BookFox

Literary Journal Rankings

On this lovely Monday morning, I'd like to direct your attention to the left column, under "Pages." I've added a new one: Ranking of Literary Journals. Although I realize the dangers of such an attempt and the impossibility of creating a list that will not be debated, I wrote this because when I was first starting to send out to literary journals, I wanted a guide to help steer me.

Unfortunately, other than a top-eleven list or two, there isn't much out there. So this list should help you to know when you're sending out to one of the most difficult journals, and also know it if you're sending to a mid-list journal. There are multiple strategies out there -- break in at the lower levels and build your way up, or pound away at the big boys until a story breaks through -- but I'll leave those choices up to you.

This list of the top literary journals is not meant to be exhaustive. Actually, the opposite: it's meant only to highlight great journals and create a hierarchy of the best journals. It excludes online literary journals because I have ranked them elsewhere. Some of the sections (especially IV and V) have very little differences in status between them. The most incomplete list is section V, which could have twenty or thirty more journals added, and there is space for a section VI, but it would include a good hundred or more journals. Consult Duotrope for those options.

My ranking criteria included perceived reputation, frequency of appearances in literary news, appearances in newly published collections, my personal experience with these journals, other ranking attempts and Duotrope rankings. Although the actual list is broken down into sections based on the difficult of getting published, this is just a convenient way of smashing all the above criteria into one easy-to-label format. Also, in ranking these journals, I tried to evaluate their current status, not (if applicable) their former glory.

If you have suggestions or critiques, I welcome them in the comments section of that page.

Publication: Round Two!

So recently I've been seeing a number of publications that seek out pre-published material. Think of it as a second chance for your piece to find an audience. Here are three different magazines focusing on round two.

Second Writes is a new literary journal specializing in material already published. The publishers of the journal are frustrated that all everyone wants is First North American Rights. What about Second Rights? And so was born Second Writes. Their first issue contains an essay from the New Yorker, which doesn't seem to need the publicity of a second go-around, but I'm hoping that future issues will focus more on the back roads and byways of publishing, to highlight the overlooked but not under-talented. Best of all, they pay $150 per piece, which isn't shabby considering First Rights have already been sold.

According to the May/June issue of Poets and Writers, New Millennium Writings also accepts any stories for contests that have not been published in journals with circulations above 5,000. So that's 97% of lit journals. (According to my completely facetious calculations).

Lastly, here is one that many more of you are familiar with: Utne Reader. They are always on the look for reprints, culling all the best out from the jetsam and flotsam of modern culture. It's a bit like the logic of Harper's Magazine Readings section, except on a much grander scale. Unlike the two above, Utne focuses solely on nonfiction:

Many of the articles in Utne Reader are reprinted from the hundreds of magazines, newsweeklies, newsletters, and literary journals we receive regularly, and we welcome previously published submissions. (Yes, this includes online sources.) We do not accept fiction or poetry.

Interview with Jeanne Leiby, Editor of the Southern Review

Interview with Jeanne Leiby from Sam Armstrong on Vimeo.
I talked with Jeanne Leiby, editor of the Southern Review, about a weak-kneed and shaky-voiced solicitation of Philip Levine, Bret Lott's aesthetic changes to the journal, a special issue about the circus, and cultivating the emerging writers of this generation.

Interviewer: John Matthew Fox
Videographer: Joel Champagne
Video Editor: James Roland

Top Twelve Online Literary Journals

Here are the top twelve online literary journals, at least according to the number of Million Writers Award nominations each journal has received in the last five years.

• Eclectica (31 nominations)
• Pindeldyboz (26)
• Agni (16)
• Strange Horizons (16)
• Word Riot (16)
• Narrative Magazine (15)
• Fiction Warehouse (13)
• The King's English (12)
• Mississippi Review (12)
• Blackbird (11)
• Blithe House Quarterly (11)
• Storyglossia (11)

Literary Rejections and Slush Pile Wars

There’s been a flurry of discussion in the blogosphere lately about what an editor should and should not say about submissions. LROD started with some complaints about VQR editor Ted Genoways, then Howard Junker of ZYZZYVA condemns Ted Genoways, and Ted Genoways responds, and Will Entrekin takes issue with the editor of Fence, the editor of Clarkesworld and myself.

The ethical issue in regards to cover letters might simply be about publishing private correspondence: writers submit a private text to the editor, and expect (in an unspoken contract) that it will remain private. Editors, by talking about or excerpting that text, break that contract. However, I believe that when this “private” correspondence is a mass submission to hundreds of journals, and when the letter betrays a complete lack of familiarity with the journal – calling it by the wrong name, or no name at all; misspelling the name of the editor, or writing a former editor, or no editor name at all; submitting an 85 page manuscript to a journal that publishes nothing over 20 pages – that this contract no longer retains its former strength. Also, as long as the editor offers the cover letter anonymously, they are only showing their submitters that the basic, professional courtesy of passing familiarity with the journal needs to be exercised when they submit. I don’t believe that it is abusing or disrespecting normal submitters in any way. 

That would be the end of it except for those who are skittish and fearful. These are the people who are scared that their work will be ridiculed next. So when these people see the comments by the readers at VQR – “this is the worst thing I’ve ever read” – they are worried that the object of scorn is their own work. It seems rather obvious that these individuals are unpublished, because published authors are quite aware that part of the risk of publishing, or even trying to be published, is fraught with the possibility of ridicule. Look at Scott Snyder: he lands a story in VQR, quite a laudable feat, and people post on Literary Rejections on Display quite nasty things, like they couldn’t make it past the first paragraph, that the entire story lacked authenticity, and that the writing was terrible. I imagine this to be the case with every published story and book (if anyone talks about it all). Once you publish, prepare for an onslaught. There will always be someone out there telling you that your work is subliterate. There will always be someone, no matter how high your accomplishments, that will tell you that you couldn’t cobble together a fourth-grade-level sentence. If you think editors wield a heavy critical stick, try the general public. Which is not to excuse everything that an editor says: they too must exercise judgment. But offering anonymous slush pile critiques is nothing compared to what you’d actually receive in book reviews. 

But to come back to what Genoways talked about, trying to reassure submitters – that none of the people mocked by the slush pile reviewers were the complainers. I’m sure he was right. I know, from my experience reading slush piles, the vast majority of pieces are merely mediocre. Mocking only comes about in regards to the 1% that is jaw-dropping terrible. If you really, really worry that you’re in that 1%, then either you have self-esteem issues or you need to work a bit longer on your craft, because you have to be in the top 1% to make it into these journals. To assume that all submissions don’t merit humor is simply to have never actually read a slush pile. However, I know that laughing in the slush pile room among fellow editors is vastly different than publishing those sentiments on the Internet. So is the problem with witnessing the mockery rather than simply knowing that it exists behind closed doors? Because it will always exist behind closed doors: no way to stop that. 

If the people complaining have no fear that their manuscripts are being mocked, and they are only concerned with protecting others less talented than themselves, then that is a different topic. Then it becomes: Is an editor acting professionally by talking about their slush pile? I believe it to be an editorial choice. I have no problem with editors that talk about outlandish submitters, and I have no trouble with editors that don’t talk. I see nothing intrinsically disrespectful about complaining in an abstract, anonymous way about the quality of submissions received. Only the people with thin skins are likely to be put off. The people with thick enough skins to handle it are likely to be the better writers anyway. 

But that’s cover letters. Let’s consider the manuscripts themselves. I would avoid publishing or talking about the actual text of submitted story or stories. There are many bad writers out there, and it does little good to condemn them. Even in a workshop setting, I believe it necessary to praise the author for something, even if the story on the whole needs vast improvement. But I don’t know an editor that has made slush pile manuscripts available – Ted Genoways shared the comments of his slush pile readers, which I believe are fairly typical of slush pile readings (if you’ve ever read a slush pile, you would likely say similar things). On the back cover of ZYZZYVA, Howard Junker often offers excerpts from cover letters, which are funny or naïve. But I’m not aware of editors that actually share bad manuscripts, and I hope that it stays that way. 

Let me say it: I admire the vast percentage of people who submit to the Southern California Review. To anyone who doesn’t screw up our basic identity, I offer a fair and careful consideration of their manuscript. I admire people who submit for the eighth time to our journal, because even if we don’t accept that eighth one, I admire their tenacity. I love that rush from finding a brilliant manuscript. I love the whole process because I am engaged in this same process, the same postage-and-manila-envelope scheme, collecting the same stack of rejection slips. So fight on, and know that if you have even the slightest bit of respect for the literary journal, the literary journal will extend that respect right back to you.

Scott Snyder and the Voodoo Rejections

I just started reading Scott Snyder's "Voodoo Heart," a wonderful collection of short stories originally published in venues like One-Story, Epoch, and Tin House, and published as a collection in 2006. There's an interview with him over at Literary Rejections on Display, but I just wanted to excerpt this staggering anecdote:

I once sent a story out to a journal – I won’t say which one – and quickly got my SASE back in the mail with a form rejection inside. Which was fine, except that about two weeks later, I got another envelope in the mail, this time one the magazine’s own envelopes, with their own postage, my address hand-written on the cover. And inside was another form rejection for the same story. Which had me wondering, was the story that bad? You had to reject it twice? On your own dime? And then, about three weeks later, I got another letter from the same magazine, rejecting the story again! In one of their own envelopes, own postage, etc. So they actually paid to reject me twice more than necessary. They hated the story that much! Now fast forward to about six months later. I’m doing a small reading with some school friends. I have one friend who runs a small art gallery in Brooklyn (South First – it’s a great place) and she asked if some of us wanted to read there to promote an upcoming show that had a literary theme. I was thrilled to do it. I hadn’t really done many readings at all. So at the reading I read the story that had gotten rejected 3 times. And afterwards someone comes up to me who happens to be an editor at that same magazine that rejected the story so many times and asks if I’ll show it to them. A couple months later, a tuned up version of the story is published in that same magazine.

The Death of Simultaneous Submission?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about a new software called CrossCheck, which is billed as a plagarism program. Most writers, who unlike academics are not quoting and paraphrasing, are hardly ever in danger of plagiarism. But the program actually goes one step beyond crosschecking other previously published articles, and also checks other currently submitted articles: "At Elsevier, a leading journal publisher, an article submitted simultaneously to two Elsevier publications will be automatically flagged."

Every writer I know ignores the prohibitions against "Simultaneous Submissions" (Or Sim Subs, if you want to be informal about it). And since print submissions are still in vogue, it would be difficult to enter all submissions into a database and crosscheck them against other journals to guard against simultaneous submission. But now that electronic submissions are becoming increasingly popular -- especially the program offered by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) -- it would be very easy for code to be written that would flag articles that had been submitted simultaneously. And it would even be worse than in the academic realm, because there are far more programs to upload submissions in the academic realm than in the creative realm, and so only one program might apply to a large number of journals. While my first move to escape detection would be to use different titles for the same story -- just like a writer does in the short story collection by Robert Bolano, "Last Evenings on Earth" -- a program like CrossCheck would check the entire story, not just the title. Those damn computers: Sometimes I feel like I'm playing chess against HAL.

For now -- and I should emphasize the "now" -- this program is only available to academic journals, and hasn't yet crossed over to the literary realm (as far as I know). But I think this kind of possibility might serve as a slight deterrent to those writers who continue to cry and beg and implore journals to switch to electronic submissions. Let it be said: there are some definite downsides to the electronic format. Although I have to admit -- with postage rising yet again, it might be a downside I'll eventually be willing to accept.

Stephen Corey on Genre Numbers

Stephen Corey, editor of the Georgia Review, wrote a piece for the May/June Poets & Writers. Here's an excerpt in which he quantifies the shifts he's seen with nonfiction, poetry, and short stories:

Well, more people are sending out and publishing what they now call (forgive us, Father Montaigne) "creative nonfiction." In the mid-1980s we received perhaps two to three hundred essays annually, but now that count has increased at least four-fold . . . The number of poems circulating seems to have held fairly steady, while the number of short stories, on the increase for a long time, has diminished in the past few years. I think the publishing industry has worked overtime of late to eradicate the short story form, and I think some of the writing programs may have been helping too. Story cycles, linked stories, novels-in-stories - all these au courant designations are attempted endarounds in the pro-novel, anti-short story game of book marketing. The pressures on our potential new Flannery O'Connors and Ernest Hemingways to "get past" their story writing and into novels as quickly as possible may be opening a sad and profound gap in our literature.

Literary Journal Correspondence

Over at Fence there's a exchange between the editor and a contributor that devolves incredibly quickly into rather shameless namecalling (via Chekhov's Mistress). Despite the nastiness, I have to say that just getting any response from an editor of a literary journal is difficult, so an editor responding multiple times should earn at least some respect. I've failed to hear from editors about a submission going on thirteen months (never responded to two emails), contributor copies (or even if they've finally published the issue in which my work was supposed to appear), and had stories accepted only to find all the emails on the journal site turned into non-functioning addresses that just pop back all my nicely phrased queries. So yes -- politeness is key, and so is staying on top of your correspondence. Not that I've done that at all for the Southern California Review, but hey, I can advocate some things on principle.

Short Roundup

Dan over at Emerging Writers Network points out a new trend among literary journals, such as Fence and American Short Fiction, to "pay what you can" for a subscription to their journal. A smart move, I believe. Journals need some kind of marketing to jumpstart their subscription base.

How literary journal rejections that take over a year at least let you imagine that you made it past the first five readers (only to be squashed by the sixth).

A low-residency MFA program that went terribly, terribly, wrong.

An interview with Benjamin Percy, whose two short story collections ("Refresh, Refresh," and "The Language of Elk") have made waves.

Literary Journal Hall of Shame

In order to benefit all of us poor writers out there, spending oodles of money sending SASEs and photocopied stories to literary journals across the nation, I am inaugurating the first ever literary journal hall of shame. I love literary journals. I read quite a few and subscribe to (admittedly) fewer. But I love them. However, it is the writer's responsibility to keep journals honest, and as self-appointed committee member and founder and spokesperson for WSOTMSTLJ (Writers Sending Out Too Many Stories To Literary Journals) (ps. you got acronym competition, NaNoWriMo), I am hereby listing the hall of shame, which will be augmented and better documented by the wonderful site Duotrope.

The method is this: Each journal that has flubbed up in an identifiable way will be named and chastised. Let other literary journal editors memorize the mistakes and try their utmost to avoid such pits of lassitude.

1. Minnesota Review: Oh dearie me. I don't know whether the U.S. postal service lost it, or it was waylaid in your hefty stacks of unsolicited submissions, but when a writer has waited eight months and finally queried, it is crushing to be told the submission was never received. So. The polite course of action would be to offer to read it, say, by email, which, in this same circumstance, was done by such upstanding journals as American Short Fiction and Frigg Magazine. It is decidedly less polite, and creates far less favor, to say: tough luck! Please spend more money to send us another!

2. Zoetrope: Taking more than a year to reply is a crime, especially by such a supposedly well-funded journal. Rejection is a platter better served hot and quick. Also, no journal should promote unsolicited submissions as a means to widen the journal's reputation, rather than actually seeking to find and publish emerging writers (See this comment by a Zoetrope reader here at BookFox).

3. Marlboro Review: The cardinal sin - taking more than a year to reply to a submission (Dec. 8th, 2006 to Dec. 13th, 2007). Second cardinal sin - not replying to any queries saying, "Um, hello? Anybody reading?"

4. Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art: The slowest, worst administration of any literary journal I have encountered. Ignores all SASES, ignore all queries about SASES, prefers if no one ever contacts them or submits.

5. Meridian: It's a big no-no to charge for online submissions and then to lose the submission and then not to offer to re-read even though you could check records and see that yes, indeed, I did pay $2 on my credit card for the privilege of having you reading my material. This is similar to the unethical behavior of contests that accept reading fees and then never anoint a winner.

If you'd like less idiosyncratic responses, e.g. a nice steady statistic culled from hundreds of submitters that averages out, then I encourage you to run, not walk, over to the Duotrope statistics page, which will inform you of the slowest, fastest, easiest, and most difficult literary journals.

As a further note, God bless all the topnotch literary journals out there currently accepting online submissions: One Story, Kenyon Review, Story Quarterly, Fence, Modern Review, A Public Space, McSweeneys, Third Coast, Crazyhorse, Gulf Stream, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review. All of us writers thank you from the deepest part of our very empty pockets.

Zoetrope All-Story MagazIne

So the latest round of Zoetrope All-Story, the Fall issue coming out in late September, is apparently a double issue. In fact, it's so thick that they're confused about what exactly it is, calling it both a magazine and a book in their promotional email. The first half of the magazine/book will be a section specially devoted to the amazingness of the founder/funder of Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola, and the greatness of his new movie, Youth Without Youth. It promises to be a full-on orgy of effusive praise/publicity about how great good old Coppola is, including - get ready! - behind the scenes photographs (in case you couldn't wait for the DVD perks) and essays by Coppola (in case you couldn't wait for interviews on the DVD perks). Gee golly, it's like the special sections that come every season with my GQ magazine, a ninety-page pamphlet/book that shows hundreds of men wearing $9,000 jeans and pouty expressions but yet lacks any real articles, a special section I immediately ditch for the real magazine. Thanks, Coppola, for such a special bonus surprise. You really know how to put the "I" in magazIne.

The Dirty Underbelly of Zoetrope

In response to my post launching the Zoetrope Boycott, a former reader for the publication weighed in with his/her less than encouraging report, including an admission that less than three stories had been plucked from the slush pile in over six years, and that even the short stories he recommended were lost/ignored/mishandled.

If you'll permit me do to some math, let's add up the (rumored) 25,000 slush pile manuscripts received per year and multiply that by six years - 150,000. Three were chosen in those six years - 3 out of 150,000. So if you send in a story, the percentage accepted stands at about .002%. But even that is not as disturbing as what the commenter alleges happens to the recommended stories. If the editors don't care what their readers think is good, why are they accepting submissions?

So, the Boycott continues, as long as Zoetrope pretends to be giving credence to the unknown writer.

But, on the upside, there are a lot of journals out there that deserve your financial and narrative support. Check out Duotrope to figure out which journals will get back to you in a proper amount of time, and also which ones actually publish manuscripts from the slush pile.

ZOETROPE BOYCOTT

So I posted a few weeks ago on the response times of literary journals - those who respond quickly and those who take a year or more. Zoetrope: All-Story, the literary journal published by Francis Ford Coppola, was one of my main culprits. I had limited data at the time - simply my correspondence which revealed it took two months for them to log my submission in, and over ten months to respond. I've been gumshoeing around since then, and found evidence that this is hardly the exception. I've talked to multiple people in my creative writing program who either haven't heard back yet or have received a rejection in over a year. Also, if you look at the website Submitting to the Black Hole, which takes reader information about literary journal response time and posts it, you can see that other people don't receive responses for as long as 388 days. In contrast, if you look at ZYZZYVA, run by Howard Junker, the minimum response time is two weeks, the maximum two months, and the average one month. Junker linked to my last post on journal response times, saying:

1. Our crosstown colleague [Zoetrope] is said to get 25,000 submissions a year; we get 2,500.
2. They have 25 "readers." We have just me.
3. They publish virtually nothing from the slush pile, which is where we get almost everything.

After the MFA also spoke up in response to my post, encouraging writers to resist this type of abuse.

So as of this date, I am instituting (unveiling fanfare: da-da-da-DA!) the ZOETROPE BOYCOTT.

Please do not send to Zoetrope. Please send to a literary journal that actually needs and might want you. Please understand that if you keep sending to Zoetrope I will not hold anything against you, but I might pity you.

I'm instituting this boycott for two reasons: One, so that the Zoetrope editors can realize that those who submit to them are respectable writers, unwilling to be mistreated, and we insist on reasonable response times (at the Maximum, four to six months). Two, if Zoetrope really can't find a way that their (fairly large staff) can't respond to submissions in under a year, then we should do them the service of reducing their inbox.

I invite writers who have submitted to Zoetrope recently to post in the comments the dates they submitted and the dates they were rejected (Also, if you have a blog, to link here in solidarity with the cause). Also, to halt this boycott requires only one thing: I invite anyone on the Zoetrope staff to respond to these allegations with a defense, an explanation of when things will get better, and some kind of reason why anyone would submit to them again.

Literary Journals

Most literary journals say they're going to get back to you within 4 months. Some give themselves a little bigger of a window - 4 to 6 months, they say, with that six looming pretty ominously (half a year! What?) Now I know that literary journals are understaffed, underpaid, and near drowning in beige manila envelopes, and on the whole, in a platonic ideal sense, I pay them a great deal of respect. They are holding up the small people, the beginners, the short story world, and that deserves our admiration. Some of the journals, though, do far better in responding promptly than others. For instance, what prompted this post was receiving a rejection slip from Zoetrope - the journal started by Francis Ford Coppola - a high level journal, well respected. I received it yesterday, January 9th. Only trouble is, I sent the short story to them January 5th. That's right, 2006. So they're coming in with a reply at just a couple days over a year. I had emailed them twice during the year, both times at which they told me my story had been logged into the system on March 3rd (two months just to get logged in?) and that the editors were experiencing a backlog. A backlog might be the right term for an eight-month delay. When you take over a year to reply, that's more like an impasse.

You would expect a journal like Zoetrope - one so exquisitely funded, I mean - to be more prompt. Or if they weren't being prompt, to hire more editors. But what I've been observing is that size, reputation, and financial backing have nothing to do with expediency in the journal world. I'll have a tiny journal like Apple Valley Review reject my short shorts in less than a week, while a heavy hitter like Columbia Journal still hasn't responded to a story I mailed out in January 2006 (and neither have they responded to email queries, and my last short story I sent them took a year and a half to receive a reply). On the other hand, Glimmer Train is practically a model for speed. Zyzzyva is another one that has been prompt, and as a plus, Howard Junker's rejection slip is the nicest I've ever read. Kenyon Review and One-Story have both been pretty quick. I've had multiple relative die while waiting to hear back from The Chattahoochee Review (and still have an outstanding story. . .) and Notre Dame Review clocked in at a snail pace of 8 months and 9 months for two separate submissions.

I am aware of all the variables that are at play (and that's why I'm not writing about any journals that I've only sent to once). There's the time of year, there is the quality of my submission (which may take longer if they are considering it), and there is the staffing snafus that leave a journal shorthanded. But the length of time to receive a reply makes barring simultaneous submissions quite a joke, and ultimately, anything over eight months makes me extremely reluctant to send any more submissions.

Black Clock

Edition Five of Black Clock is out, and despite the journal being relatively new, it's commanding some well-known voices (David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, Aimee Bender). The editor and creator of the journal, Steve Erickson, talked at the LA Times book fair in a panel on LA Fiction (hosted by Janet Fitch), and now Black Clock is now targetting Los Angeles fiction. This focus on LA fiction is great for LA writers, because guess what? Not all the writers in So Cal use FinalDraft.

Anyways, here's the event: Black Clock Reading - at Skylight Books in Silver Lake. June 22, a Thursday, at 7:30 pm. LA Times Post

And, if you haven't read Steve Erickson's latest and greatest - Our Estatic Days - do so now at Powell's Books.

Labels: Steve Erickson