Start Here: Submitting Short Stories

A from-scratch guide to short story submissions

I’ve been getting a few questions lately from people just breaking into the short story game. Several of these people have been working on a novel for years, and have reached some inflection point (novel is done / out with agents / mid–catastrophic overhaul) where it suddenly makes sense to turn to short stories.

Compared to all the advice out there on how to get an agent, there aren’t that many guides on how to submit short stories. I think it’s generally regarded as self-explanatory: you find a journal’s submissions page, check their word count guidelines, shoot off a story, and then refresh Submittable again and again in hopes of an acceptance.

That summary probably sounds very simple to you if you regularly submit short stories (or poems, or essays, or etc.). If you’re new at this, however, that “self-explanatory” process leaves some pretty huge gaps: Which journals should you submit to? How do you decide which of your stories to submit? How do you know that a story is ready to submit? What’s supposed to go in a cover letter? How long will it be before you hear back?

So this guide is for anyone who’s just getting started on short story submissions. That includes novelists with lit mag aspirations, students in fiction workshops, people who are transitioning from another genre or industry, and anyone who submits stories regularly but fears they’re maybe doing it wrong.

I’ll start with a step-by-step guide, and then I’ll try to cover anything I missed in an FAQ. Feel free to skip ahead to whatever step you’re stuck on.

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Step 1. Write a short story.

The good news with short stories: you can write absolutely whatever you want. An unhinged first-person rant, a carefully plotted drama with beginning/middle/end, a wacky speculative high-concept thought experiment, a six-part meditation that unfolds in reverse chronological order…

The bad news is, you can write absolutely whatever you want. That much freedom can make it difficult to get started.

My advice: don’t overthink it. Write whatever comes to mind, and then worry about cutting and shaping it into something other people can comprehend. The stakes are low with short stories: if you get it wrong, you’ve only lost a few weeks, not years. (Of course, that time is never really “lost”—it’s all practice, the same way that a musician plunking out major and minor scales is practicing.)

As you’re drafting the story, it’s worth keeping in mind the typical lengths of short stories:

• < 1,000 words: flash fiction

• 1,000-10,000 words: short story

  • 1,000-6,000 words: sweet spot for lit mag submissions

  • 6,000-10,000 words: on the long side

• 10,000-20,000 words: long story

• 20,000+ words: novella

It’s okay if you set out to write one kind of story and then under- or overshoot. Your final word count is going to affect where you can submit the story, but it doesn’t make it any more or less of a story. You might set out to write an epic novella and then realize, at 8,000 words, that you’ve said pretty much everything you had to say. That’s all good. The standard word count breakdowns are useful, not because they constrain what you can write, but because they indicate what company your story will keep.

If you haven’t read many short stories, now is a good time to do some research. Whatever the length of your draft, see if you can find other stories of that same length. What do successful writers usually achieve in a 5,000-word story? What does a great piece of flash fiction achieve?

As you write more stories, you might find that you keep landing at the same word count. I had a period where every story I wrote came out at 1,200 words. This is fine—you can get better at that particular form, even start to specialize.

It’s also possible that you’ll land somewhere different every time. Some stories come out at 10,000 words, some at 3,000 words, sometimes you set out to write a story and accidentally write a novel. This is also fine. I believe that every story idea has an ideal “size,” and the work of revision is to figure out what size the story should be.

Speaking of revision:

Step 2. Edit your short story.

Once you’ve finished a draft, and you’ve gone back through it a couple times to make sure that it’s legible, it’s time to edit—and editing means other people.

I resisted this part for a long time. I had years of editorial experience and strong convictions about craft—couldn’t I just edit my own work?

No. For some reason, we are not able to judge our own work, just as we are not able to see ourselves accurately in the mirror (see: plastic surgery gone wrong), just as we have no idea what our houses smell like or what our voices actually sound like.

You need other readers to see if anyone’s picking up what you’re putting down. The first few times you send a short story draft to a friend, I guarantee their reaction will surprise you. They’ll get fixated on a side detail that you threw in just for texture, and will miss entirely the big moral point you were trying to make with that stream-of-consciousness ending.

And they’ll be right. Or at least, they’ll be better attuned to what’s interesting about your story than you are.

Experiment with trusting your readers. You will probably feel defensive and skeptical about all the issues they pointed out in your story. Set those feelings aside and embark on a good-faith draft that follows their advice. You may find that some of their suggestions were wrong, in which case you can go back to the old version or come up with something better. But I’d bet that you’ll also discover, to your chagrin, that some of their suggestions were dead-on correct.

For more on how to find readers, and how to figure out which readers are good for you:

Alpha, Beta, & Gamma Readers

After you’ve written and edited dozens of stories, this other-people step becomes less important. Not because you no longer need other people, but because their voices are already in your head.

When I read back through a first draft of a new story, I’m thinking: “They’re going to tell me I took too long to get to the point. They’re going to tell me this part is unnecessarily cryptic. They’re going to want me to cut this part.” This is how you become a good editor for yourself: by internalizing the lessons you’ve gotten through previous rounds of editing.

But let’s assume for now that you are not at the stage where you can channel your mentors telepathically. Send your story to a trusted friend, edit the story in good faith, send it to another friend, edit again in good faith, and then see how you’re feeling about the story.

Have you revised the story enough? How do you know when the story is done?

Don’t worry, I’ve got a guide to that too:

Is It Ready?

Skip ahead to the section “Literary journals, magazines, online pubs, etc.” The main takeaway:

Submit your story/poem/essay/etc. to journals if and only if:

• you’ve addressed all the feedback you’ve received on it

• you can read back through the draft without wanting to change anything

• you still like it

• it is plausibly publishable

Step 3. Create your submission spreadsheet.

This step is going to take some time, but you only have to do it once and it’ll be useful for the rest of your writing career. You need to figure out where you’re going to submit your stories.

I think this, more than any of the other steps of this process, feels daunting to people just breaking into short stories. There are hundreds of lit mags—how are you supposed to know where to send your stuff? All the magazines say the submission guidelines are “implied by the magazine itself,” but there’s no way you’re going to subscribe to hundreds of journals just to figure out where to send your one 3,000-word story.

Here’s the method that worked for me.

Step 3a. Research

First, make a list of all the journals you’ve heard of that you want to get into. The New Yorker, the Paris Review—yeah, all the big guns should be on your list, along with smaller journals that you keep hearing about. You don’t need to put them in any order or have any justification for putting them on the list. You’ve heard of them and you want your work to appear there—that’s enough.

Next, make a list of writers you envy. These might be friends and rivals in your writing cohort, who are just slightly ahead of you in the publishing game. Or these might be writers who have published a first or second book with your dream press. The goal is to get a list of writers who are ahead of you, but not that far ahead—don’t put George Saunders on your list. These should be writers who are still out there hustling.

Now go through the list of writers and check out their websites. Their bios will say something like, “Enviable Writer’s work has appeared in X, Y, Z, and elsewhere.” Add these journals (X, Y, and Z) to your list.

Nota bene: writers usually list their publications in descending order of impressiveness. As you collect journals from these bios, you’ll start to get a sense of who the major players are in the lit mag world.

These writers will probably also have a tab on their websites listing all the short stories they’ve published. Add those journals to your list too. Notice which journals do and don’t get mentioned in the bio.

If you live near a good bookstore (I hope you do!), head over and check out their short story collections. There’s a page in every short story collection that lists where the stories previously appeared—it’ll either be on the copyright page at the front of the book, or in the acknowledgements at the back. Flip through the collections of writers who work in your genre or preferred style, and note down where they published their stories.

At this point, you’ve got a good list going:

• famous important journals

• journals where the writers you envy have published

• journals that always seem to get pride of place in writers’ bios

• journals that have published stories that later ended up in collections

This is probably at least 20 journals. To round out your list, look up “best literary journals” and scroll through a few listicles. Are you missing any obvious contenders?

You can also check out issues of the Best American Short Stories or the Pushcart Prize anthology—they’ll name the originating journal of each story in the TOC.

By this point you might have a list of 50-60 journals. That’s great. You don’t need to worry about getting every last journal on there, and you don’t want your list to become unwieldy or overwhelming. Start here, and over time you’ll add more journals as you come across them.

Now it’s time to make your spreadsheet.

Step 3b. Organization

Okay, it doesn’t have to be a spreadsheet—you can do all this in a word document. It just won’t be as elegant.

My spreadsheet has the following columns:

• Journal: the name of the journal

• Open: when their submission window opens

• Close: when their submission window closes

• Min: minimum word count

• Max: maximum word count

• Link: link to their submission guidelines

Here’s what I like about this: I can sort the spreadsheet by the “Open” column, so with one click I can see all the journals that open in March.

Some journals open for multiple submission windows throughout the year. In that case, I create multiple rows:

• Paris Review | Feb 1 | Feb 28

• Paris Review | June 1 | June 30

• Paris Review | Oct 1 | Oct 31

You can also add columns relevant to you. There was a time when I was writing almost exclusively flash fiction, and many journals allow you to submit up to 3 flash fiction stories at once time, as long as they’re all less than 1,000 words.

So I created a new column:

• Up to 3 <1k?

Every time I looked up a new journal, I added either YES or NO to the <1k column, so that I could sort the spreadsheet to show me the journals that took flash fiction in batches.

Is this all getting a bit technical? The point is, you take your list of journals and you organize it in a way that makes sense to you.

A simpler method, both tedious and effective, is to utilize the power of Schedule Send. Schedule an email to yourself at the start of every month, listing the journals that are open to submission that month. I actually use this method in addition to the spreadsheet, to remind myself of journals that open for submission mid-month or that have small submission caps.

Step 3c. Maintenance

Now you’ve built your submission spreadsheet (or word document, or collection of post-its). I told you that you would only have to do this once—but unfortunately you will have to put some work into maintaining it.

Journals love to change their submission windows to trip up people who don’t follow them on social media or subscribe to their newsletter or otherwise demonstrate their love and attention. There are some journals (not naming names…) that announce a 48-hour submission window at random once a year. This sucks. It’s bad for my spreadsheet.

But it’s also not that much work to go through my spreadsheet every few months and make sure I have the submission windows right.

One way you can make the maintenance a lot easier: share this spreadsheet with a few writer friends! Keeping the spreadsheet up-to-date can be a group responsibility.

Okay, so you have a list of maybe 60 journals that you want to publish in, and you know when they open for submission. Next up:

Step 4. Decide which stories to submit where.

Whenever you have time to sit down and do a round of submissions—ideally, this would be once a month, but it’s okay if it’s more sporadic—open your spreadsheet and see who’s open for submissions right now.

Your goal is to submit a story to each journal on your list that’s currently open for business.

If you’ve only written one story, this part is easy. Send your one story to all the journals on your list that are open for subs, as long as:

• your story falls within their word count guidelines

• they publish work more or less in your genre & style

• they haven’t rejected the story yet

If you’ve written two stories, this gets slightly more difficult. Which to send: Story A or Story B?

Obviously, the journals would prefer for you to subscribe, read each issue carefully, and come to a nuanced conclusion about the kind of work that they publish.

But you probably don’t have the time or money to do that with all sixty journals on your list.

So here’s a shortcut: go to the website of the journal and check out their recently published fiction. Most journals, even print-only journals, have a few stories or previews available online. Read the first few paragraphs of three or four stories. What’s the vibe? Do the editors seem to like voicey first-person narrators? Do they like overwrought literary description? Do they like harsh, strange juxtapositions? Do they like the second person?

Whatever conclusions you draw about the journal in question, check out Story A and Story B and see which gets closer to the vibe. Maybe Story A is a little voicier, and Story B is a little more erudite. Use these distinctions to channel Stories A & B toward the journals more likely to appreciate them.

The more stories you write, the more effective this vibe approach gets. If you have sixteen stories, you can target the vibe of a given journal pretty directly. “They like unsettling speculative horror stories in the second person. Great, I have one of those!”

Another good thing about writing lots of stories: you don’t run out of options quite as quickly. If you’re sticking with just Story A and Story B, you’ll reach a point where you can’t submit Story A or Story B to a given journal, because they’ve already rejected both.

Keep writing, keep editing, keep polishing—but also, keep experimenting. The more you push out your range, the more likely you’ll find a bizarro journal with a very distinctive style and realize: I’ve actually written a story in that style.

Step 5. Submit.

Submitting short stories is way easier than querying a novel. Here’s what you need to have ready:

• Properly formatted short story

• Cover letter

• $3

Let’s take these in turn.

Step 5a. Properly formatted short story

Times New Roman, 12-point font, double-spaced.

On the first page, a header that includes:

• Your full name

• Your mailing address

• Your email

• Your phone number

• The word count of the story

On subsequent pages, a header that includes:

• Your full name

• Page number

Some journals have different specifications for what should and shouldn’t be in the header. The above is my default formatting—I’ll save a new copy of the story in a separate folder if a journal requires me to, e.g., anonymize the document.

If you’re submitting three flash fiction stories in one document, I recommend creating a basic title page that lists the title and word count of each story.

Step 5b. Cover letter

Here’s my template for cover letters:

Dear editors,

Thank you for your consideration of “Story,” a short story of #,### words.

My short stories have appeared in Journal, Journal, and elsewhere. I hold a Degree from University, and I’m based in City, State.

This is a simultaneous submission. I’ll let you know immediately if the piece is accepted elsewhere.

I appreciate your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

The bio is, of course, customizable. The only essential thing to mention is any past publications, awards, and/or residencies. You can mention degree, location, occupation, etc., but you don’t have to.

I wrote more about cover letter bios here:

Red Flags in Short Story Submissions

If you can personalize the cover letter, you should. I always look up the masthead for the given journal, and if it’s clear who will be reading the cover letter (e.g. if there’s only one fiction editor), I address it to them.

Also, if you are a genuine fan of the journal, that’s worth mentioning. Don’t fake it (“I so deeply admire your commitment to publishing literature”), but if you’ve read a piece in the journal that you liked, you can add a line toward the top about it.

Step 5c. $3

Most journals charge around $3 as a submission fee. Some are sneaking up toward $4.50.

DO NOT PAY MORE THAN THIS. Contest submissions average around $20, and they are very rarely worth it. These contests aren’t scams, per se—writers do win those contests, and they get good publicity and a chunk of money for the winning story—but the odds are terrible, and you’re paying $20 for the same thing you could get for $3: a chance to get published.

We all falter now and then and spend $25 on an unwise contest submission. Just don’t make a habit of it. Getting that form rejection six months later, and realizing you spent $25 on it, is painful.

I’ve had nineteen stories accepted for publication (including one that just came out yesterday!), and zero of them were contest submissions. I don’t submit to contests anymore. Yes, it’s fun to dream of getting $1,000 for a short story—but by submitting to a contest, you are most likely paying into someone else’s $1,000.

Step 6. Keep track of your submissions.

So you wrote your short story, you edited it, you figured out which journals to send it to, and you submitted. Now you just need a system to keep track of where you’ve sent your stories.

That’s right: it’s time for another spreadsheet!

Okay, you don’t have to do it my way. But here’s how I do it.

The columns:

• Story title

• Word count

• Status: ready / edit / accepted / retired

• Active submissions: all the journals I’ve sent it to

• Past submissions: all the journals that have rejected it

  • with asterisks for kind rejections*

Some nice things about this method: I can sort by word count, so I can look through all the stories in a certain word range to see which one I should send to a particular journal. I can also sort by status, so that I’m only looking at the “ready” stories when deciding what to send where.

Whenever a journal opens to submissions, I do a search to see if I have any stories with them already. If not, I search through to see what they’ve already rejected, and that gives me a sense of what to send next.

Of course, you will probably come up with your own method, and it may be cleaner and more efficient than mine. But the basic principle is: you shouldn’t have to go digging through your inbox to figure out where you’ve sent a story and whether it’s been rejected yet.

This is especially true when a story gets accepted, as you’ll need to withdraw it officially from all the other journals you sent it to. It’s nice to have all those journals gathered in one list.

All right, so you’re on submission, you’re keeping good track, and now all that’s left is to wait.

Step 7. Wait.

That’s all you can do. Don’t fixate, don’t refresh Submittable, don’t read the tea leaves of “Received” vs. “In-Progress.” They’ll get to it when they get to it. Your job is to keep writing.

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Frequently Asked Questions I Anticipate You Asking

What happens when a short story gets accepted, but it’s still under consideration at other journals? Can I nudge the other journals to make a decision?

No—in the short story world, it’s first across the finish line. If your short story gets accepted somewhere, you have to immediately and officially withdraw it from consideration everywhere else.

Does that mean I should submit to the top-tier journals first? I don’t want a low-tier journal to take my story if it could have gotten accepted somewhere better!

Sure—if you have the patience, you can submit in rounds of prestige. This is slower, but definitely avoids the problem of having a story accepted somewhere you’re not thrilled about.

I don’t do it that way, though. My feeling is: journals only make it onto my list if I would be pleased and proud to have a story accepted there. When I get an early acceptance from a “mid-tier” journal, I’m delighted—I don’t waste any time thinking, “But what if the Paris Review would have accepted it??” I’m just glad to have another story out in the world.

Is it even worth submitting to top-tier journals like the New Yorker? I hear they haven’t taken any stories from the slush in like 30 years.

Yeah, well, the New Yorker slush is a bit of a joke. But we might as well flood their inbox anyway, right? It’s on them for pretending they actually consider unsolicited submissions.

As for other top-tier journals—yes, it’s worth it. The first short story I managed to publish was accepted at Ploughshares. I had no credentials and no clue what I was doing—I only sent that story to seven journals total.

If I had known the odds, I wouldn’t have bothered to submit to a juggernaut like Ploughshares. Luckily, I was audacious in my ignorance, and they liked the story and published it and it even won a Pushcart Prize. (I peaked early.)

What’s the difference between a kind rejection and a form rejection? Do kind rejections matter?

I wrote about that here:

No News Is Bad News

You can use the Rejection Wiki to gauge the tier of the rejection you’ve just received. As to whether these tiers matter—I think they do, as a loose indicator of whether you’re getting “warmer” or “colder” with your work.

Do you recommend submission databases like DuoTrope and Chill Subs?

I’ve never used them, but they’re probably useful. I don’t like to pay for anything I can do myself, so I’ve always chosen to compile my own submission spreadsheet. If you’ve used these services or others like them, please weigh in in the comments!

Can I read that story you mentioned that came out yesterday?

Oh my god, totally. It’s just under 1,000 words, and I submitted it to swamp pink in a batch of three flash fiction pieces… thanks to that handy column in my spreadsheet.¹

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All right, that’s my one-stop shop for short story submissions. Questions? Criticisms? Ad hominem attacks? The comments are open!

1. Did she just nest a plug for spreadsheets inside a plug for her short story?