Paying to enter

Sometimes even, you had to include inside another envelope with your address on it, and with enough postage for it to travel back to you so that the editor could post your submission back if it got a rejection. All of that was costly to writers and time-consuming. With the rise of the internet, that system has mostly fallen away. Now it is as simple as pressing a button to send your submission off.

That simplicity has increased submissions, especially ill-matched and inappropriate submissions, likely a hundred-fold. For a small literary magazine or writing contest that can be daunting. Because of this, some of them have begun to charge a fee to enter.