I recently attended a panel discussion by the editors of several very prestigious, top-tier literary magazines. These editors were at the panel purely to discuss the ins and outs of getting published, so I’m going to boil down their very helpful comments to the three points that seemed to keep coming back again and again. Hopefully you’ll find them helpful too in your publishing quest!

Read the magazine

With the ease of internet submissions, famous literary magazines are getting swamped by stories. The frustrating thing for editors is that while it enables them to see more good work, it often means a flood of work that clearly doesn’t fit the ton or needs of the magazine. So before you indiscriminately do a mass-submission to all the big names, make sure your story actually fits the needs of the magazine. Does it seem to cohere with past stories? Does the subject matter and writing style match the magazine’s? If not, you’re just wasting your time and everyone else’s. So be sure to do your research — pick up a copy of the magazine and actually read it! If money is tight, many of the lit mags have selections from their journals online. Read a sample story or two at the very least before you send.

Don’t bug.

Editors’ time is valuable, just like yours. The editors at this panel told horror stories of writers who started emailing every day for status updates a week after they had sent their story out. Understand that these magazines have an enormous backlog, and there’s no quicker way to send your story to the rejection pile than to irritate someone with excessive queries. This also means not sending another story until you have heard back about the first. You can generally send the story to other mags while waiting, since the response time is so slow, but don’t send to that particularly magazine again — or pester with emailed questions — until at least a couple of months have passed. Slow, I know, but that’s the magazine biz.

Develop a relationship

The editors at the panel agreed that one rejection from their magazine did not mean death there forever. Instead, they all mentioned stories of developing a dialogue with a writer who was on the cusp but not quite there yet. They wrote encouraging notes to writers with good stories, and the writers sent more stories back with the recommended improvements. This went on for several stories, all rejected, and then finally a story was accepted. It’s a great idea to send your best work and get your name known that way. Even if you are rejected, an encouraging note shows that the editor would be willing to see more of your work and enter in a relationship with you (as long as you don’t overstep the boundaries by breaking the rules mentioned above). It’s these stepping-stones that lead to your first big publication at a nationally-renowned magazine.