Lit Mag Submissions Minus the Mystery

By Becky Tuch

The first time I heard people talking about literary magazines was at a writing conference almost two decades ago. A panel of writers were discussing their submission strategies. One poet said she submitted to an average of thirty places at once. A fiction writer said that when she got a rejection from a magazine, she immediately sent the piece to three or five more places.

In my mid-twenties, new to the idea of writing as a career, I was astounded. Thirty places at one ti...