Literary Journals That Pay for Poetry & Fiction

In the 1940’s, Ray Bradbury was able to financially support himself and his family by writing one short story a week, selling them to magazines that paid cash for first publication rights. While the science fiction community today generally pays $.08 a word or higher, most non-genre writers are used to giving their work away for free. Literary journals are often underfunded, the editors themselves volunteers.

As online publications have grown in popularity, though, literary journals that do pay are making a comeback. Below, please find a personal list I’ve compiled of lit mags that do pay short story writers and poets for their work. This is a list I personally use when making submissions and it’s my hopes that it’ll be of help to you.

A few caveats:

— Information is current at the time of publication, but rates may change between now and when you read this.

— I have not included journals that only publish writers of a certain gender, race, national origin, etc. I’m sharing this list to help the larger short fiction and poetry communities. If the outlets listed don’t work with that full community, then the list won’t help as many people.

— I also haven’t included outlets like The Sun, The New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, etc. (Not only are they pretty much on every other list already, they aren’t literary journals. They’re magazines.)