Friday, July 23, 2010

Submitting to the mathematically challenged

I've been surfing the net this evening, searching for places to submit unsold stories, and I've stumbled across too many "paying" publications that reveal mathematical ineptitude in how they describe their pay rates.

For example, one site that claims to pay professional rates states that they pay .05 cents per word.

Say what?

Five cents per word is usually considered a professional rate.

One-twentieth of one cent per word is not.

If they truly pay a professional rate, then they should state that the pay rate is:

5 cents per word

or

$.05 per word

but NOT

.05 cents per word

As it stands, their stated pay rate is either abysmally low or their editors lack proofreading skills. Either way, would you want them to publish your work?

2 comments:

Graham Powell said...

Hell, maybe they're off by a couple of orders of magnitude and they're really paying 50 cents a word. I say go for it! Though it seems more likely that they are, in fact, paying .05 cents per word.

Kevin R. Tipple said...

I am seeing this more and more. I thought it was just me not getting it right.