Everybody Wants to Rule the Lit Mags!
Scam alert!; submission fee & response time stats; invisibilisation of class in the lit world; breaking submission rules; leaving MFA programs; AI-related sub guidelines; reading lit mags; and more
Welcome to our bi-weekly news roundup!
Greetings Lit Magicorns,
This week in news we’ve got a scammy lit mag, submissions data, questions about AI, submissions tips, and oh so much more. Go on and pour yourself a tall glass of cold-pressed celery juice, settle in, and let’s go!
Since I launched this project in 2020 I’ve been getting regular emails from readers with concerns about magazines. Not once, though, have two readers emailed me about the same magazine on the same day. That changed recently, when two different people contacted me about StreetLit.
One reader wrote:
It might make sense for a lit mag to not offer refunds on editorial feedback, given that writers could complain after receiving feedback and want their money back. But to not make this clear in the guidelines? And to not provide a refund before the service has been provided? To be so dismissive of a writer who has paid for a service? Seems troubling.
This writer added:
That this magazine is asking writers to repeatedly send more work was echoed by several on X:
At Reddit, another writer echoed this experience:
I wanted to make everyone here aware of a scam by a magazine called StreetLit.
I sent them two different essays within the last few months and paid extra for the “individualized feedback” option. $30 USD. The first essay actually got accepted for publication by a different magazine and StreetLit rejected it with some pretty crappy unhelpful and insulting feedback before I was able to withdraw the submission on submittable.
Fast forward a month or so. For one reason or another I decided to send them a different essay, which had actually been accepted elsewhere but I declined as I wanted to find a better home for the essay. Obviously StreetLit isn’t a big magazine to aspire to but the essay in question fit the spirituality theme so I submitted it with the feedback option to see what might happen. Lo and behold, they just rejected the essay and copy and pasted word for fucking word the same useless and insulting feedback. Not one sentence mentioned anything about the essay itself just vague notions of style and crappy stock suggestions. Which tells me they likely didn’t actually read either of the essays. This is an uncalled for and predatory scam on aspiring writers who are sharing their heart and soul they put into every word they write. It’s also blatant theft of my $30 but the principle of it is the worst part. They give literary magazines a bad name.
So we have two writers reporting “insulting feedback.” On top of this, it appears they are recycling the same feedback from one submission to the next. (The Reddit post includes the feedback provided by the editors.)
If all this doesn’t raise your hackles enough, this magazine does not pay writers but they do charge a $5 reading fee. Yet the fee is not mentioned in the submissions guidelines. You only come to it after filling out the submissions form. It’s listed as a “tip.” Yet it’s required.
I tried to contact these editors but there is no contact information. The masthead is anonymous.
If I have said it once then I have said it a million times: Avoid lit mags where there is no contact information and/or where the masthead is anonymous, especially when they charge reading fees!
I reached out to the reader who initially contacted me about this magazine. I asked whether the masthead was anonymous when they submitted. They wrote:
“…just starting out and had no idea what to look out for.”
And that’s the rub, my friends. This practically brings me to tears. Lit mags like this prey upon writers who don’t have enough submitting experience and who don’t know what is normal editorial behavior. This is NOT NORMAL editorial behavior.
Such lit mags also poison the lit mag ecosystem by adding a layer of mistrust into an already opaque and challenging environment.
The reader has contacted Submittable and is awaiting response. Submittable is notoriously reluctant to deal with predatory lit mags, so we will wait and see. In the meantime, writers: consider yourselves warned and tell your friends.
Moving along, many have also asked me in recent months whether response times at lit mags have gotten longer. Well, Duotrope has released some interesting data. They’ve charted average response times, response type (acceptance, rejection, withdrawal), submission fees and submission method. The data includes contests.
Interestingly, it appears that around 2020-2022 the response times and submission fees were at their peak, coming down just a bit in recent years. At the same time, the percentage of lit mags that charge fees has risen.
Brecht DePoortere, who maintains a massive database of lit mags, also crunched some numbers to reveal interesting findings:
With all the talk about rising fees and more lit mags charging fees, it’s heartening to know that nearly half of the most competitive magazines still offer free submissions, at least part of the time.
In other news, just a few days after we had a rousing conversation here at Lit Mag News about whether class was a feature of marginalization and underrepresentation in lit mags, Lit Hub ran a piece that raises important questions about how class is perceived (or rendered invisible) within MFA programs and beyond.
In What Does It Mean To Be a Working Class Writer at Iowa Writers’ Workshop?, Lee Cole writes,
The problem I’m describing is much bigger than a single MFA program, even one as emblematic as Iowa. While institutions—MFA programs, lit mags, publishing houses—have done much to include and elevate underrepresented groups on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation, they’ve done far less to include and elevate those from underrepresented class backgrounds.
Many of you have asked me over the years about editing a piece and sending it back to a journal that has rejected it. I always say this is a major no-no, and most editors seem to agree. However, in Writer's Perspective: Forget the Rules
shares a different experience:By August of 2023, I thought Fortunes was ready to submit. Emphasis on thought.
…I sent it out to Electric Literature, a long-shot magazine…Electric Lit liked it, but after two rounds of edits, they ultimately passed.
…In March of 2025, Electric Literature reopened submissions for personal narrative, and I decided, against better judgment, to try again. I revised the essay based on the feedback from EL’s editors and brought it back to the workshop for one last round of discussion…I sent it back to the editor who had originally passed on the piece. A few weeks later, to my surprise, they accepted it!
…So I’m here to tell you to break the rules—selectively! And don’t ever, ever give up.
Speaking of corresponding with editors,
shared an interesting interaction with a lit mag editor. In I Sent This Letter to a Literary Magazine. This Was Their Response. Was I Wrong?, Smith shares a letter to a journal editor whose magazine’s guidelines state, “We accept no writing aided in any manner by AI.” To the editor, Smith wrote,Your guidelines are a riot, equal parts charm offensive and institutional trauma response…
…No conditions. No nuance. No space for what kind of aid, how much, or what counts as “help.”
…A policy like yours rewards those who can afford to work in aesthetic isolation. It draws a moral line around methods and enforces it without context. It doesn’t ask what was made, only how.
Is not allowing submissions that are “aided in any manner by AI” discriminatory? Does it encourage writers to lie? Is it incumbent upon editors to define what they mean by aided in any manner? Or do you welcome such strict guidelines surrounding AI?
Over at
, ONE ART Editor has some great submissions advice generally, and solid advice on how to think about lit mag “tiers”:It’s true, an audience of one True Believer matters. An impact on one person’s life makes it all worthwhile. With this in mind, we artists would all prefer to impact more than just the life of one person engaging with our work. But, we’ll settle for one person who is a real fan.
I believe this relates heavily to how we should approach submitting to lit mags and where we publish our work.
Speaking of finding your own audience, at
, has posted Why I'm Dropping Out Of The MFA. Kalantzis writes,The MFA machine keeps pumping out identical voices. Workshop darlings who write beautiful sentences about nothing. Students worry more about pleasing professors than creating something that matters. They've turned fiction into a product you can manufacture if you follow the right steps.
Step one: Write what you know. Step two: Make it literary. Step three: Submit to journals no one reads. Step four: Apply for teaching jobs. Step five: Repeat until dead.
Meanwhile, big media is hemorrhaging writers to Substack. The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times are all watching their talent walk away. Why? Because people are done with perfection. Done with prose that sounds like it was focus-grouped. And most literary fiction reeks of workshop notes.
…The future belongs to writers who know the best literature doesn't make you a better person, it makes you feel less alone in being exactly who you are.
At
, has shared thoughts on the importance of voice in writing. In It’s Really All About the Voice, Ponepinto writes,Even among the Orca staff we sometimes had vastly different reactions to submissions. One staff member might think a submission was the best thing they had read all month. Another might think the same submission was a waste of time.
This is voice. The same story evokes polar opposite reactions from people even on the same literary journal staff. How can this be? I believe that each of us carries a lifetime of experiences that shape our personalities and opinions, and these core traits, even if we are not aware of them, are susceptible to the psychological triggers that are presented to us through works of art, especially literature. That’s why editors’ choices can seem so arbitrary.
Another topic we’ve explored here at Lit Mag News is how you decide what to read next. At his Substack,
has written a generous dive into his own reading habits and shares some serious lit mag love. In “How do you know what to read?” Chee writes,I am still a literary magazine nerd….
32 years later I can say I was and am helped by anthologies. The ones that include me and the ones I regularly aspire to be in. The Best American Essays, Stories and Poetry anthologies, especially, which I learned to comb for work that excited me, before examining the back pages, the lists of the noteworthy essays, stories and poems, and the magazines that would publish them. I use them as a guide to submissions and subscriptions.
…And I do subscribe to roughly 30 literary magazines, in a mix of digital and paper subscriptions…I also use JSTOR frequently, which my students can access from their institutional libraries, and which does allow people to make accounts for free, and which has extensive archives of essays, stories and poems published in many literary magazines…
Finally, CLMP has announced its annual Firecracker Awards. Best Debut Magazines are Fruitslice, new words, Revel, Short Reads, The Weganda Review. Best General Excellence Magazines are Aster(ix) Journal, Circumference, The Common, The Evergreen Review, The Hopkins Review, Joyland Magazine. Congratulations to all!
As for us, I’m slowly but surely putting together the schedule for July’s interviews and info sessions. Stay on the lookout as it should be rolling into your inbox very soon!
And that you free-thinkers and independent wanderers, you rogue tinkerers and searching drifters, you headed toward the summer’s sandy shores and you firing up the grill with all the season’s latest savory somethings, you eager to catch those explosive colors in a flash upon the night sky and you for whom it’s just noise, all noise, so much noise, you with flip-flops flapping, you with brimmed hats bouncing, you out there, the ocean tugging at your inner tide or rivers pulling at your hungry heating heart, you expecting traffic, you back in action, you going nowhere but a rooftop, gaze upward and dreaming into the infinite spackle of clustered stars, you who will be celebrating a weekend of travel and fireworks, you who won’t do anything special at all, you and you, each and every one, everywhere, no matter, lighting up the world and tearing open the sky, always, in more ways than you even know, is the news in literary magazines.
Have a fun week, pals.
Fondly,
Becky
I wanted to recommend Pencil House, an organization that provides cheap or free feedback.
They open for _free_ feedback the first two days of every month, or until they reach their cap.
I submitted a story to them a couple of years ago, and got three single-spaced pages of kind, constructive feedback.
Here are links for more information:
https://pencilhouse.org/programs/feedback/
https://www.instagram.com/ThePencilhouse
“The MFA machine keeps pumping out identical voices. Workshop darlings who write beautiful sentences about nothing. Students worry more about pleasing professors than creating something that matters. They've turned fiction into a product you can manufacture if you follow the right steps.”
Speaking as an iconoclastic old autodidact in this writing business, whenever I see the letters MFA, I think the first letter must stand for Mother with the following two letters standing for words that complete a common American insult. More seriously, the existence of such courses seems to me to be the equivalent of setting up courses to teach art via painting by numbers.