FOR many writers, submitting work to literary magazines feels like a Sisyphean push through piles of rejections and long, anxious waits. Would-be contributors may end up waiting three to six months—and sometimes even longer—only to receive a form rejection. The pandemic slowed response times further, but the phenomenon isn’t new—so what’s going on behind the scenes?
The sheer volume of submissions that the majority of literary magazines receive is a driving factor in slow response times. At n+1, for example, publisher and coeditor Mark Krotov describes the publication’s submissions e-mail inbox as a “behemoth” receiving as many as two hundred pieces every week. That’s a lot, especially considering that each year the journal publishes only about two hundred pieces total, between its three print issues and online offerings. “A lot of [submissions] are self-evidently not for us,” he says, “but it’s a lot to work through.”
coeditor Bill Pierce says that in 2020 the Boston-based journal was overwhelmed by its submission numbers, a whopping 21,000 annually. In response the editors reluctantly implemented a $3 fee for online submissions—not out of an operations-based need for the money, Pierce explains, but simply because they thought it could help pull the submission numbers back down. The journal is now at about 16,000 annual submissions,
