Literary Magazines for the Overwhelmed

This week's ep is all about lit mags! ✨

If you're exploring this space and trying to figure it out, this podcast ep is for you.

I discuss how to find the right magazine for your story, the importance of reading widely, and the realities of rejection in the submission process. 

I also explore the culture and industry of literary magazines, including issues of elitism, gatekeeping, and the value of punk/DIY publications. 

Here are a few resources I recommend you check out:

Chill Subs: https://www.chillsubs.com/

Writer Beware: https://writerbeware.blog/

ALLi Watchdog: https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/watchdog/

Taco Bell Quarterly: https://tacobellquarterly.org/

Hustle Culture versus the Literary Academy: https://www.thenarrativecraft.com/post/two-cultures-in-publishing-hustle-culture-vs-the-literary-academy

My lit mag wins so far: https://www.thenarrativecraft.com/books-short-stories-andrew-hodges

Transcript

 Hello, and welcome, folks, to season two of the Freelancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. My name is Andy Hodges. I'm a cultural anthropologist turned fiction writer and editor, and I own a book editing business called The Narrative Craft. Make sure you subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode, and sign up for my fortnightly newsletter in the show notes if you want more regular updates.

Now, today I'm discussing literary magazines from an editor, writer, and literary translator perspective. I'll talk a little bit about my own experience and I'll cover the basics for any authors out there who are maybe overwhelmed, confused, interested and excited to publish a short story for the first time in a literary magazine.

The first thing to say is that there are many literary magazines out there and they cover al different kinds of poetry, and then you've got more literary ones, and then you've got more genre-focused ones. There are loads, and it can be a bit overwhelming for new authors, especially because of all this.

Before I delve into the details, here's a few basic points that will help you. So very, very short stories. That's up to about a thousand words. These usually fall under something called flash fiction. Flash fiction can be a great exercise, especially for editors because it forces you to develop a story, come up with an idea and execute it using a really small number of words.

Quite often these stories have a lot in common with jokes. Like jokes have a punchline. Flash fiction often has some kind of twist at the end a little bit similar to a punchline. Flash fiction is not for me. I do not enjoy it, but I know loads of editors and writers who do, and I think it can be a really helpful exercise.

Then you have short stories, so the length of a short story can vary a lot, but it's usually between 1,000 words and 5,000 words, so that can be seven and a half thousand, even 10,000 words perhaps. But most magazines in my experience are looking for stories between 1,000 words and about 5,000 words. You go a little bit longer and you end up in novelette or novella territory, and then you'll be looking for a different kind of publishing outlet for your manuscript.

Some literary magazines are incredibly well established. I'm looking here at magazines in the literary space and in the speculative fiction slash genre fiction space. Really famous magazines in the genre fiction space. That might be Clarksworld. Then you have Strange Horizons, which is kind of literary, speculative fiction.

Then you have Asimov's Science Fiction as well. That's another genre one. The biggie in literary fiction would be The Paris Review. And I'll talk a little bit about the literary space later. Other literary magazines are very much fly by night. Some of them have a really kind of DIY aesthetic or a zine feel.

They might be passion projects created by students who have just completed a publishing MA or creative writing MFA, something like that. They could be passion projects by editors who are really excited about a particular topic or theme and wanted to make a literary magazine based around it. A DIY literary magazine also gives these people an incredible amount of useful experience as well.

For instance, in reading through lots of submissions and looking for patterns, reading the famous slush pile, and also copy editing, and possibly a little bit of developmental editing experience as well, depending on how much they work with the authors to prepare and polish those texts for publication.

So there are all sorts of literary magazines out there, and that can make the whole landscape a little bit overwhelming quite often for new authors. Add to that, that there are also scammy outfits out there that will charge you a lot of money to publish with them and then they'll just publish it. I's like vanity publishing in that sense.

Also, watch out for competitions. There are a lots of competitions. You pay a substantial fee and ... it might not be that substantial, it could be 20 or 30 dollars, something like that. Or it could be 75 dollars or more. And then you win the competition in some way. Like you win Bronze Prize in Paranormal Romance in that competition for the year.

And guess what? There were three people who submitted a paranormal romance. So yeah, everybody wins a prize sort of a thing, and then you pop it on your website and you have this mark of credibility, et cetera. So this is the dodgy end of the literary magazine and writing competition space. Now a couple of websites, I'll stick them in the show notes.

There's Writer Beware. That's really helpful. Ali also have a watch dog list. So Ali is the Alliance of Independent Authors. They're focused on the self-publishing space because there are loads of competitions in that space and some of those competitions are dodgy. So check out their watchdog list as well.

Next question, what is the point of publishing in a literary magazine? And I think there are two main approaches or two main reasons that you might have here, and ideally both of them apply. So, first of all, you might do it out of pure enjoyment, so you just enjoy writing short stories and you would like the short stories that you write to find readers. If you're not bothered about the size of that readership so much, it doesn't really matter that there's no credentialing here. It doesn't really matter what literary magazine you go for, as long as they do have some kind of small audience. So that's one approach. The other reason would be as part of some wider career strategy as a writer.

So it's worth pointing out that literary agents do follow some of the top literary magazines, and Jane Friedman talks a lot about this in her book, The Business of Being a Writer. I'll link to that in the show notes as well. But it can also be part of your building an author platform by becoming recognized for writing about a particular topic or set of topics.

In the fiction space and literary magazines can be incredibly helpful for that as well. And you might just find your groove with a particular writing community centered around some of these magazines. So those are the two main reasons for publishing in the literary magazine. But if you don't enjoy with the format, if you don't enjoy writing short stories, then don't bother.

It's by no means a must if you are looking for a literary agent further down the line. And there's also very little money in it, and I like that in a sense, because it makes the whole literary mag space and have more fluid and potentially more anti-capitalist than the novel space where there is money to be made and there's this kind of heavy dependence on the market, at least in the Anglo-American genre fiction world especially.

So you've written a short story. How do you go and find the best magazine for your short story? And overwhelm is real. And this is especially the case for new writers, and I've experienced this too. I just found the whole literary mag space too much. When I started out, I was like, there are so many literary magazines and I have no clue where to start.

Do not worry. This is the same for everyone and it definitely gets easier over time, and I can draw a parallel with my academic career here as well. So when I first started sending academic articles to journals, I had very little idea about things like prestige hierarchies, which journals were worth sending like articles to, I couldn't tell.

But I knew predatory journals from nonpredatory journals. And I generally started off by picking journals that I knew my friends in my academic network had been publishing in. And this is also a great approach and way of thinking about literary magazines as well. So take a look at your writerly network.

If you don't have one, I recommend you start making one now. You can learn so much from writing in community with others, getting critique, feedback, et cetera, from like solid, vetted friends, that kind of thing. Uh, look at where they're publishing and research it. Another thing to do if you are struggling with the sheer number of literary magazines out there is this service I've used called Chill Subs, I'll link to it in the show notes. They offer a service where you send them your short story.

And then they give you a list of literary mags that are tailored to that story, to your submission, and they're in a position to do that because they're very experienced in this space, and they'll be able to come up with a better list than ChatGPT or me, at least that's my hope. I will report back on how that's gone, including the inevitable rejections that I receive from that list, and I'll let you know.

But Chill Subs looks like a good site. I've heard good things about it from other people in my network. Positive experiences. So check it out now for strategy. So if you are just doing this out of pure enjoyment, then. Be whimsical. Follow your whim and pick whatever magazines interest you the most.

Again, Chill Subs have a big directory on their website so you can look at them all and search for particular things. I just found a really cool magazine called Seaside Gothic, and that is so cool because I was writing a gothic horror story that is set on a beach.

So there you go. There are literally magazines out there for pretty much everything that you can imagine. But if you're doing this as part of some kind of wider career strategy, then I recommend you start with the top tier magazines, the ones that are the best known with the lowest acceptance rates and the biggest audiences, and then you work your way down to the other ones beneath it until you find one that works for you. This might sound obvious, but if you are planning to publish in literary magazines, you should be reading literary magazines, not necessarily the one that you want to publish in, although that will help because inevitably you'll get a sense of what kind of stories they are into and whether that's a good fit for you. But you should be reading and you should be interested in reading short stories with literary magazines, you are inevitably gonna find the best ones for you if you know their conventions and you read them, et cetera, et cetera. And there's another parallel here with the whole academic journals.

So when I was a completely new academic writer, I was, I received a higher number of rejections from academic journals, and that is largely because I didn't know the conventions of writing, the conventions of the discipline, as well as established academics. And whilst the literary magazine space is much freer and stories are more subjective than academic journal articles. Nevertheless, like knowing the conventions, storytelling tropes, what what, um, you might call market conventions is really important. And of course you can break them and there's not just one way of writing a short story. Part of the beauty of short stories is that it's a much freer format than the novel, and this is why I really like short stories.

That said, you still need to know what's out there and learn if you're gonna break conventions, how to break them gracefully. Now so far I've drawn quite a few parallels with academic journals and I've done that 'cause it reflects my own history, like my own career. What I will say is that there is one big difference between academic journals and literary magazines, and that is the fact that literary magazines are in principle open to anyone.

There's no technical barrier to entry. All you need to really do is write a short story. And anyone in principle pretty much can write a short story. With academic journals, most of them, not all, but most of them are looking for credentialed academic writers who will at least be on a master's or PhD program in that area or adjacent area, etc.

So there's already been a kind of vetting or gatekeeping process that has restricted. Who can apply, who can participate in kind of the academic journal, networky world, whatever you wanna call it. With literary magazines, because it's much more open, you will naturally encounter a lot more rejection. Many magazines, and I'm not just talking about the top level ones here, receive hundreds of submissions for just, I don't know, 12 or 15 spots in a particular issue. So that means the vast majority of people are gonna be rejected. And the authors that I have spoken to have told me how it often takes two, three, maybe even 20 attempts at submission before it's finally accepted, and that's just part of the process.

That's obviously difficult for people who are very sensitive to rejection. What I will say is that it quickly gets much easier. So I found the first couple of rejections stung. Um, it's ego as well. It's like you want to be the person who gets accepted for the first time, even though the chances are only small.

But after the first five or six, it just became like normal and accepted. So it definitely gets easier over time if you are one of those people who is more sensitive to rejection. So on the topic of rejection, I think that literary magazines are also a good space to test the water for agent querying as well, because writing a short story requires relatively little effort compared with writing a novel.

But you go through the whole process, you go through drafting, you go through editing, you then submit it, you probably get rejected a few times, and then if it's accepted, you may well go through some kind of editorial process, like copy editing and so on, and that's useful just to experience. It's definitely confidence boosting.

It's helpful for those of you who haven't published in some other kind of academic or nonfiction world, just to learn how, how publishing processes work and to experience them firsthand and lit Mag publishing credits in in the magazines that agents watch can enhance your query package. So. They are a good call.

What I've noticed, and this is through kind of my own informal market research, is that there are different kinds of literary magazine. So you've got the genre industry ones, you've got the top tier lit literary ones like the Paris Review. There's a bunch of those like Los Angeles Review, et cetera, et cetera.

The whole literary gatekeeping process is somewhat obscure and unclear. And what that means is, is that they can, they can come across as very elitist and they can have a very particular vibe or focus. And it can end up being a little bit, and this happens in academia as well, but you can end up having a small number of authors who just keep publishing in the same outlets.

We call it a circle jerk in academia. Pardon? Pardon the phrase, but that is what we call it. Um, what happens there is, you know, even if you have blind submission to journals or literary magazines like this, these authors have a unique kind of imprint in their style. So it's pretty clear that it is one of the members of a certain club speaking or not.

So blind submission doesn't really help with that. It's very clear from the style of writing who the author is or even what kind of tradition they've come out of, what university they're linked to, et cetera, et cetera. Then you have a set of literary style magazines that are linked to university programs often to these MFAs in creative writing.

So they can be quite exclusive as well. They're obviously going to favor people who have been on those courses either that year or who are a recognized name and alumnus or something like that. So if you are going at these sorts of networks from completely outside of that ecosystem and infrastructure, whatever.

Then you're probably gonna have less success than people who are inside it. As for the kind of the DIY feel magazines, there are some that are incredibly punk, and I really like Taco Bell Quarterly for this. I'll put a link to them in the show notes as well. They, they, they're critiquing some of the, uh, elitism, um, inherent like capitalist practices as well linked to some of these big name literary magazines.

For example, the big mags have a large amount of prestige cultural capital attached to them, but they're often paying people who like work on the slush piles or as editors with them, very low wages, like just above minimum wage, that kind of thing. Of course, that means that they're not an attractive prospect for most people to work with, and the kinds of people that will end up working for those kind of magazines are often people who don't rely on that income because they, they, they're there for the prestige and they can afford to work for the low wages and that can contribute to the elitism, but like perpetuating it, which is really bad of course. And that's why I am glad that there are initiatives like Taco Bell Quarterly that are very punk.

I think there's less of this in the genre fiction space. This is really the like elite literary fiction space, which is closely tied historically to the university. And I've got a whole blog post where I talk about these kind of two cultures in publishing. So I'll pop that in the show notes as well to finish off tips for publishing in a literary magazine.

So if you are trying to build a portfolio, then first of all, read, read, read. If you don't regularly read short stories, your book is less likely to gel with current market conventions. You're less likely to find the lit mag for your story, even if you've mastered the technical aspects of craft. 

Tip number two, make a list of desirable magazines, and then I said this already, but start with the top tier ones, then the mid tier, and then respectable, but not vanity outlets after that.

Tip number three. Get comfortable with rejection. You are gonna experience a lot of rejections. 

To wrap up this episode, what has my journey looked like? So I quit academia in 2019, became a full-time book editor. I started writing fiction in 2021, and I submitted my first stories to magazines or competitions in 2023.

So I knew from like my previous career that you don't just sit down, write something, send it off, and it's an instant success. It's best to start slow and to take your time if nothing else. If you did have that instant success, you might well regret that text being out there a few years down the line. It takes time to find your voice, to find what you want to do, and what you want to contribute, et cetera. In 2023, I had some success in a literary translation competition, the John Dryden Literary Translation Competition. In 2025, I had my first literary translation short stories accepted. Along the way, I was rejected from a bunch of lit mags and writing competitions. Of course, I'm not gonna name them all, but you can find them on my blog, and that's it for today.

That is a very short episode on literary magazines. Do you read them? If so, let me know. Have you had some success with them? Have you got any other tips, things that I haven't mentioned? I love the format. I think it's great that you can be so free and you can play around with things in this creative way, whereas writing a novel is really like something very different.

It takes a lot more discipline. There's usually a lot more structure involved and so on. So that's it. Next time I'll be back with Karen Parker, where we will be dissecting our writer and editorly selves alongside one another. Should be a fun episode, and after that I have an episode for you on how to de-grow your editing business, not grow but de-grow, and I really look forward to sharing those insights with you. So thank you again for listening. Don't forget to take a look at the show notes for all the useful links, and if you want to keep in touch, sign up for my newsletter, subscribe, rate, and review, and I will see you next time.