As I’ve discussed in past posts, I’m selective with the literary journals I add to Submitit’s database. I always ask myself the following questions: Is the journal’s website (layout and  copy) of relatively high quality? Is there a masthead, preferably with multiple editors, and are the editors experienced and accomplished (as editors, writers, or (ideally) both)? Are the submission guidelines sensible and clear? (Some new journals, with inexperienced editors, have unusual gu

We all do something like this: Submit a story to a wonderful journal. Try not to think about it (we know it’ll be a while). But then we...

It’s hard to imagine that Submitit has been going strong now for over four years. Near the end of 2021 (around a year in) I wrote a post...

Since part of my job is to work on—which is to say, less euphemistically, “to fix”—formatting issues with the stories and essays I...

(First of all, am I the only one who can’t seem to get enough of the word ephemeral ? It kind of rolls off the tongue. Never gets...

I wrote a post not long ago about how I evaluate literary journals , focusing mostly on smaller and usually newer ones. These journals...

When it comes to the ethics of getting work accepted at literary journals, the submission gods hath spoken, the prophet hath come down from the mountaintop, and the commandments—only two!—have been delivered. And here they are: 1) Thou shall not decline an acceptance to a literary journal. If a journal has taken the time to read a writer’s story or essay and accept it for publication, we believe it is ethical for the writer to accept the acceptance . The time to, in essence,

If you’ve signed up for a Submitit submissions package, you know that we submit your story to up to twenty journals, in two rounds of...

As part of a cover letter, journals generally ask for a third-person bio. In addition, a short “blurb” about the piece can sometimes help. Writers often get both wrong. But before writing one more word about this, let me state clearly: in terms of whether a piece gets accepted or not, cover letters—the blurb plus the bio—matter about as much as the twinkling stars do to those fish that live near the bottom of the ocean (benthic fish, we call these). In other words, very littl

I’ve written a lot (most obviously here ) about the importance of submitting stories and essays to smaller, newer, and (ostensibly) more...

I’ve been running Submitit now for about a year, and I’m happy to say that we—I must say we , since the stories are yours—have had some...

I consistently see the same handful of mistakes.

If you're getting rejected, you are not alone.

Five ways to vary your writing and expand your field of literary markets ...

A few years ago I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Signature of All Things” in One Story, and was blown away.

I’d like to share with you a (partial) list of 40 literary journals. Can you guess what they have in common?