How Do You Find Literary Magazines to Submit To?
Quick answer How do you find literary magazines to submit to? Use databases like Duotrope and Chill Subs, mine anthologies and bios, and match your story to real issues.
Find literary magazines through the databases built for exactly this: Duotrope, Chill Subs and The Submission Grinder let you filter thousands of markets by genre, length, pay, response time and prestige, while NewPages maintains a broad directory with calls for submissions. Then work backwards from writers you resemble: check the acknowledgment pages of story collections, prize anthologies such as Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart volumes, and author bios, which list the magazines that published them first.
The search matters because targeting is half of publication. Editors constantly say the same thing about their rejection piles: much of what they decline is competent work sent to the wrong magazine. An hour of market research routinely outperforms a month of extra polishing.
The Databases, and What Each Is For
Duotrope, a small annual subscription, is the veteran: deep listings, response-time statistics reported by users, and interviews with editors. The Submission Grinder is free, strongest for genre fiction, and tracks response data generously. Chill Subs, the newest, is free at its core with a friendly interface, vibe-based filters and curated lists that suit literary writers mapping the field for the first time. NewPages is less a database than a well-kept directory, useful for discovering established magazines and current calls.
Use them to generate a longlist, not a decision. Filter by your story's genre and length, response times you can live with, and whether payment matters to you. Twenty candidates is plenty. The databases tell you a magazine exists and behaves professionally; whether it suits your story is the next step, and no filter answers that.
Detective Work Beats Directories
The richest leads come from provenance. Pick five living writers whose stories feel like cousins of yours and trace where they first published; collections credit the original magazines on the copyright or acknowledgments page. Prize anthologies do this at scale: the back of Best American Short Stories lists every magazine whose work was noticed that year, which is effectively a curated map of the serious market.
Contributor bios run the same trick in reverse. When a story you love appears in one magazine, the author's bio names two or three others that took their work, and those magazines share taste by definition. Follow the chain for an afternoon and you will hold a personal map of your corner of the field, something no database can generate, because it is organised around affinity rather than category.
Vetting Before You Submit
A shortlist earns submissions only after basic checks:
- Read at least two stories from recent issues; many magazines post samples free.
- Confirm the magazine is alive: recent issues, working submission portal, activity this year.
- Check the guidelines page for length limits, reading periods and simultaneous submission policy.
- Note payment and rights requested; first serial rights are standard, anything grabbier deserves a second look.
- Gauge tier honestly: mix two reach magazines with several realistic ones per story.
- Record everything in your tracker so next story's search starts warm.
Let the Community Do Half the Work
Market intelligence circulates socially long before it reaches directories. Newsletters and submission-call roundups land weekly in thousands of inboxes, flagging themed issues and fee-free windows. Editors announce openings on their magazines' social accounts, and writing communities trade fresh news constantly: which magazine just relaunched, which one now answers in three weeks, which one quietly stopped paying.
Plug into two or three of these streams and your list maintains itself. A workshop group or online forum adds the unlisted layer: first-hand accounts of how magazines treat writers, which no database records. And your local library's periodical shelf remains an underrated tool, offering an afternoon of browsing actual issues without a single paywall, which is still the fastest way to feel whether your work belongs in a magazine's pages.
Common Search Mistakes
The classic error is prestige-only targeting: sending every story to the five most famous magazines in the language, collecting form rejections for two years, and concluding the story is bad. Those magazines decline over 98 percent of submissions, much of it excellent. A parallel error is spray-and-pray, submitting to fifty markets unread, which wastes fees, burns bridges and mismatches good stories to indifferent homes.
Watch also for dead and predatory listings: magazines that quietly stopped publishing, or operations charging high fees while publishing everything they receive. Reading an issue exposes both instantly. And do not overlook contests as part of the map; a contest with published criteria and transparent results, such as Writory's monthly short story cycle, tells you exactly how your work will be judged, which almost no magazine will.
What writers can take from this
- Start with Chill Subs or The Submission Grinder free, and add Duotrope once you submit regularly.
- Mine acknowledgment pages and prize anthologies for magazines aligned with your taste.
- Read two stories from any magazine before it earns a place on your list.
- Keep a living spreadsheet of markets, guidelines quirks and response experiences.
- Balance each story's list: a couple of reaches, several realistic homes.
- Subscribe to one submission-calls newsletter; fresh windows arrive faster than any database updates.
Try it yourself
Choose one published story you wish you had written. Trace its provenance: find where the author first published, list those magazines, then read one story from each. Write a paragraph on which of them your current story fits best, and why, in terms an editor would recognise.
Questions
Are paid submission databases like Duotrope worth it?
If you submit more than a few times a year, usually yes: the response-time data alone saves you from dead markets and year-long waits. Casual submitters do fine with the free trio of Chill Subs, The Submission Grinder and NewPages.
Should beginners submit to top-tier literary magazines?
Occasionally, as a lottery ticket alongside realistic targets; the reads are fair even when odds are long. Building a record in solid smaller magazines first is the conventional route, and editors do notice careful prior credits.
Related writing from the Writory blog
This entry on How Do You Find Literary Magazines to Submit To?. Compiled by the Writory editorial team for the story collection, and revised when the craft of it changes.
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