Publishing in Literary Magazines

A starter guide to a slower type of publishing, and why it's still worth doing

I’m thrilled to share my recent essay in AGNI Magazine, All Things Considered. I loved the challenge of exploring the topics of sensitivity, perfectionism, and depressive realism, and turning over the question of whether this mix of traits could be seen (by me, in our culture) as a good thing. Along with this publication, I wanted to write a bit about the process and value of publishing in literary magazines. Here it is!

Art by Stephanie Davidson, written by Rae Katz

Recently I took myself on an artist’s date, an idea from The Artist’s Way, where you make a date with yourself to go look at art, or listen to music, or make something with your hands, or do some other activity related to beauty and making that is outside of your normal routine. The idea sounds extravagant within a regular modern life, packed to the brim with a job and perhaps a family and a home and maybe a dog, all of which need attention. For Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way, though, it’s an indispensable practice for nurturing creativity.

My artist’s dates are rare, but recently I have felt a sudden urgency for this kind of solo, slow, aimless outing centered around seeking beauty. Perhaps this is a reaction to my spending more time online and feeling a little creatively choked. So, full of guilt for all the other responsibilities I was neglecting, a few days ago I took the bus to the San Francisco MoMA. I didn’t look at which exhibitions were open, and I didn’t plan. I just walked in, bought my ticket, and immediately stumbled on The Visitors, a multimedia installation showing a group of people in different rooms of a house signing a song for an hour. In various soulful harmonies, they repeated the phrase:

“Once again I fall into my feminine ways….”

Like art is supposed to, it cracked me open. I sat on the floor of the museum in the dark with twenty strangers for forty minutes, reveling in the sound.

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It is in moments like these that I often get a spark of an idea that becomes my favorite work. My recent essay about my son started in a moment like this, as did my recent essay in AGNI magazine about pessimism, sensitivity and depressive realism. While I firmly don’t believe in writing only when I feel inspired, I do believe that the best ideas often start in moments of inspiration.

Furthermore, I’ve found that I prefer to place the resulting work—the stuff closest to my heart—in literary magazines, rather than in my newsletter.

Literary Magazines vs. Self-Publishing on Substack

The literary magazine world is just about as opposite from the internet as you can get. Magazines often have limited reading periods during certain times of year, the rest of the time you can’t submit. They usually take months to respond to submissions, and if a piece is accepted, the publishing timeline is typically many more months, so the whole thing from submission to publication can easily be the better part of a year. Once the work is published, no one can comment, and it almost certainly will not go viral. Many literary magazines are print-only (can you imagine!?), and the ones that publish online do so at a slow and steady pace with no “like” buttons or other forms of interaction. The work is just the work, take or leave it, I will never know.

So as someone reading this on an internet platform, and maybe a writer on said platform, you might be thinking, are you crazy? Put your best work there? Where few will read it or share it? Where it can’t go viral?

My answer is yes, and let me make the pitch for why. I think the literary magazine process—the slowness and the preciousness with which each piece is treated—feels right for a work that emerged in a dark room full of music and tears, and which I often draft and edit over the course of many months. The whole format honors the work in a way that throwing it up online does not. At some magazines, there is also the opportunity to work with an editor, a totally wonderful experience which further hones the piece and recognizes it as something to be cared for and crafted. As a bonus, in certain communities, these publications are highly respected, even if the majority of people have never heard of them. There are downsides of course—low readership, and the impossibility of ever making a reasonable income from literary magazine publications—which is why I write on Substack too. But I will not give up the literary magazines; I deeply appreciate the role they play in the writing world.

So I thought I’d share some lessons learned from publishing in literary magazines. You can see my work online and in print in AGNI, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Literary Mama, Under the Sun, Stonecoast Review, Ghost City Press, Talking River Review, and others. If you are interested, here are the nuts and bolts of getting started and some lessons learned.

There are lists

Whether you are a writer or an avid reader, you can discover excellent literary magazines by perusing lists of top magazines. When I started out, I wasn’t familiar with any of the nonfiction literary magazines outside of the The New Yorker and The Paris Review. David Mcdannald’s nonfiction rankings list is widely used among nonfiction writers.

At first, it can be wise to submit to smaller magazines, which are often more open to writers without an established publishing track record. The best targets are the ones where you love the work they publish and where you can envision your writing fitting in. As I have written about before, I don’t actually love reading, so sometimes this part of the process felt like a chore. However, as I continued doing submissions over multiple years, I started to get a feel for different magazines and could determine more quickly where any given work might fit.

Most submissions happen on Submittable

Doing submissions felt really intimidating to me at first, but luckily most magazines accept submissions through Submittable, which is an easy-to-use platform for submitting work. Magazines typically post their guidelines on Submittable (or on another page), including genres, word counts, and sometimes themes that interest them. I’ve found that the more I submit, the easier the process feels—once you have an essay and a bio ready, it is mostly a matter of copying and pasting with some customization for each publication.

There’s help if you want to pay

I was really overwhelmed when I was trying to get my first literary publications, and so I enlisted help. Writer’s Relief is a company that will create lists of good target magazines for each piece of work based on the length, themes, magazine submission windows, author publishing history and more. For an extra fee, they will also do the submissions for you. This was a really helpful service for me at the beginning, and it resulted in my first handful of publications. It also educated me in formatting the submissions and writing a cover letter, and helped me understand the full landscape of magazines out there (there are a lot). I’m sure some writers find this a little icky—too much of a shortcut, too little author engagement, we should be carefully reading all the magazines we submit to. I have felt some of that too, but at the same time it helped me get started and gain some confidence, which has been really valuable.

Once I felt I had gotten in the door, this service was no longer an appealing option. I wanted full control over my target list, and I was familiar enough with the landscape to do the targeting more easily myself. I also wanted to do fewer submission with more care as my acceptance rate increased due to my track record of publishing. So that’s the path I took: Writer’s Relief to break in, then moving to a self-directed process, which I now use.

My current submission process

I typically aim to submit an essay every couple of months, though this year it was more like every three to four months as I worked to get my Substack off the ground. I choose 5-7 publications for each round of submission, and if an essay is rejected from all of them, then I do a second round of the same size. This allows me to wait to hear back from my top choices before submitting to more. Needless to say, each essay is usually rejected many times before it is accepted.

Bonus tip: Consider taking a writing class

One of the best things I have done for my writing in general, but also for learning about the literary world, is take adult ed writing classes. I take classes through Grub Street, which I have found to be consistently high quality, covering all kinds of topics, and which I can do via Zoom even from across the country (Grub Street is in Boston and I am in San Francisco).

The people who take the classes range from professionals to serious hobbyists to beginners, and through these classes I have not only upped my writing game significantly, I’ve also met other writers and been exposed to different approaches to “being a writer.” Seeing this range of styles has been very important in informing my own approach to writing. It is at Grub Street that I was first inspired to start submitting to magazines, and where I met writers who had established their literary credibility through this type of publication. I find that participating in classes, meeting writers, and submitting work outside of the internet world helps me balance and feel good about the other, more fast-paced work I do online.

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I thought this fast-slow balance might resonate with some of my fellow writers here, and I hope this sparked an exciting idea or two for a few of you, or at least offered permission to still engage in very slow writing. This other way brings different value into the world, keeps me sane, and is an important counterbalance to writing on the internet.

I’m curious…

1. What was the last “artist’s date” you’ve taken yourself on? If this is a new concept to you, do you have an idea of the type of artist’s date you’d like?

2. What’s your experience publishing in literary magazines, if any? Is this an interest of yours? Do you have any tips for the submission process?

3. Do you have a favorite way of reigniting your creative spark?