Interesting graph. ‘Quality’ is a personal opinion but I often find I prefer the stories in the semi-pro mags, perhaps because my tastes are old-fashioned.
It would be reasonable to assume that magazines which pay more for their stories end up with higher-quality material to publish. I decided to plot my ratings of short stories in 49 ranked magazines against the cents per word paid for them. I was only able to use 299 out of 365 stories, as some magazines only pay royalties, others have gone out of business and no longer have a submissions page, and still others are invitation-only and don’t publish their rates.
As there were many stories sharing data points, I used Microsoft Excel’s bubble chart feature to represent the data:
Let’s look at the horizontal axis first. Magazines are called “professional-rate” if they pay six cents or more per word, “semi-pro” if they pay between one and five cents per word, and “token” if they pay less than one cent per word. My data seems to indicate that these…
View original post 414 more words
