How to Submit to Literary Journals

How to find and select a venue, write a cover letter, and stay sane

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collage of lit mag covers by me :)

Step 1: Write Something Good

If you care more about getting published than you do about the quality of your work, it’s unlikely publication will ever be a regular occurrence for you, if it ever happens at all. I say this, not as a harsh judgement, but as a lesson I myself had to learn. There was a time when I was obsessed with publication—when I was churning out piece after piece just so I could package them up and submit them. It’s unsurprising that those efforts yielded no results (it also made writing a lot less joyful).

Eventually, despondent, I decided to take a break from the submission game and just focus on improving as a writer. I took online classes with Gotham Writers Workshop, Grub Street, and Smokelong, all of which I cannot recommend highly enough. I got feedback on my work. I edited my pieces once, twice, three, four times. I identified my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. I focused on improving my weaknesses and leaning into my strengths. After about a year of not submitting and just focusing on my craft, I wrote something that I loved. I submitted it. It was accepted for publication. Since then I have had pieces accepted and published by Cleaver, Chestnut Review, Fractured, F(r)iction, Grim & Gilded, Gramarye, Ghost Parachute, and more.

Running a literary magazine or journal takes time and care, so if you expect to be published by a reputable venues above all the hundreds, or even thousands, of other submissions they receive, you need to dedicate a similar amount of time and care to the writing you submit to them.

Step 2: Curate a Submission List

When I first started submitting, I just submitted pieces scattershot to any magazine I could find open on Submittable. This resulted in me submitting a comedy piece about smoking weed to Guernica, no joke. I was not a part of any literary or writing community so I had no idea which journals were which. But, over time, I discovered some resources that helped me more accurately target my submissions to magazines that were a good fit. I’ll describe each of those resources below:

1. Erika Krouse’s Ranking of Lit Mags for Short Fiction: This is my favorite resource by far. It’s a tiered list of ~500 literary magazines, but my favorite part about it is that basically all of the mags on this list are pretty well respected. Sticking to this list can help you find great places to submit, while avoiding magazines that might be scammy or totally unknown. Of course there are great mags that are not on this list, but at least at the beginning of my submitting, I found sticking to Erika’s list gave me great peace of mind.

2. Chill Subs, Sub Club: This is an essential resource to pair with Erika’s list. Chill Subs is a platform that aggregates lots of important lit mag data to make submitting more transparent and accessible. For example, when you search a magazine on Chill Subs, it will tell you the difficulty level of publishing with them in easy-to-understand terms. For example, for The Paris Review it says “Bother, but like, don’t?” and for Chestnut Review, which was my first big publication, it says, “Send us your best but less intimidating.” It also uses user-reported data to generate response times and acceptance rates for magazines. Finally, and most importantly, it will tell you submission guidelines and whether the journal is actually open for submissions. Chill Subs is very chill and very useful, but my favorite resource of theirs is actually (no surprise) their Substack, Sub Club! Sub Club sends weekly emails about recently opened submission calls, specific themed submission calls, and magazines about to close to submissions. At first, when I was only using Erika’s list, I would get frustrated because I would find a magazine I thought sounded great, and then it would be closed, but using Erika’s list in tandem with Chill Subs and Sub Club really made submitting so much easier!

3. Clifford Garstang’s Lit Mag Rankings in Fiction, CNF, and Poetry: If you’re a CNF or poetry writer, then Clifford’s list works just like Erika’s. I find Erika’s has a bit more helpful detail and granularity, but whenever I’m submitting nonfiction I use Clifford’s as a helpful resource to find and evaluate magazines.

Using these resources, I would put together a list of ten to fifteen open venues where you think your piece might be fit both in terms of style and quality of writing. For example, I usually don’t submit to magazines in Tier 1 or 2 of Erika’s list. The quality of writing is just higher than what I can currently produce (but I’m working up to it!). Some venues publish only literary fiction, some only genre fiction like fantasy or sci-fi. Make sure you at least do some skimming to ensure the places you’re submitting would publish a piece like yours.

I usually only submit to about ten to fifteen places for each piece, because I write consistently, and if I submitted one story to forty places, I would run out of places to submit the other stories while I waited to hear back about the first one. Plus, there are submission fees, and submitting just takes time. For me, I’ve found that ten is the sweet spot both financially and mentally, and I sometimes add a few on if other magazines open for submissions while I’m waiting to hear back.

Step 3: Write a Cover Letter

Most magazines will require you submit a cover letter with your piece. Here’s the thing, I have been a reader for magazines, and I can say that we are so inundated with submissions that cover letters do not really matter, unless you do something really weird, then they could potentially get you disqualified. We read the stories carefully, but cover letters are mostly a “check that they’re normal and professional” thing.

Here’s what not to do:

1. Don’t accidentally say the wrong magazine’s name. That is rude and annoying.

2. Don’t go on and on about your story. Let the story speak for itself.

Here’s what you should do:

1. Find an editor’s name if you can and address it to a specific person. If you can’t, then just say “Dear {Journal Name} Editorial Team.”

2. Do provide the basic details of the story: genre, word count, title.

3. Do inform the magazine if your piece is a simultaneous submission, meaning you’ve submitted it for consideration to other magazines.

4. Do include a brief, 3rd-person bio.

5. If this will be your debut publication, mention it. Magazines love that shit.

6. If you have received a kind rejection from the magazine previously asking you to submit more work, mention that too.

7. Speak to the magazine like they are people, because, believe it or not, a real person is reading every story.

Below is an example cover letter template that I use, with slight tweaks, for basically every submission:

Dear Massachusetts Review Editorial Team,

I hope you’re having a great week! Please accept my ~5000-word story, “Fitting,” for consideration. I really hope you enjoy it. It would truly be an honor to be published in The Massachusetts Review, and I look forward to hearing from you. This is a simultaneous submission, and I will notify you immediately if it is accepted for publication elsewhere. Below is a brief, third-person bio: 

Caroline Beuley is an alumni of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction Writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington where she works as a publication assistant for Lookout Books. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Chestnut Review, Cleaver, Fractured, F(r)iction, and Ghost Parachute, among others. She is currently working on a short story collection and a young adult fantasy novel.

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration. 

Best, Caroline Beuley 

Step 4: Prepare for Rejection

After you submitted to your ten to fifteen literary magazines, carefully paying attention to each individual magazine’s submission guidelines¹, and dutifully recording each submission in a spreadsheet² so you don’t forget the two or three that are not on Submittable, it’s time to sit back, pop open a beer, and agonize for months! Kidding! But seriously it’s completely insane how long some literary journals will take to get back to you. So, as much as you can, after you press submit, try to forget about them. I have gotten acceptances fifteen months after submitting. For real.

The other side of this coin is that when you do hear back, it will most likely be a rejection. I have gotten rejected so many times it’s kind of crazy (I wrote a whole essay about it here, if you’re interested). It’s just part of the game, and you need to numb yourself to it as much as possible. Sometimes the person reading your story is a high eighteen-year-old undergrad, so try not take every rejection personally. It really is a crapshoot. If I really believe in a piece and it gets rejected from most of my first-round places, I’ll submit it to another ten.

Step 5: Celebrate

If you keep writing and keep submitting, eventually you will get published. Writing is all about the long-game, and if you stick with it long enough, you will start to see dividends. So when you finally get that email that begins with congratulations, do a little dance around your apartment, text all your friends, and pour yourself a glass of champagne. If you’ve chosen to be a writer, then you’ve chosen a lifelong pursuit that will be filled with rejections. So, when the acceptances and successes do come, it’s important to pause and really celebrate them!

Good luck! Submitting is an act of faith in yourself and your work. Take the leap. I promise it will be worth it. And please let me know if you have any questions about the resources or guidelines above!

If you enjoyed this essay on writing, check out my other writing essays: Use Pinterest to Elevate Your Writing, Character Profiles Fixed my Fiction, and How to Write Strong Beginnings.

Subscribers have already voted on the topic for next month: How to Write Strong Dialogue, so stay tuned for that in May!

1. Read submission guidelines carefully. Some magazines don’t want your name anywhere on the submission, some want it on the header of every page. Some want double-spaced, some want single-spaced. All have different word count limits. Ignoring a magazine’s specific formatting and submission preferences is a quick way to get yourself rejected. And always include page numbers for the love of God.

2. Always record your submissions, because if you do get accepted you need to quickly withdraw all other submissions. If you forget about one lingering submission on some random other submission platform that’s not Submittable and they email you months later saying they want to publish your piece and you have to tell them “oops, it’s already been published,” that will burn that bridge for future submissions.