911 submissions – 5 accepted.
In the last two years I’ve sent out over 200 submissions of my work including short stories, flash fiction, poetry and photographs. Duotrope, a submission manager platform I use to help track this activity, says my success rate at 11% is somewhat better than average, though I have yet to have any luck with the more prestigious magazines.
Not all online literary publications are created equal, and it doesn’t take long to realize a great many of them are a Word Press site run by creative writing students or a platform for an unsuccessful author to promote their own work alongside other (more worthy?) writers.
I’ve up-ed my game and now only submit to legitimate publications that don’t discriminate in favour of marginalized authors, have a professional websites, a publishing history and/or pay. I’ve never submitted to publications that charge a reading fee. Who pays to get rejected.
Merganser Magazine is a free online literary magazine, featuring a variety of prose and poetry. They aim “to publish many writers and artists whose work transcends disciplines and genres.” It checked all my boxes and so I sent them my short story, They.
I received a prompt rejection, which was disappointing though not unusual. However, what was unusual was the editor, Jake Ott, included the following stats for that edition: submitted – 911, withdrawn – 19, accepted – 5, or .6%.
I was astounded! I knew the competition was tough but 911 submissions! And an acceptance rate less than one percent! I sent Jake an email asking for details and he kindly responded.
He began by admitting that “April was a bigger month than usual for us in terms of submissions,” and then explained their submission review process.
I imagined that some submissions might be rejected out of hand for not adhering to guidelines but this is not the case with Merganser Magazine. Ott and his team of reviewers “code” all submissions into a database. Each reviewer independently applies several different categories of codes to each submission during review.
Only about 10% correspond to “standout” quality. In the case of the last edition, that got them down to about fifty submissions. From there they narrowed it down to 5 by comparing editorial comments/re-reading those fifty submissions.
Interestingly, they don’t give special consideration to marginalized authors. Many of their submitters write under pen names, and they don’t ask questions about backgrounds. They do, however, “have a mission of publishing and promoting important stories. That very much includes stories representing marginalized groups. This needs not be direct. We’re talking about art, so subtlety has its place with us.”
Merganser Magazine is currently open for submissions at https://mergansermagazine.com/about.html
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