What Happens After You Submit to a Lit Mag?
Lesson 6 of 12 of A Submitter's Guide to Lit Mags! With help from The Sun, Brevity Blog, ONE ART, SmokeLong Quarterly, Write or Die, and ONLY POEMS
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This is Lesson # 6 of Sorry For The Inconvenience — A Submitter’s Guide to Lit Mags. It is the final lesson in the first half of this course, focusing on a comprehensive breakdown of submitting to lit mags. In the final two weeks, I will be focusing more on strategy, analysis, and practical tips and tricks to increase your chances of getting published while decreasing your chances of running screaming into the void. If you’d like to catch up on the lessons so far, here they are.
Lesson 4: Everything You Wanted To Know (and Plenty You Didn't) About Lit Mag Submission Guidelines
Alrighty! Let’s get into how the sausage is made — or, well, I guess it would be more accurate to say: Let’s get into how the sausage is put into someone’s mouth, rolled around a bit, and, likelier than not, spat back out.1
I thought the best way to handle this would be to ask some of my friends to help (yeah, I have friends). So I reached out to the editors of The Sun, Brevity Blog, SmokeLong Quarterly, ONLY POEMS, ONE ART, and The Forever Workshop.
I asked them to demystify the process of what goes on behind the scenes once your work arrives. I wanted to give a range — cover all different genres → from big teams to small → Submittable to email submissions → super-fast response times to six months waits and more. The idea is that, with this much variety, it should give you a general understanding of how the industry as a whole generally works.
Please welcome your guest instructors:
Both Andrea Firth and
will be teaching courses right here on The Forever Workshop later this year, btw. Learn about those on our 2024 Calendar.
If you use submittable to submit to lit mags and see that little label change from [RECEIVED] to [In-Progress], it means some action has been taken on your work. Here is what happens next.
The Sun
The Sun is a United States of America-based literary magazine founded in 1974, accepting fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
We’re looking for narrative writing and evocative photography from all over the world. Send us work that maps the human landscape, where the light catches on the faintest joy, where darkness sometimes threatens to overwhelm, and where ✗ never marks the spot.
The Sun accepts simultaneous submissions. They respond within six months. They are extremely competitive, with a last known acceptance rate of <1%. You can find them on social media (@TheSunMagazine), where they have 19506 followers the last time we checked.
Notable Tags: #read for free #active on socials #independent #extremely competitive #30+ years old #nominates for industry awards #mega super popular. Woah. #has printed issues
We have iterated on our process quite a bit over the last few years, and as recently as last month. Here's an outline of our current submission-review system:
An unsolicited submission comes in. We get roughly 2,500 per month through this main channel, and submissions are open year-round.
One of three paid Manuscript Readers reads each piece and rates it on a Yes/Maybe/No scale (with a text field for comments). All of our readers are generalists—they read essays, poems, and short stories alike. We don't mask/anonymize submissions, either.
"No" submissions are rejected. Around 70% of all submissions are rejected at this stage. Because we pay contributors well and we have a good reputation, we get a lot of submissions, and most of them are not what we're looking for. Any manuscript reader can offer personalized feedback, but we don't have a lot of capacity for that, so most at this stage get a form rejection.
"Maybe" submissions are read by another Manuscript Reader who can only say "Yes" or "No." Everything about our work is subjective, but it can't be "Maybe"s all the way down or we'd never get anything else done.
Most "Yes" submissions advance to the next stage. If a reader really loves a piece, they have the option to skip a stage and send it to the full editorial staff rather than a single editorial reader.
One of five Editorial Readers, part of the Sun editorial staff, reads each submission passed along from the previous stage. They rate submissions on a Yes/No scale (with a text field for comments).
"No" submissions" are rejected, but sometimes an editor will reject at this stage in order to ask for a revision before advancing to the next stage because we want to give everything we're passing along the best possible chance at acceptance. We also tend to send more rejections encouraging another submission at this stage.
"Yes" submissions advance to the next stage.
The full editorial staff, except for the Editor & Publisher, reads each manuscript passed along from the previous stage. They rate submissions on a slightly different scale: Accept/Request Revision/Reject. Here we have multiple text fields for comments regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the submission. Only about 5% of all unsolicited submissions reach this stage.
All submissions advance from here to the next stage.
The Editor & Publisher reads each submission and all reader comments.
We accept some submissions. These are often pieces with broad support among the editorial staff, but we will also accept pieces that got a divisive response from the team, or pieces that the capital-E Editor loved but others didn't.
We request revisions of some submissions. These are usually pieces that most of the team had some affection for but that we mostly agreed are missing something that only the author can add (as opposed to just a vigorous line edit).
We reject some submissions. These are usually pieces that most of the editorial staff didn't connect with. These always get some kind of encouragement, whether a positive comment about the piece or an invitation to submit more work.
We do some soliciting of new writers, and we handle those as well as submissions from prior contributors much the same way. I love the Chill Subs lists of submission opportunities; sometimes when I see a list that feels aligned with the kind of work published in The Sun, I go to those journals' websites and look for contributors I might ask to send me work.
Our goal is to respond to all submissions within three months, but we're fairly behind on that target right now. We're at more like six months, still catching up after various holiday breaks. Protip: the longer it takes for us to respond, the better a writer's chances of acceptance. They're still not good chances—we publish less than one percent of unsolicited submissions—but they're better. I'd have to imagine this is true for most journals that have multiple stages of review.
SmokeLong Quarterly
SmokeLong Quarterly is a United States-based literary magazine founded in 2003, accepting flash fiction and flash nonfiction.
"We are dedicated to bringing the best flash narratives to the web quarterly, whether written by widely published authors or those new to the craft."
SmokeLong Quarterly accepts simultaneous submissions. They respond within 1 week. They are extremely competitive, with a last known acceptance rate of <1%. You can find them on social media (@SmokeLong), where they have 21694 followers the last time we checked.
Notable Tags: #read for free #active on socials #brecht top 1000 #clmp member #extremely competitive #2nd best lit mag of 2023 #krouse top 500 #20+ years old #chill subs community favorite #nominates for industry awards #mega super popular. woah. #one week response time
The editorial process at SmokeLong can go quite fast for the submitter if the answer is no. We try to respond within 7 days. If we are taking longer, we are discussing your work. Our competitions and general submissions queue work the same way. We never limit the number of narratives you can send us. As soon as you’ve heard back from us, please feel free to send your next submission. We don’t consider multiple submissions: always one at a time. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please consider journals’ response times when submitting.
When you submit, always through Submittable, two submissions editors are assigned to your work. They comment and vote usually within a couple of days, and I send responses out accordingly.
If at least one submissions editor votes MAYBE, I have a look at the submitted narrative and decide if it should be sent to the senior editors for a discussion. The submissions editors always remain in the discussion.
If at least one submissions editor votes YES, your work is automatically sent to the senior editors for a discussion.
The discussion that ensues may take weeks. We are a diverse team, and we rarely all agree on what works and what doesn’t in flash. Though the discussion often results in a rejection, we feel strong work deserves consideration.
When the discussion results in a possible acceptance with substantive edits, I first message the writer and ask if they’d like to see my edit. If they are amenable and accept the edits, I send an acceptance. If the writer rejects my edits, we respectfully part ways.
When the discussion results in an acceptance regardless of whether the writer accepts our minor edits, I send an acceptance and let the writer know that we might have some suggestions. These will probably focus on tightening syntax and smoothing out grammatical, spelling, typographical and transcription niggles.
The new SmokeLong contributor will then, around one month before publication, receive questions from an interviewer.
Upon acceptance, we need an author photo, an updated bio, and a Paypal email for the transfer of the honorarium. We pay immediately upon publication. Starting with Issue 83, we also invite our contributors to provide an audio.
We receive an average of 38 submissions each day when our general queue is open, fewer when we’re reading only for The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction (open now). While we’re reading entries for this competition, we are closed to general submissions—with the exception of paid feedback submissions, which we are currently reading for the September 2024 issue.
ONE ART: a journal of poetry
ONE ART: a journal of poetry is a United States of America-based literary magazine founded in 2020, accepting poetry .
ONE ART is a home for good poems. We aim to publish poetry that adds value to the life of our readers. We hope to offer, sustain, and nourish a kind, inviting, and thoughtful community.
ONE ART: a journal of poetry accepts simultaneous submissions. They respond within 1-7 days. They are highly competitive, with a last known acceptance rate of <3%. You can find them on social media (@oneartpoetry1), where they have 2305 followers the last time we checked.
Notable Tags: #read for free #active on socials #highly competitive #nominates for industry awards #popular #one week response time
ONE ART submissions are handled in a fairly straightforward though, perhaps a little haphazard manner. I read everything. Louisa Schnaithmann (my wife) is Consulting Editor and weighs in on submissions fairly often. Sometimes Louisa acts as a sensitivity reader, sometimes it's because I'm a little too in love with the words of certain poets and need a more objective position, sometimes I'm at a bit of a loss (admittedly) ... usually because I'm underslept or have simply read far too much poetry that day... and then, importantly, Louisa in more into "lyric" poetry so she'll call bullshit on work that is straight narrative with line breaks (so to speak). Increasingly, I ask Louisa to weigh in on Regular Contributors (those that have appeared frequently in ONE ART). I think this is good to avoid bias. I often ask Louisa to have first read of these submissions. That way I receive her input before I start getting excited about certain poems in the submission batch. It's useful feedback. Given the poet-friendly intention to respond in a timely fashion, I try to get through as much as I can daily. I've learned the sensible approach is to get the [obvious] rejections out the door as fast as possible.
Reasons poems get declined (quickly):
Red flags that are actually red → misogyny/sexism is an obvious example, homophobia, racism, antisemitism, the list goes on...
Hypersexuality → I'm not a prude by any means... but there has to be a reason you're using the images you're using and the language you're using.
I'm bored (don't be boring) → remember, things in the zeitgeist are written about by EVERYONE... if a 17-year cicada brood just arrived, you know every editor is smashing their head against their desk because of poem after poem about cicadas.…
Private vs. public → Is this poem for an audience? Sometimes we, poets, write poems that are really truly for ourselves ... when you are thinking about submitting, you have to put on your editor's hat and think a little from the reader's position... what is the takeaway for the reader? What are you offering? Furthermore, are you offering something that someone else hasn't already done better?
ONE ART specific → They submitted types of work that are not accepted or are hard sells): For example, rarely publish anything with lots of negative space... if the words are all over the page, it's not a good fit. Poems in columns, Concrete poetry, Blackout poetry, visual poetry.
The poet doesn't have anything to say → Sorry, but this is extremely common. I was guilty of this in my own poetry before I had lived enough life. Experience is humbling.
Some NOs are probably unfair, but we only have a couple of minutes max to look at submissions given the volume, so...
the poem is unfinished in too many ways → even a good poem, where lots of stuff is working, the editor shouldn't be doing too much rewriting.
don't be pretentious with your language
poems are too didactic
political poems that are more of a rant than anything else
poems that are too hyperbolic and nebulous ... sound and fury signifying nothing
Oof, I feel like I could keep going... this is well beyond what you wanted, I think. Some of these are more "obvious" than others. I think the key statement is that editors are looking for reasons to keep reading, reasons to lean in, a line or image that catches your eye. If nothing is jumping out then the editor is going to move on and keep plowing through the slush. We want to be surprised / amazed / startled / shaken / haunted / left wanting more / ruminating on the poem long after having finished reading it ... like Dickinson, try to take the top of my head off, you know?
Some poets/writers get mildly (or more than mildly) insulted by fast turnaround time. All I can assure them is that it's well-intended. It's also necessary as my inbox overfloweth (which I'm grateful for). I haven't forgotten that this is what I wanted. I try to minimize the time from acceptance to publication though this has been getting trickier. Mainly because we receive more and more good work as ONE ART becomes more recognized. Competition has become much more intense. I do like to broaden the horizons of readership when reasonable. So, now and again, there are poems in ONE ART (that typically go over very well) though a few poets will note a level of surprise that I chose to publish the poems.
Brevity Blog
Brevity Blog is a United States of America-based literary magazine, accepting flash essays.2
The Brevity Blog is the place to discuss issues related to the writing of creative nonfiction.
Brevity Blog accepts simultaneous submissions. They aim to respond within 30 days. You can find them on social media (@brevitymag), where they have 20000 followers the last time we checked.
Notable Tags: #read for free #active on socials #highly competitive
Brevity Blog, Essays Exploring Craft and the Writing Life
The Brevity Blog is the place to discuss issues related to the writing of creative nonfiction. The Blog is not a literary journal and it’s not “a blog,” at least not like what blogs used to be. Launched in 2006, Brevity Blog publishes a high-quality essay that explores craft and/or the writing life every weekday of the year, 250-260 essays annually. We aim to produce journal-quality content while functioning with the speed and flexibility of a blog—like an ongoing conversation in essays.
Submissions to the Blog are FREE and accepted year-round. Our response time is one to four weeks. You can find our guidelines here and read a discussion of what kinds of submissions work best for us here.
Each essay is read by one, sometimes two editors. Although we move quickly due to the large number of essays submitted and the frequency that we publish, we give each essay careful attention and pull in a second editor if we are “on the fence” or have questions.
Submissions receive one of four responses.
Not appropriate. Essays that do not fit our editorial mission are declined quickly.
No thank you. If the essay doesn’t meet our editorial standards, we say no kindly. Reasons why we say no are outlined below. We receive many quality submissions and can only publish a subset. Sometimes we say no to excellent work because the Blog essay submitted is very similar to other work we have recently published or accepted for an upcoming Blog slot.
Maybe this will help. Here’s where we differ from most journals. For essays with potential but not quite there, the editor may follow up with supportive feedback to help the writer with revision. This is dependent on the editor’s available time. The feedback is “on the house” and we hope the writer finds it useful. Sometimes the editor will encourage the writer to consider the feedback, and if it resonates, to make changes and resubmit. This doesn’t guarantee publication, but we engage in editorial conversations with our writers when we can.3
Yes, accepted. The reviewing editor will work with the writer on edits as needed. The editorial process moves quickly—the more promptly the writer responds, the sooner the essay will post, usually within 30 to 60 days. It’s best to indicate if an essay is timely in the submission’s cover letter re line. Readers of the Brevity Blog can comment on Blog essays, and we ask the writer to be available on the day their essay posts to acknowledge or respond to comments. We promote every essay on multiple social media platforms and hope our writers share the work with their audiences as well.
Occasionally, when we encounter a writer with an interesting idea or experience related to nonfiction writing, we will reach out and request that they submit an essay to the Blog. This doesn’t guarantee publication, but we try to keep our content wide-ranging and relevant. Most of our essays are unsolicited.
Why essays get declined:
We don’t publish academic essays and prefer a conversational, collegial tone. Poetic and lyrical styles work too. Sometimes we receive essays that simply don’t fit the Blog’s mission or voice.
If we aren’t sure what the writer is trying to say, if the language is unnecessarily complex or confusing, if the topic seems to stray in too many directions, or if the essay reads rough, like a first or early draft—we say no. Don’t go too long, our word count max is 1,000, and 850 words is the sweet spot.
Ultimately the essay needs to connect the dots. We want to understand how your personal experience links with the craft of creative nonfiction or with the various aspects of the writing life, such as publishing, workshops, or promotion, and we want to know specifically what we can learn from you and your experience. We appreciate subtlety, nuance, metaphor, and imagery as ways to show meaning. But if we don’t get it—we say no.
We invite you to join the conversation that’s been ongoing on the Brevity Blog for 17 years now. Read the Blog. Learn what we’re about. Be thoughtful and take the time your essay needs. Then give your writing the chance it deserves—send it. We look forward to reading your work.
Write or Die Magazine
Write or Die Magazine is a United States of America-based literary magazine founded in 2018, accepting fiction, nonfiction, and interviews.
Official literary magazine for Chill Subs. Money → Mouth, here we go.
Write or Die Magazine accepts simultaneous submissions. They respond within Within 90 days. They are highly competitive, with a last known acceptance rate of <2%. You can find them on social media (@WriteorDieMag), where they have 11,700 followers the last time we checked.
Notable Tags: #read for free #active on socials #highly competitive #nominates for industry awards #popular
Because we have grown so fast over the last year, we have worked to streamline our process to be as simple as possible for the submitter and our editors. We have two submission periods a year for Fiction, from Oct. 1 - Dec. 1 and Feb. 1 - April. 1. Our creative nonfiction and author interviews are always open for pitches or full pieces. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but we ask that you let us know if your story is accepted elsewhere.
We currently collect our unsolicited submissions through Google Forms. We have one for Fiction submissions, one for Author Interviews, and one for Creative Nonfiction. We aim to respond to writers within three months.
Our associate editor, Shelby Hinte, receives your essays and interviews. She responds to pitches and submissions in the order she receives them. Shelby reads through all of these submissions on her own and makes the final decision if a piece works for the magazine or not. Since interviews typically come in the form of pitches, Shelby will respond with a rejection or an acceptance if we have an interest in covering the author being pitched. We publish four essays and between 4-6 author interviews monthly so that we have the time and space to promote each writer wh contributes their work to us. We pay $50 for essays and $25 for interviews.
If you want an essay to stand out from the slush pile, Shelby goes for pieces written from a unique angle or perspective. “I love personal essays that veer into cultural/critical analysis, so anytime the writer has obviously done some serious research (or obsessing), I am pretty hooked.” She also enjoys reading essays that show connections between seemingly disconnected things.
Things to avoid: Very obviously hasn't read the magazine before and/or doesn't follow submission guidelines. I know everyone says this, but it really bears repeating!
200-500 word essays about "why I write."
Essays that feel topical just to get a like/be part of the conversation.
For fiction, our assistant fiction editor, Suzanne Grove, reads through each submission and marks it as a rejection or if it will be moved to the next round. She typically moved 5-8 to the next round for our fiction editor, Tamar Mekredijian, to read. Tamar narrows these pieces down to the one we will publish. We publish one fiction piece a month and pay writers $200. Their work is also published with original artwork.
Once acceptances are made, the editors send finished pieces to Kailey Brennan DelloRusso, the EIC, who responds to each writer via email with a media kit to feature their work on social media, their publication date, and notes about when they will receive their payment. Because one of Write or Die Mag’s main focuses is to evaluate writers, we take pride in this last step as we hope it makes each writer feel prioritized!
Submissions have been coming in hot lately. We just posted a reminder that our essay and interview submissions are always open, and we received around 70 essay submissions and 25 interview pitches within a few weeks. In our first week of reopening fiction, we received over 300 submissions. We publish author interviews every Tuesday, essays on Wednesday and monthly fiction during the last Tuesday of every month.
Only Poems
United States of America-based literary magazine founded in 2023, accepting poetry.
"Free to submit. Open all year. Fast response. We pay $55." -C.S.
ONLY POEMS accepts simultaneous submissions. They respond within two weeks. They are extremely competitive, with a last known acceptance rate of <3%. You can find them on social media (@onlypoemsmag).
Notable Tags: #read for free #extremely competitive #nominates for industry awards # two-week response time
When we first started ONLY POEMS after an all-nighter of mad brainstorming (think that Pepe Silva planning meme), we accepted submissions via email. We thought we wouldn’t really get that many since we didn’t really exist save for a social media post. By the end of the first month we had well over a 1000 subs and were sorta in over our heads. Today, we work through submissions via Submittable (and impatiently await Chill Subs’ knockout submissions manager).
Here’s a breakdown of the steps after you (around 2000 of you a month!) hit “submit”.
Karan, our Editor-in-Chief, reviews everything chronologically. They spend time on the cover letter and going through all ten pages of the poetry. (Our response time used to be two weeks, and while we are still striving to maintain that, for now, it takes us around six weeks to get back to everyone).
Thanks to the nifty Submittable labels, Karan flags certain subs as “Request more”, “Special Decline”, or “Accept” while others (around 95%) receive a form decline after the first read.
This leaves us with roughly 100 submissions per reading period (we are always open for subs, but free submissions are only open the first seven days of the month, so for us, reading periods are basically akin to one month). Out of these 100, we can publish four poets (because of our Poet of the Week model). This means a lot of hard, weepy rejecting. Alas.
At this point, Karan assigns submissions to Justine (our Managing Editor) and myself. “Special Declines” are not sent a confirmed special decline until one more editor has reviewed it. After that, we either send the special decline (and really mean it) or we ask the poet for more work sent directly to Karan’s email.
The “Request more” labeled submissions essentially get the same treatment as “special decline,” wherein one other editor reviews the submission. If the other editor really thinks this ought to be a “special decline” instead, then there might be a bit of back and forth before the appropriate response is sent out.
After this, we’re left with around ten or so “Accept” labeled submissions. Since our editorial calendar usually runs about two months in advance, this means that we can only really take two of these poets. So we’ll discuss their work at our weekly team meetings (or, as is often the case, Karan and I will talk about it throughout our day, which means we’re often discussing poems in random situations like when bathing our kid or vacuuming or in between schoolwork, and definitely over breakfast and dinner. You could say we live, breathe, eat poetry).
Karan almost always makes the final decision. From these ten “accepts,” we only send out two acceptances, so the other eight poets get what we’ve labeled the “Super-duper special decline” (you’ll know it when you see it!)
And that’s it! We await confirmation and slot in our poets and start the process all over again!
Now some quick ground rules that are part of our ethos:
We do not read blind. We like cover letters. We read your cover letters. This doesn’t mean we’ll accept you just because you’ve published in The Paris Review 50 times or reject you because you’ve never published. Our Poet of the Week series has featured everyone from Pulitzer Winners to debut poets. We just like knowing who you are.
We have some amazing readers joining our team this Monday. The process from then on will look quite similar. The only difference will be that more eyes will be reading the initial round of submissions. Karan will still review each and every submission that comes through before sending any kind of a response (so this means that even if all our readers have marked a poem as “no”, an editor will still take a quick look before confirming the form decline).
Most of our submissions pour in during our free periods, but we are also always open for Tip-Jar and 3-Day Fast Response submissions. Paid submissions do not get special treatment (outside of, well, the super-fast response for the latter). We are just ever grateful for the support.
Sometimes it takes us longer to respond than six weeks. Please know that this probably means that Karan and I are having many animated discussions about your poems. Like, your poetry is probably the instigator of our breakfast squabbles. We’ll respond to you as soon as we’ve made up.
Since this is the last lesson in my six-part information overload half of this course, I will forego the specific discussion and exercises. There has been a lot of information spread out over a short period of time. There is a weekend between now and when the second half of this course begins (Monday). Starting next week, my focus will no longer be on providing information but instead using the information we’ve covered to discuss strategy, tracking, organizing, and analysis. So, the floor is open. What questions do you still have about the submission process? What dark corners did I miss? Have at it.
I truly did not consider how weirdly sexual that metaphor was until after I wrote it
Brevity Blog is an excellent resource for those who want to learn more about the craft of writing.
I have received feedback like this from Brevity Blog in the past, and it was extremely useful and comprehensive. They’re not messing around.
I suspect I'm not the typical audience for this series: I'm a writer, yes, but I'm also the editor of a 28-year-old lit mag that I have mostly run as a one-man show (Fiction on the Web). I cannot tell you how much value I'm getting out of this series as an EDITOR wishing to improve and iterate my own lit mag based on the best practice you've been laying out in this course. Every lesson so far has inspired me to update my submissions guidelines or my About page to improve clarity and transparency for the authors who are submitting. You've helped confirm to me that I've been on the right track all this time, but also challenged me to be better. Everything from sharing readership stats, to being more open about how Patreon donations get spent, to creating a little video explaining how stories get sifted and selected (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptfj9pkIeJA). Please let me know if there's anything I can do to thank you! (I have, as a start, become a paid Chill Subs subscriber.)
This is the best behind-the-scenes piece on what happens at lit mags I've ever seen. It's so hard submitting pieces and not knowing WHAT IS HAPPENING. So this is deeply comforting. Thanks, Ben, and the editors who pulled back the curtain.