How to Evaluate the Smaller Literary Journals

8 things to look for when assessing markets for your work

Welcome to our weekly column exploring the ins and outs of lit mag publishing, written by readers, writers and editors from around the world.

By Erik Harper Klass

Many writers understand the importance of submitting stories and essays to smaller, newer, and (ostensibly) more accessible literary journals. If you’re only submitting to the “top” journals (the Grantas and Paris Reviews and New England Reviews of the world), you’re asking for a lot of rejections. (Most of the “top” journals accept fewer than 1% of their submissions, and many, according to Duotrope, accept 0%. That’s Z-E-R-O. Zilch. (Of course no journal really accepts zero submissions—these numbers reflect only Duotrope’s users—but I think you get the idea.)

Finding these smaller journals takes some work. And finding ones that match your particular style of writing can be a challenge (especially with newer journals that haven’t published yet). I could easily write a couple of articles on both of these topics (perhaps someday I will!), but, for this article, I want to focus on one simple question: How can you evaluate smaller journals to ensure that they’ll be around for a while?

Literary journals come and go with surprising frequency. I’m pretty careful with the journals I track—both for my own work and for my clients’—but I still average a couple of “defuncts” a month. If you, like me, would like your work to show up in journals that have staying power, read on. The following covers the eight things I recommend you look for before submitting.