Over the past several months we’ve struggled with timely payments to the authors and narrators who trust us with their work. We knew there would be delays and bumps with our transition to a non-profit, but we want to be transparent about what’s been happening, what we’re doing to correct it, and some actions others can take.

First, our deepest apologies to every author, narrator, or member of our crew who’s been impacted. We viscerally understand that the creative arts are financially fragile even in the best of times, and we’re deeply sorry to have contributed to the stress you experience trying to simply work in the fields we love.

If you’re a creative who works with us you will have been contacted by your editorial team about this situation with more detail. To be clear – you absolutely will be paid. Where we’re struggling is with timing of donations, publication schedules, and key staff availability causing us to stretch our 60 day payment window. We remain as always deeply humbled and honored by your flexibility and patience.

There’s a cluster of factors contributing to the current situation, both internal and external. Very few people are in the privileged position of being able to devote their full time to publishing short fiction, and that’s the case with every member of EA. We know that we’re not the top of anyone’s priority list, and that’s right and appropriate: family and health always come first. One of the areas where EA does have privilege is that our payment processing is handled centrally. With centralized donations and multiple shows, it’s efficient and cost effective for us to work this way. It also has an added benefit, giving a level of separation between publisher financial tasks and editorial decision making. But streamlining can also become choke points, causing a situation where the personal health and wellbeing needs of a small number of people generate backlogs that have an impact on a wider number of creatives.

To correct this going forward, we’re focusing on two tasks: updating our systems and redundancy. Redundancy is self-explanatory; we’re cross-training more people on more critical tasks to avoid these bottlenecks in the future. Over the last nearly twenty years EA has grown a bit like a tree, putting on additional rings of process or sprouting a new branch with new tools when the need arose. But it means many of those core ways of working no longer fit an organization now many times larger. Changing that isn’t difficult, but it takes time — time on top of weekly publication schedules, time from team members already struggling with their own pressures and demands. We are well underway making these changes, but it’s impossible right now to predict when they’ll be finished. Our goal is before any submission windows open for stories with 2024 publication dates.

Our final point could be viewed as mercenary, but we prefer to view it as blunt: there are plenty of problems in life that money can solve. We picked ‘good’ and ‘cheap’ on the pyramid because that’s what the current financial realities of short fiction dictate. Implementing a grant-seeking program takes time before a single penny is received, sometimes years. Our transition to non-profit let us immediately lower some key costs and seek other sources of funding like employer donation matching, which have started to help. We do our best to budget and prepare for the fluctuations that happen in monthly donations, but ultimately we remain a cash-based business — we don’t have a corporate parent to extend us debt financing.

We know we’re not alone. We see other publications face similar uncertainty. We see it, month on month, in the apologetic emails we receive from supporters who simply do not have the donations to spare right now. And there are dozens of systemic issues facing all creative projects which we haven’t even touched on.

It remains our greatest honor to be entrusted with the work of all the creatives who supply us with their stories and their voices. Thank you for your patience and support while we iron out these issues.

If you’re an impacted creative please reach out to your editor if you have further questions. Other queries or offers of assistance will reach us best through our contact form.