I’m always interested when editors share the behind-the-scenes details of their magazines, so figured I would do a look at The Journal’s fall online issue (with the obvious caveat that I’m Fiction Editor there but not speaking for any other genre, or Fiction Editors past or future). (Also, yes, I am writing to avoid working on my novel.) Even for a magazine that doesn’t pay, like The Journal, our acceptance rate is quite low, which can either make you feel hopeless or is oddly freeing in that, hey, once you’ve done your part in terms of writing the best story you can, and researching your magazines, some luck does play into landing with the right editor on the right day.
We published six stories in issue 46.1. Five of these six stories came in through the slush pile. One story I had solicited for a special issue focused on Ohio writers, and when the guest editor for that issue went in a different direction, I claimed the story (A.A. Balaskovits’s “The Handkerchief”) for this issue. (Worth noting that this is the only story I’ve ever solicited.) Two of the stories were submitted as early as October 2021 (when we were still playing catchup with submissions I’d inherited from the previous Fiction Editor), while one came in as recently as September 2022. One of the stories was sent by a writer we’d previously rejected but encouraged to submit again, and happily he did.
During this period (Oct 2021 through Sept 2022) we received about 1350 fiction submissions at The Journal. I accepted a total of 13 stories (six of which, like I mentioned, wound up in issue 46.1), meaning we have an acceptance rate of just under 1%. This isn’t an unusual acceptance rate for a literary magazine, but it’s worth remembering that at any magazine—and maybe a little more so at one with free submissions, like The Journal—some of these submissions seem to be first drafts that just need more rest and revision, while others are misdirected (hardboiled detective stories, sword and sorcery fantasy, etc.). If you’re sending polished work and carefully targeting your submissions, your odds are better than 1%. Still: it’s harder to get a piece of fiction into The Journal than it is to get into Harvard! This is what I recommend you tell your relatives when they ask how many stories you’ve published.
(Kind of boring detail but maybe useful for anyone who is new to submitting and wondering what actually happens to their story, or does it just enter a black hole: Like most magazines, we have a standard process that involves a few readers. Volunteer MFA students and undergraduates enrolled in a Literary Publishing course are usually our first readers for stories, and especially for the undergraduates this is mostly a chance for them to gain experience in the workings of a lit mag. Once stories have received their first reading, they go on to either our first-year Associate Fiction Editor [who votes, comments on the story, and recommends an action before passing the story on to the second-year Associate Fiction Editor], or directly to the second-year Associate Editor, who decides whether to reject a story or pass it along to me. Because our queue is so large and we aren’t about to demand undergrads read 50 stories a week, I sometimes jump in and act as a first reader myself. This means that any story submitted to us is either (a) passed right along to the top for the sake of not taking 2 years to respond, or (b) being read by 2-4 people before a decision is made.)
University lit mags are unique in that we often change editorial staff yearly. Some university magazines with stable staffing do have a consistent style over time, but editorial preferences at a magazine like The Journal, where a new Fiction Editor rolls through every year (or two years) may change more rapidly, meaning it’s worth your while to pay a little closer attention to the latest issues. With The Journal (I am now offering a mini advertisement to potential submitters, though given my upcoming graduation this advice will go bad in six months) you’ll see that I’m not super, super interested in realism and when we do publish it there’s something unique happening with the voice (as in the fable-like quality Bipin Aurora’s “The Terrorist”), or setting/absurdity/humor (Neal Hammons’s “A Promised Land via the Central Pacific”), just something pushing beyond the boundaries of what I’d call, I don’t know, “MFA realism.” So we end up with those two gorgeous stories, as well as Scott Garson’s “Ybeltrab” (a micro that flips Bartleby in a way that I found especially delightful as I’m worrying about having a job again after the MFA), A.A. Balaskovits’s “The Handkerchief” (a retelling of Beauty and the Beast with a close so shocking that the first time I read it, I spent a week telling everyone I knew about this wild story that ends like --- [will not ruin here]), Jennifer Marie Donahue’s “Bone to Rock” (a woman falls underground while searching for flowers for her dying mother, has conversations with fossils, and…that’s all I say, but this story is so gorgeous and delicately told), and Michelle Ross’s “Crossing Guard” (a micro that uses a brief interaction with a crossing guard as a route into an exploration of a marriage).
We have a couple retellings, yeah, and a couple micros, but really the only thing these stories have in common is that I loved them on first reading, and I kept loving them when I reread them, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them between readings. With so many submissions coming through, there are obviously a lot of strong stories that we end up declining. Sometimes it’s because I recognize right away that the story isn’t a fit for The Journal, though I’m confident it’ll find a good home with another editor who is looking for just that type of story. Other times I read the story, I think it could probably be a good fit for The Journal, but then a week goes by and I couldn’t tell you what happened in the story—there’s no image or moment that was so distinct I could hang onto it. We have our “standard” form rejection and then one that is a little nicer and encourages another submission, and when I send this second one (I would probably send it in the example just mentioned) I always mean it and will keep a closer eye on the queue in hopes the writer does send another story through while their name is still in the front of my brain. (Maybe 1% or 2% of submissions get the “nice” rejection. )
So our job as writers submitting fiction is, I think, to very simply write something that’s going to grab an unpaid editor’s attention when they’re exhausted and have been working for an hour and still have a hundred stories before them, and that they’re going to keep circling back to after they’ve commented on the story and closed their laptop. But even if you research a magazine extensively, you’ve read its latest issue, you know the name of its editor (Ellen!), you can’t say with certainty whether your story will be what they want—so the best thing you can do is to write the story you want to write, revise it, format it properly, do your best with the research, and then let the business take care of itself, knowing that on the other side of things there is an editor who is waiting for a story (maybe your story) that demands their total attention.
(And now, advertising time again: submissions are still open at The Journal through the end of the month. If you read the stories linked here and thought, “my stories would make good neighbors with these stories,” send something in! If you miss our fall submission window no worries, we’ll reopen on Feb. 1 after a couple months off to catch up in our reading. Submissions are free and we’re getting responses out within a few months these days. If you have any questions, things I have somehow failed to address in these 1200 words [no wonder all my stories are 8000 words long], feel free to ask and I’ll try to get back to you!)