Slogan Slingers to start charging writers a submission fee

Slogan Slingers recently sent out an administrative email to its slogan writers. In order to attract more contest holders, Slogan Slingers will begin charging writers to submit their slogans. The idea is that by charging writers to submit, it will cull a lot of the bad submissions. When you can submit up to six slogans for every contest, it's tempting to default to the "throw it at the wall and see if it sticks mindset."

From Slogan Slingers' email:

So in order to lower the quantity and increase the quality, we are going to charge a very, very small fee for writers to enter a contest. It will be less than a dollar per submission. Our hope is that this keeps the bad writers away and lets our good writers stand out and not have their entries lost in a pool of thousands.

No word yet on the exact fee, or whether it's a fixed fee or dependent on other factors (contest award amount, writer's success level in the past, etc.). This change may in fact bring in more slogan contests, as the admins hope, but it will also probably deter at least some writers. Slogan Slingers currently takes a 15% cut from the prize amount for winning slogans to cover admin costs.

Slogan Slingers could have considered many options for increasing the quality of submissions -- the reason that the email cites for the low number of recent contests. Among the possible alternatives:

- Reduce the number of entries per writer, with merit-based increases
- An application/verification process before a writer can submit slogans
- A review (by the admins) or voting (by the writers) stage to weed out low-quality entries

All of these options have their pros and cons. The fact that Slogan Slingers chose to charge writers to submit their work may have the desired effect, but it will likely leave a bad taste in many writers' mouths, including this one.