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nicholaslovett-blog · 7 years ago

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How I Research and Organize Literary Magazines

How a guy that’s been published once tries to get published again.

PART TWO

In part one I wrote about the vast and confusing literary magazine ecosphere. Poets & Writers lists over 1200 literary magazines that accept unsolicited submissions. Where to start? If you followed the first post, you’ve already read and digested the Pushcart Prize, and you’re hip to the best of the best. What about the rest? Once you’re fluent with the 50-odd magazines where every writer sends work, where to take it from there? Because unless you’re Karen Russell and your first publication is the New Yorker, you have make some kind of sense of the remaining 1150 venues, and it’s not BCCing three hundred editors with rich text pasted in the body of an email.

Keep reading, and I’ll tell you where to find them, how to interpret them, and how to organize the venues.

I. Where to Find Literary Magazines

There’s more than one way to skin this cat. The big list, as I’ve mentioned, is on Poets & Writers website. That’s all of them. However, they all have different submission periods, different themes, etcetera, making this tool as unwieldy as hanging a piece of drywall.

Duotrope will allow you to narrow a search. The service is five dollars a month, and you’ll get stats on each market. How long they take to tender a rejection, how many users have been accepted and that percentage, and it will put “Temp Closed” in big, red letters, saving time. This is the best of the best of internet crowdsourcing. There’s also a helpful email list that goes out on Wednesdays with new and newly reopened markets. I use Duotrope regularly, but that’s no longer where I find venues.

Sadly, Writer’s Market, imo, is obsolete. I remember a family member of mine, a poet, giving me a copy in high school. That was my first formal introduction to writing beyond 5-point essays and the Sylvia Plath facsimiles I wrote in honors English 10. There’s not much here that you can’t get from the internet. There’s something to be said for having all of the contests in one place from A-Z, instead of scattershot announcements via Twitter or email, but I’m not sure that’s worth 15 bucks. The articles at the beginning of the book are pre-internet, when writers had a tough time accessing career information. Pre-Writer’s Digest, honestly.

Where I find markets is Entropy’s “Where to Submit” list. This is what that looks like. The compiler of this list should never have to buy a drink at an event where writers are present. The list is bi-monthly, and divided into four sections: Presses, Chapbooks, Journals and Anthology, and Residencies, Fellowships, Conferences and Opportunities. The journals section has everything from “Zzzyzva” to “Wanton Fuckery.” (Don’t lie, you just threw that into Google). Like every other list, it’s overwhelming. But it’s monthly, and if the magazine accepts submissions in the second listed month of the title, that’s specified. Start with the A’s, then the Z’s, then the Ms, and you’ll be ahead of the game. I didn’t get them all from the August/September list, but I found five prime, previously unknown-to-me markets.

The other source not be forgotten is “Calls for Submissions.” These are markets that explicitly need more work to read, so yeah, might want to keep up with those. Poets and Writers, The Review Review, and New Pages all list markets with open calls for submissions. Some are niche, many are not.

II. How to Interpret a Magazine’s Work

We’ve found the market, how do we know what it likes? Simply, don’t send a sci-fi story to Ellery Queen, and all that. I don’t want to go there, that should be obvious by now. But I also don’t want to get into dense literary criticism, which I probably can’t pull off as-is. Though, I don’t think you have to.

Start with the submissions page, where you’ll get all the relevant info about formatting, submission window, SASE or not, fees. Often, there’s a mission statement. Maybe they only publish teenagers from Borneo? That’s something to know. The mission statement is something of a wish-list, but with 1000s of submissions, believe they can find it. Here’s a common one I just saw from TIMBER:

“We’re...interested in hybrid work that pushes against the limits of genre.”

Okay. That makes sense. They’re more likely, if this were a novel, to publish Phillip Meyer or Benjamin Percy than Don Winslow or James Ellroy.

My next stop is the contributor’s notes. Magazines publish writers from one stage of their career, more often than not. I divide them like this:

a. Heavyweights - Names any writer would recognize like Stephen King, James Patterson, Joyce Carol Oates, Lauren Groff, Junot, TC Boyle, Jeffrey Eugenides. The upper-crust. The careers we would all love to have.

b. Pros - Full Professors with a track record, or well-known names in the literary mag world like Stephen Dixon, Tea Obreht, Deb Olin-Unferth, or Steve Almond.

c. Up and Comers - MFAs, adjunct professors, emerging writers with a few credits. I would say the literary magazine bear is stuffed with 70 percent of this class of writer.

d. New Writers - MFA students, writers with two or less publications.

That’s not too hard, eh? If you read the submission guidelines, the mission statements, and get a feel for the writers, you’ve eliminated 3/5 venues. Keep in mind, this is after you’ve narrowed a macro-list. So we’re down to 2 of 10 venues.

The last bit I’ll keep short and sweet: the aesthetic. There’s a long answer that I won’t get to here, and a short answer. If you have a PhD in English Literature, you can read the last three years of issues and find the needle in a haystack.

Or...you can submit to the journals whose work you like. That’s it! Read two stories. Do you like what you read? Submit. Do you have a first person story about punk teenagers (like half of mine) and you’re looking at a journal like The Gettysburg Review that takes a very educated look to its subject matter, like Melville’s treatment of manual labor? Don’t. At the end of the slush pile, editors have about 50 stories that are worth publishing. From there, a theme emerges, and they pick their favorites. Don’t overthink it, but don’t send your work just anywhere. Often times, editors will just list their aesthetic preferences, like the Master’s Review love of “interiority.”

III. How to Organize Literary Magazines

Should all this info just go into a computer document with the title “mysubzyo,” or a desk drawer on pieces of scrap paper? Nope, but you can figure this one out. I keep an alphabetized box of index cards with the following categories written down on each:

Editors: Need to list the right editor for your cover letter.

Length: Will be explicitly listed, but some favor long, some short. Online-only venues favor stories that are less than 2500 words, because that’s what our minds tolerate from the computer.

Submissions: When, how, and how often.

Contributors: See above.

Story: Which story I liked the most, and why.

Thoughts: Three or four lines of editorial.

Front of the card: I list the name, the SASE address, and the mission statement comments.

Top line of the back: Tier ranking, where they’re from, and how much, if any, cost to submit.

How does this all come together for me? My wife went out breakfast with her mother yesterday, and I decided to do some research, and submit.. I spend at least 2-3 Saturday mornings a month pounding the pavement, and more before the academic calendars open for submissions.

I narrowed the Entropy list to three venues: The Hour After Happy Hour Review, Craft, and The Atticus Review. I looked at their websites, and they were high-quality. I dove deeper and found:

-The Hour After Happy Hour Review was a great fit. Their mission statement included “a subject few have thought of” and “quirky.” I have a story I’m trying to place about rehab kids working in a South Florida call center which matches up nicely. I read two of their stories that matched this aesthetic, and I didn’t feel embarrassed to put my work next to.

-The Atticus Review was a good aesthetic fit for the same story, but has the edict that all stories need to be single-spaced. That’s ok. But I already have documents with and without contact info, and documents in PDF, .doc, and .docx. That’s not even digressing into what I have to do to compile these formats in Scrivener. I’m not willing to spend 10 minutes reformatting after spending hours before my story was ready. This isn’t a knock against their policy, but just as editors can be arbitrary and dislike certain flubs or themes, I can do the same. So there.

-Craft is a new concept from the Master’s Review. Like the title suggests, they focus on the craft of writing. The stories were good, but after looking at their contributors notes, I saw a lot of reprints and only writers out of my weight class. Which makes sense. Each story is concluded with an author’s writerly note on a craft element, and this isn’t 101. There were no emerging writers, of which the Master’s Review specializes. This market was not a fit, and while I’ll read their stuff (instead of the red-meat, high calorie political journalism that’s taken deep ro(o)t on social media), I won’t waste my time or their with a submission.

Hope this was a help. If anybody wants to compare notes, they can email me at [email protected] or @lovettfiction

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