Literary Magazine in Fiction
Quick answer: A literary magazine is a periodical that publishes short fiction and essays, and it is where most story writers build their first publication credits.
A literary magazine is a periodical, in print or online, devoted to publishing short fiction, essays and other creative writing rather than news or commercial features. In other words, it is the natural habitat of the short story. For fiction writers, these magazines are the proving ground: the place where new voices are first published, where editors and agents go scouting, and where the short form is kept alive as an art in its own right.
The term matters at the submission stage of a writing life. Once you have finished and revised stories, literary magazines are the standard next step, and understanding how they work, from reading periods to response times to rights, is the difference between submitting professionally and submitting blind.
What the ecosystem looks like
At the top sit a handful of famous names: The Paris Review, Granta, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and general magazines with celebrated fiction pages such as The New Yorker. Below them spreads an enormous middle field of university journals, independent print magazines and respected online venues, and below that a constantly renewing layer of new magazines, some of which last two issues and some of which become institutions.
History explains the prestige. Literary magazines have introduced a striking share of canonical fiction: The Paris Review ran early work by Philip Roth, Granta's Best of Young British Novelists lists repeatedly predicted careers, and The New Yorker published Shirley Jackson's story The Lottery in 1948, generating more reader mail than the magazine had ever received for fiction. Editors read these magazines to find writers, which is why a strong story credit still opens doors.
How submissions actually work
Most magazines take submissions through an online portal during defined reading periods, and most now accept simultaneous submissions, meaning you may send the same story to several magazines at once provided you withdraw it everywhere else the moment one accepts. Response times run from days to many months. Payment ranges from nothing beyond contributor copies to professional rates at the wealthiest venues.
On acceptance, a magazine typically asks for first rights, the one-time privilege of publishing the story before anyone else, after which rights revert to you. Read every contract, however short. And read the magazine itself before submitting: nothing wastes more of everyone's time than a story sent to a venue whose taste it plainly does not match.
Choosing where to send your work
Build a tiered list. Put a few ambitious magazines at the top, a solid band of realistic mid-tier venues in the middle, and newer magazines whose taste genuinely matches yours at the base. Send to the top tier first, and work downward as rejections arrive. Databases and market listings help, but the deciding research is always reading a recent issue and asking whether your story would sit naturally in it.
The trap is submitting scattershot to fifty venues you have never read. Editors can tell, and mismatched submissions earn only form rejections. Ten targeted submissions outperform fifty random ones, in acceptance rate and in what you learn about your own work along the way.
Building a relationship with a venue
Magazines remember writers, and the memory compounds. A warm rejection that invites more work is a door left open: send a new story within a few months, and mention the invitation in one line of your cover letter. Editors track who responds to encouragement, and repeat submitters who improve are exactly the writers they end up publishing.
There is also a back door worth naming: many magazines run on volunteer readers, and reading slush for a venue you admire teaches you more about publishable fiction in three months than a year of guessing. You see what editors see, in the proportions they see it, and your own submissions sharpen accordingly. Just keep the roles clean, and follow the magazine's rules about submitting where you read.
Neighbours and opposites
A literary magazine differs from an anthology, which is a one-off book of collected stories rather than an ongoing periodical. It differs from a genre magazine, such as science fiction and fantasy venues, mainly in taste and tradition rather than seriousness; the genre magazines run the same submission machinery. And it differs from a writing contest, which judges entries against each other for a prize rather than curating an issue, though many magazines run contests and many contests, including Writory's monthly Short Story Contest, publish or showcase their winners.
What poets can take from this
- Read at least one recent issue of any magazine before you submit to it.
- Track every submission in a spreadsheet: story, venue, date sent, and result.
- Keep cover letters to three or four sentences; the story does the talking.
- Submit simultaneously where allowed, and withdraw instantly when a story is accepted.
- Treat every acceptance as market data: that editor's taste is a map for your next submission.
Try it yourself
Pick one literary magazine, read three stories from its latest issue, and write a short story that would sit naturally beside them without imitating any of them. Note afterwards which of your instincts you adjusted and why.
Questions
Do literary magazines pay for short stories?
Some do and many do not. Payment ranges from contributor copies to token sums to professional rates at the best-funded venues. Prestige and payment do not always align, so decide which matters more for each story.
Can I submit the same story to several magazines at once?
Usually yes; this is called simultaneous submission and most magazines allow it if you withdraw the story elsewhere once it is accepted. Always check each magazine's guidelines, because a minority still forbid it.
Do I need magazine credits before querying agents or entering contests?
No. Credits help by signalling that editors have vetted your work, but agents and contest judges ultimately respond to the writing in front of them. Strong unpublished writers succeed at both constantly.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.