I just read that a number of small literary magazines are now charging a reading fee. If you want them to consider your story or poem you have to pay them a fee (in one case, $3).
If they reject your material they keep the money and use it to pay the contributors whose work is accepted. The pay for accepted material usually is very low, sometimes a few dollars and a few copies, so I suspect some of the money will go toward their other expenses.
Their rationale for this: they get too many submissions and they don't have enough paying subscribers to pay the bills.
So, in sum, you can now pay to be rejected by publications that don't have many readers in the first place.
Of course nobody forces you to submit material to these publications, and I wonder how many people will continue to do so, and what effect this policy may have on the quality of the material submitted.
