We were super stoked at After Happy Hour when we finally started being able to pay our contributors. It wasn't much at first—just a $10 token payment per contributor, which for us felt just on the good side of not insulting but still seemed manageable if we didn't bring in much revenue that reading period. What we found, though, was that once we started paying contributors our revenue went up, too. More people were willing to pay for expedited submissions, or throw us a few bucks as a tip jar submission, and we also started selling more print issues. All together, that meant we were able to increase our pay rates within just a couple years to where they are now.
Currently, After Happy Hour pays contributors $2.50 per issue page, with a minimum of $15 and a maximum of $50 per work. Functionally, this means we end up paying $15 per poem or work of art, with prose writers getting $15-$50 depending on the length of their work. That puts us into semi-pro territory for art and poetry, and we perch on the border between token and semi-pro payment for fiction and creative nonfiction depending on the length of the work.
Read this if you like: mythic fantasy, punk poetry, Haruki Murakami
tl;dr summary: Combination poetry collection and story about a galaxy-traveling wizard
