written by David Steffen
This post is in response to a post made on the Amazing Stories‘s OpEd section on July 10, 2026, titled “MRM Titles Remain Non-Qualifying Markets On The Submission Grinder”. Most of the article seems reasonably accurate quoting of involved parties, but the opening paragraph of the piece had factual errors regarding The Submission Grinder and as co-founder and administrator of The Submission Grinder I felt it necessary to make a correction on the public record.
In other circumstances, we might have contacted the publication privately to ask them to correct their errors, but in a past conversation with Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories, Steve asked us to not contact him again. We have honored this request, but at the same time we do not wish to let these errors stand so instead we are making this public post.
The relevant passage:
“MRM Titles Remain Non-Qualifying Markets On The Submission Grinder”
Non-Qualifying Markets are markets for fiction, nonfiction and poetry that do not meet SFWA’s minimal pay rates and contractual requirements – while it implies nothing about the quality of the contents, though, in general, “good markets” (ones that pay well and that respect the norms of rights) get better submissions than otherwise. (Full disclosure: Amazing Stories (new) is, at present, a non-qualifying market.)
SFWA does not and has never administered Submission Grinder listings
Although Submission Grinder is not mentioned in this paragraph, the sentence beginning with “Non-Qualifying Markets” appears to imply that this sentence is a continuation of the title referring to “Non-Qualifying Markets On the Submission Grinder”. Submission Grinder has worked with SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association) in an advisory and/or freelance capacity. The most obvious of these is the SFWA Market Report, the final edition of which posted in December 2025.
It’s a natural match for the two organizations to work together from time to time, because there is a great deal of overlap in concerns, especially advocating for minimum industry standards to protect the concerns of fiction writers.
The organizations sometimes work together but they are not the same organization, and although they may confer and/or advise on topics of shared interest, neither organization dictates the policies of the other.
SFWA had previously had a “Qualifying Market List” as part of their membership requirements, but this has been retired.
Both SFWA and Submission Grinder have had the concept of a Qualifying Market, it’s true. The concept, in both cases, had some similarity in advocating for a minimum standard of the way that short fiction publications treat authors.
SFWA used to maintain a Qualifying Markets List. At that time, writers could only qualify to become SFWA members if their stories were published in markets that were on the Qualifying Markets List. You can see past announcements on their site about when individual publications were added to the Qualifying Markets list, such as this one announcing the addition of Lightspeed.
SFWA still has old versions of their membership requirements pages publicly visible, so you can see how this qualifying market list was used as well as a non-exhaustive list of some publications that met those requirements on this past membership rules page. That page notes that these rules were no longer in effect as of March 23, 2022.
The current version of the SFWA membership requirements do have a Qualifying Markets section but it simply says:
Some people may remember that SFWA used to require publication in certain venues in order to qualify for membership. This is no longer part of the membership application.
In this context “qualifying” refers to an author’s work published in that publication counting toward Qualifying that author for membership.
It is true that Submission Grinder listings have been tagged with a searchable tag for “SFWA Recognized” – this is based on the SFWA Qualifying market list, but its presence on the listing is only a factual piece of information that should probably be retired at some point since SFWA does not actually maintain that list anymore.
The Submission Grinder does have a list of reasons why markets might not qualify for a full listing.
There is a section on our FAQ page devoted to this question:
Why does X Publication have a note about “This market does not qualify for a full listing on The Grinder.” What does it mean by a “full listing”? What can cause a publication to not have a full listing?
I won’t repost that whole section here, simply because there is a lot, but you can read it there yourself. As it notes in the FAQ itself, it is not intended to be an exhaustive list. There are many reasons why an entity might not qualify for a publication listing, and not all of them are negative. For instance, a publication may ask for their listing to be removed for any reason or no reason and we will honor that, and so that is not intended to be interpreted as positive or negative, that is their choice to make. Another example is that a contest will not be listed if it doesn’t publish the winning stories, again that is not intended to be interpreted as negative – a contest can do great good for writers without publishing the winning works. On the other hand, some of them do have clearly negative interpretations, such as publishers who use contract term who take more rights from authors than they should need, or publishers who harass or doxx.
In the case of MRM, one relevant term on that list was:
A publication asks the writer to waive their “moral rights” to the story. The meaning of this is complicated but waiving moral rights has in some circumstances resulted in attribution to the author being removed, or for the work to be altered without the author’s consent or even awareness.
Minimum pay is not a factor for qualifying for a Submission Grinder listing
Note that this doesn’t mean that Submission Grinder does not think that writers should go unpaid. We do think writers should be paid. Rather than refuse to list publications who don’t pay, we try to make the pay or lack of pay as transparent as possible, and allow it to be used to threshold and sort results so that individual writers can make their own value judgments about their expectations of pay. Lack of payment is not a reason for a publication to not have a Submission Grinder listing. We could pick a payment threshold but whatever number we chose would be arbitrary. Better to just list it as correctly as we know how, and let each individual writer choose a threshold that feels meaningful to them.
The reason that Amazing Stories does not have a full Submission Grinder listing is:
In 2015, Steve Davidson requested that the listing for the Gernsback Writing Contest be removed. In that same conversation, he also asked for Submission Grinder to not contact him again. I believe this was before the full Amazing Stories launch (of the new Amazing Stories after purchasing the rights to the publication name).
At the time we did not have a policy about removing listings on publication request and so at that time we did not remove it though I believe it was a short-term call in any case.
When the new Amazing Stories launched, I believe we fully listed it for a short time. At that time we still did not yet have a policy about allowing publications to request removal, but later we realized that it would be best if we allowed any publication to be able to request this for any or no reason. We hoped and we continue to hope that sending writer traffic to publications will help the publications as well as the writer, but if the publication doesn’t want the traffic from us, then we should oblige them by not sending them any traffic.
Under other circumstances, we might have contacted a publication to ask “When you said that you wanted this contest listing to be removed, did you also mean for this other related publication listing to be removed also?” However, Steve Davidson was very clear that he did not want us to contact him again, and so we felt the only correct course of action appeared to be to consider that request to include not listing Amazing Stories. We have continued to honor our interpretation of his request by not listing Amazing Stories and we have continued to honor his other request by not contacting him for that or for any other purpose in the eleven years hence.