As you know, paying contributors is a very important part of Vitality’s goals. From the very beginning, with our first minizine, we pulled money from our own personal funds to pay all of the authors and artists who helped make up Vitality. We are proud that for the last year we have offered professional, competitive rates to authors and artists.
It’s with extreme reluctance, then, that I announce we are lowering our rates of pay for authors and artists. Vitality has not been able to maintain the level of sales (t-shirts, issues, subscriptions, etc.) necessary to continue paying high rates for contributors. We have been trying everything we can think of in order to raise funds, and our efforts are simply not working.
At this time, we are lowering the rates to 3 cents per word for prose and $20 per poem. For artists, we are lowering the rates to $35 for single images and $75 for complete story illustrations, with a $15 bonus for cover art as opposed to the previous $25. This change brings Vitality down from a professional to a semi-professional market.
We’ve just started the print on demand t-shirt and button sales, released our August issue, and have another project coming soon. We’re working hard to be able to raise the rates for authors and artists in the future. The #1 way you can help us is by spreading the word. Posting to , , , writing your own posts about what Vitality means to you… these do wonders for our visibility and help our stories reach more people! Your support means the world, and we’ve said it many times – Vitality wouldn’t exist without you.
We understand if some of you choose to withdraw your submissions and seek publication elsewhere, and hope that our change in pay rates will not affect the standards of quality we aim for with Vitality.
Thank you all for your support!