Getting into Literary Magazines
In brief: Journal publication is how poems get passports: proof they can travel without you. This lesson turns submission from a lottery into a craft you can learn.
Literary magazines remain the working currency of a poetry career. Editors of presses read them, grant panels weigh them, reading series book from them, and, less mercenarily, they are how your poems find readers who never met you. Yet most poets submit badly: to journals they have never read, with poems chosen at random, in batches sent once a year after which a single rejection stops everything. The acceptance rates at good journals are genuinely low, often under two percent, but the poets who publish steadily are not two percent lucky. They run a system.
This lesson builds that system: how to research and tier your markets, how to assemble a batch and write a cover letter that helps rather than hurts, how simultaneous submissions actually work, and how to metabolize rejection so it feeds the process instead of ending it. Nothing here improves your poems. Everything here improves the odds that your best poems meet the editors who will love them.
Research is half the acceptance
Editors say the same thing with weary unanimity: most submissions fail because they were never right for the magazine. Reading a journal before submitting is not etiquette, it is targeting. You do not need to buy every issue. Nearly all journals post sample poems online. Read six poems a magazine has actually published and ask two questions: does my work share a temperature with these, and would my poem look at home beside them without embarrassment in either direction? If both answers are yes, that journal goes on your list with a note about which of your poems fits and why.
Build a tiered list of fifteen to twenty-five journals. Tier one is the handful of dream venues everyone knows. Tier two is strong journals with distinct personalities where your odds are real. Tier three is newer or smaller magazines actively hungry for good work. Send to all tiers at once, not sequentially, because tier one responses can take six months and your poems should not sit in one queue aging. The tier system also quietly protects your morale: something is usually alive somewhere, and a tier three acceptance is genuine publication with genuine readers, not a consolation prize.
Keep a submission log from your first send: poem titles, journal, date sent, response, and any personal note from an editor. A scrawled “enjoyed these, send more” on a rejection is not politeness, it is one of the strongest signals in the entire ecosystem, and poets who fail to resubmit to those editors within a few months are declining an invitation. Your log turns years of scattered results into a map of who is warming to your work.
The batch and the letter
A standard submission is three to five poems, and the batch is a small act of curation. Do not send five random poems. Send a batch with a shape: poems that speak to each other while showing slight range, so that an editor who dislikes the first still meets a different register by the third. Lead with your strongest poem, the one you would keep if forced to burn the rest, because tired editors decide early whether to lean in. And send only finished work. A promising draft wastes the one reading that journal will ever give it.
Cover letters should be brief to the point of plainness: greeting by editor name if listed, one line stating you are submitting three or five poems, titles, a two or three line bio in third person, thanks. If you genuinely know the magazine, one sentence proves it: “The ghazals in your spring issue are why I am sending these.” What letters should never do is explain the poems, apologize for the poems, or list every workshop you attended. The poems must speak entirely for themselves, and editors are fluent in reading them without subtitles.
Your bio at this stage may feel thin, and that is fine. Two credits are enough, and contest results count: a placement or a strong showing in a scored competition is a legitimate line, and a Writory result, where poems are judged on creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme, tells an editor a jury has already looked hard at your work. If you have no credits at all, say where you live and what you do, in one warm sentence. No editor has ever rejected a good poem for arriving with a short bio.
Simultaneous submissions and the ethics of the queue
Simultaneous submission, sending the same poem to several journals at once, is standard practice and, given six month response times, the only sane practice. The rules are two and absolute. First, respect the few journals that explicitly forbid it, either by giving them exclusives or by not submitting to them. Second, the moment a poem is accepted anywhere, withdraw it everywhere else, immediately and with thanks. A one line note to each journal does it. Failing to withdraw is the fastest way to burn a bridge in a small world with a long memory.
Understand what acceptance transacts. Most journals take first serial rights, the right to publish the poem first, after which rights revert to you, and the poem can appear in your future chapbook or collection with an acknowledgment line. This is also why the previous lesson on social media matters here: a publicly posted poem has usually spent its first rights already. Read what each journal takes, and if a contract ever asks for all rights permanently, ask questions before signing. Reputable magazines do not need to own your poem forever.
Pace the machine. A steady practice is one submission batch per month: research one new journal, refresh your log, send three to five poems to two or three venues. In an afternoon a month you will have twenty to forty poems circulating within a year, and circulation is what publication statistically requires. Poets with one batch out are gambling. Poets with thirty poems out are running a system in which rejection is weather.
Rejection is data, not verdict
At a two percent acceptance rate, a poem good enough to be published will still be declined dozens of times on its way to yes, because fit, timing, and an editor’s Tuesday all outvote quality in any single reading. The professional response is mechanical: log it, and send the poem out again within a week, ideally the same day. The poets who publish are not the ones who hurt less. They are the ones whose system keeps moving while they hurt.
Do read the tiers of rejection, because they carry information. A form rejection says nothing about the poem. A personal note, a named poem, an invitation to resubmit, each is a rung up a real ladder, and your log should track them like the signals they are. And once or twice a year, audit the poems themselves: a poem rejected twenty times without one personal note may be telling you it needs revision rather than another stamp. Retire it to the workshop file without shame. Some poems are not failed, they are early.
A complete cover letter, in full
Dear Ms. Okafor,
Please consider these four poems, “Salt Map”, “My Father’s English”, “Curfew Birds”, and “Litany with Power Cut”, for River Ledger. The prose poems in your winter issue are why I am sending these.
Asha Nair’s poems appear in Two Rivers Review, and she placed second in Writory’s monthly contest in March. She teaches primary school in Kochi.
Thank you for reading.
Asha Nair
Everything an editor needs, nothing they must wade through: titles, one line proving she reads the journal, a two line bio in third person. The poems get the stage.
A batch with a shape, shown as its table of contents
Batch for submission, October:
1. “Salt Map”, strongest, leads.
2. “Curfew Birds”, same coastal world, tighter lines.
3. “My Father’s English”, register shift, humour under grief.
4. “Litany with Power Cut”, formal variety, anaphora.
The four poems share a temperature but vary in register and form, so an editor cool to one meets a different music two pages later. The strongest opens because editors decide early.
Exercises
- Read six published poems from each of three journals you have never submitted to, and write one sentence per journal on whether your work shares a temperature with theirs.
- Build your tiered list of fifteen journals, five per tier, each with a note naming which of your poems fits that venue and why.
- Assemble one batch of four poems with a deliberate shape, then write the two sentence rationale for its order as if explaining it to an editor friend.
- Start your submission log today, backfilling any past submissions you remember, and add a column for personal notes from editors, the signal most poets fail to track.
Key takeaways
- Read six published poems before submitting anywhere: fit, not luck, is half the acceptance.
- Run a tiered list and keep twenty or more poems circulating, because publication is a statistics game played with finished work.
- Lead the batch with your strongest poem and keep the cover letter almost invisible.
- Simultaneous submission is standard, and instant withdrawal after acceptance is the unbreakable rule.
- Log everything, treat personal rejections as invitations, and let silence tell you which poems need the workshop instead of the mail.
Related lessons
Part of The Working Poet in the free Writory Academy: about 9 minutes, Intermediate level, with a quiz that counts toward a signed certificate on the Certificate Track. By the Writory editorial team. Updated July 2026.