Cricket Magazine / Cicada

It's what I've been hearing, though they still state in their submissions pages that rights vary for new work accepted. Highlights has also changed their policy/terms over the years, Illustration is now wfh.
Perhaps someone who has sold to any of the Cricket media mags will post here with first hand knowledge. The "rights vary" may also depend on WHO the contributor is and what standing they have in the industry (I would hope not)

So, this took a while but did find a children's lit interview with one of the Editors of two of the Cricket Media magazines. The date of interview/live chat, 2003 and I'm sure it's not gotten MORE author friendly as time has gone on. Few Publishers in any medium have been giving out even BETTER contracts then once offered in the past. They did once offer non-exclusive to all contributors years ago but said it was getting hard to have to continually try to find/contact writers, Illustrators, if they moved etc to get permission to re use the work. Yes, it lessened the work load to some degree but lets not forget to mention it saved the company a fortune in payments to all the creators over all the years.

Our preferred contract is all rights. It's simplest for the permissions department. We have some wonderful writers who have been with us for a long time, though, and rather than ask them to change an existing relationship, we offer them the nonexclusive, although, frankly, some of them don't mind signing the all-rights contract. A new writer just getting started will get an all-rights contract, which means we're buying that particular arrangement of words.

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Ten years ago, Ladybug accepted a second article I'd written. This past March, it was finally published. Yes, 10 years. And today, I got payment. Wow. I'm grateful. Seriously.
But I didn't receive a contributor's copy. It costs 6.95 for one magazine, plus about $17 for shipping (to Canada). So I guess I'll never see my little article. Oh, well, I did get the $ and I've learned a big lesson. Be patient, keep busy. And avoid Cricket Media.

Anyone else care to share their experience? Or was mine just an anomaly?

Gabbi, that may just be a record, even for them! You should be able to find the magazines at our Chapters/Indigo stores (and some of the larger magazine shops carry them as well) also Libraries have subscriptions so you could borrow, scan and save your article. But you should also keep emailing them till they send you your contrib copy. You say "seriously" grateful but I still hope your being sarcastic!

Cicada has always been very prompt in rejecting my submissions but I submitted a story to Spider and it took them over a year to finally send a rejection. They apologized for the long wait. I like to think that they enjoyed the story so much that they wavered on whether or not to reject it rather than just putting it in the wrong queue. Also, they don't have an email address listed for submission questions so I wasn't able to query the status of my submission during that time.

Submission response times for Cricket magazine can often be found on Submission Grinder:
https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/Market/Index/67