the moon when I submitted a poem to an online contest and found out it had won a place in a real printed anthology – the fact that I had to pay for my copy hardly seemed worth bothering about. It was my journalist parents who explained to me, gently, what vanity presses were, and how some people would claim to be running a contest as a way to sucker you in – you’d still get the finished product, of course; you just wouldn’t have earned anything through merit, and you’d end up paying for something which, if you were being legitimately published, you’d be entitled to for free.

While the necessary, pragmatic goal of any writer is to be paid for their work, at base, we still care deeply about whether that work is good. Scam awards like this, which claim to be “exclusive” while making the higher odds of winning a selling point – which make us think we’ve been nominated by others on the basis of ability, but which are really just clickbait to make us nominate ourselves – are designed to prey on that feeling. We want to be good. We want to succeed, and sometimes that means paying, doesn’t it? Yes, of course – but in a fair industry, that payment would net you something more meaningful and substantial than the reassurance that your odds of success are better than if you bought a lottery ticket. For that payment, we ought to know who the judges are and why they’re qualified, and we certainly shouldn’t have to pay extra to list our work as belonging to more than one genre.

If you don’t want your business called a scam – if you truly want to be taken seriously as a literary publication running a meaningful literary award – then you’d damn sure better be ready to take ownership of your errors. Passing the buck while trying to guilt strangers into feeling bad about their deployment of basic critical reasoning skills is shitty at any time; but during a major holiday, at the end of a year as treacherous and draining as 2017 has been, it’s somehow even worse.

And for everyone who’s been upset by this, or inconvenienced – or to anyone, really, who’s just had a difficult twelve months – 2018 is right around the corner. Let’s dig down and make it better for all of us.

*ETA 27 Dec 2017: The original version of this post included the line “secondly, because it makes little sense for a small English-speaking literary publication to outsource its marketing to a company based in a non-English speaking country,” which I’ve now amended to read “secondly, because it makes little sense for a literary publication to outsource its marketing in the first place, let alone to a company with no experience in marketing to authors”. I’ve made this change because it was pointed out by Aliette de Bodard that the original version was both racist and inaccurate: English is an official language in multiple Asian countries, and regardless of that status, Asian nationals can certainly be fluent in the language. This was a biased, racist lapse in thinking on my part for which I apologise unreservedly; I’m grateful to have been corrected, and will endeavour not to make similar offensive errors in the future.

Litfic, Feminism, Genre & Subgenre

I’ve just been reading this interesting post over at Katharine Kerr’s blog about trying to define what constitutes a work of literary fiction, as opposed to a work of genre fiction. She also talks about the dangers of arguing against litfic and the literary establishment by way of derogatory strawman arguments, not only because this is exactly the kind of negative pigeonholing SFF fans and writers have always railed against when it’s turned our way, but also because it’s unhelpful in trying to understand what literary fiction actually is. It’s an interesting question, but in trying to answer it, I ended up in quite a different place to where I started. Rather than hijack the conversation, therefore, I’m going to take the comment I left as a starting point for answering a slightly different question: how might a lack of named literary subgenres be impeding the success of women literary writers?

As a casual glance at the blogsphere will reveal, there’s been considerable recent debate in SFF quarters about the feminisation of epic fantasy and the nihilism of gritty fantasy, conversations that have been in no small part facilitated by our ability to distinguish between the different SFF subgenres. We know that Tolkien is the Mitochondrial Eve of fantasy writers: one way or another, all our works descend from his. But as with the human race, things have grown more and more diverse with successive generations, such that trying to use fantasy as an exclusive, catch-all terminology has become, except in the most general sense, both useless and inaccurate. Without a language of subgenre terms with which to discuss these differences, it seems inevitable that SFF writing would automatically default to using Tolkien as a blueprint for all new stories – and indeed, up until very recently, we can see that this was the case. Only when writers started trying to break new ground did an alternate language spring up to try and describe their efforts. Partly, it must be admitted, this happened as a means of distancing such heretical works from their canonical predecessors, but also because it was suddenly necessary to look back over everything that had happened since Tolkien and ask whether fantasy could – or should – be more than just the same old Eurocentric, medieval vision of elves, dwarves, men and halflings fighting a succession of ultimate Dark Lords over and over again.

Suddenly, fantasy ceased to be a universal term, and once we started talking and thinking in subgenres, it became easier to understand why new types of story were arising; to pinpoint the tropes their authors wanted to address or change, and for what reasons. True, it also became harder to classify individual works, and the need to fit each and every book into a particular box is something we’re all still arguing about. But the fact is that language is important. Naming a thing allows us greater control over it, and that’s true regardless of whether we’re talking about the magic of Earthsea or the politics of Earth. Consider, for instance, this article by feminist philosopher Jennifer Saul, wherein she talks about the significance of language in feminism. To quote:

“Languages may also lack words for things that matter a great deal to women. This sort of gap is another way that a language can be seen as encoding a male worldview. The term ‘sexual harassment’, for example, is a recent feminist innovation. Women’s discussion of their experiences led them to see a certain common element to many of their problems, and as a result they invented the term ‘sexual harassment’. Once the problem was named, it became much easier to fight sexual harassment, both legally and by educating people about it.”

Which brings me to the matter of the Orange Prize – or rather, to the recent suggestion that an equivalent award is necessary to combat sexism in the Australian literary scene. It’s none too encouraging a sign when women take steps to set themselves apart from men, not because they want or ought to, but because discrimination has left them with no other means of achieving success. For an intelligent and comprehensive rundown on the issue, I highly recommend this excellent piece by writer Benjamin Law, wherein he says, among other things:

“If you take Brookner’s insistence that a meritocracy exists, what are you supposed to make of the raw figures? Books written by women are reviewed less. Women win fewer literary prizes. If that is a meritocracy, then you have to buy into the argument that books by women must be inherently inferior. I can’t accept that. The danger on relying on meritocracy is assuming one actually exists.”

But what, I hear you cry, does any of this have to do with SFF subgenres? Only that women SFF writers seem to have a stronger platform from which to argue their case for equality, simply because their dialogue about content, bias and narrative is so much more linguistically robust than in the literary community. This is not to say that the problems outlined by the recent VIDA statistics on the representation of women vs men in literary reviews are absent in SFF; indeed, it has been demonstrably proven that they aren’t. But when it comes to the question of awards, it doesn’t seem unduly optimistic to say that change is in the air. The Hugo Award nominees for Best Novel in 2011, for instance, are all, with one exception, women, and the situation is identical when it comes to the Nebula. The 2010 Campbell Award was won by a woman, Seanan McGuire, and for the purposes of my argument about subgenre, it doesn’t strike me as irrelevant to note that McGuire’s debut novel, Rosemary and Rue, was the first work of urban fantasy to win its author the Campbell, nor that it did so in competition with another female-authored UF novel: Gail Carriger’s Soulless.

So much of the debate I’ve seen about the disenfranchisement of women literary writers centers on anger at the perception of women’s novels as being “domestic” (where such a label is pejorative) compared to those written by men, which naturally deal with Big Themes and Important Issues. What has always struck me about this complaint – aside from the fact that it appears to be correct, both intuitively and in terms of critical perception – is the difficulty these writers seem to have articulating the problem. They talk about literature and literary fiction as a single entity, grasping after a magical phrase that will allow them to explain simultaneously why women might indeed be more prone to writing about domestic topics, why this is not a bad thing, and why it still counts as literature. Because such amorphous justifications are exactly what subgenre terminology exists to prevent, allowing us to acknowledge that two different types of storytelling are related to one another, that they share a common ancestry and ultimately a common genre, but that their conventions and approaches may nonetheless be very, very different. As in the case of last year’s Hugo Award nominees for Best Novel, it allows us to put vastly different works like China Mieville’s The City & The City, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest on the same ballot, despite the fact that the first is heavily noir/New Weird, the second is dystopian SF, and the third is urban fantasy/mythpunk.

It also puts the SFF community in an excellent position to discuss tropes and archetypes. A communal, cultural resource like TV Tropes provides a go-to lexicon for discussing narrative structure in shorthand, with many such terms finding their way into the mainstream dialogue as a matter of course. Perhaps it’s because the origins and inspirations of SFF are so heavily rooted in jargon-heavy areas like mythology, science, linguistics, pop culture and folklore that the community has taken so readily to isolating and naming its parts; alternatively, it seems reasonable to assume that any group of people who spend a significant proportion of their intellectual lives reading made-up languages, interpreting new cultures and memorising invented systems of magic will inevitably come to appreciate the deep precision and relevance of language. Whatever it is, the literary community doesn’t seem to share it – or if it does, then to nowhere near the same extent.

As more than one would-be inventor of slanguage has come to realise, there’s no telling which new terms will enter our collective vocabularies or die a series of quick deaths. But as corny and New Age as it might seem, it strikes me that the writers most deeply concerned with the state of literary fiction and its biases against women could do a lot worse than trying to coin some terms of their own: to name the archetypes they wish to invert or criticise and thereby open up the discussion. If authors can be thought of as magicians in any sense, then the root of our power has always rested with words: choosing them, arranging them and – most powerfully – inventing them. Sexism won’t go away overnight, and nor will literary bias. But until then, if we’re determined to invest ourselves in bringing about those changes, it only makes sense to arm ourselves with a language that we, and not our enemies, have chosen.