When he was fiction editor, Mark Leahy wrote a lot about where a story goes when it arrives in the office (here and here), and I'd like to add some observations of my own, now that we're approaching the wire for our next issue and I'm sending out more rejections than I care to think about. I haven't discussed this with our nonfiction and poetry editors, but here's the life of a typical fiction submission: a story takes a few days for the postal service to deliver it to our office. Then it takes maybe a week to get logged before it arrives on my desk. I read all the cover letters and the first page or two of everything, pulling out the fifty pagers we obviously don't have space for, then I farm everything off to unpaid assistants, many of whom read through as many stories as I can give them, adding their silent but astute yea or nay suggestion for a story. That process usually takes two or three weeks before it comes to my desk once again, a new pile this time. I usually take a week to sort through all the stories incoming from my assistants, and from there the story goes into a to-be-rejected pile or a maybe pile for my colleagues to read, for me to reread. At any given time, there are probably around ten maybes, some of which get moved to the rejection pile as new ones come in.

When the rejection pile is several feet high, I'll send out notes in batches of fifty or a hundred. We'll probably end up with five hundred fiction submissions for this issue, and 99% will be rejected. Many of these stories are very good, and will no doubt be picked up by someone soon. Many of these could use a revision. And many are probably destined for a drawer. I try to write a note of thanks or encouragement on some of the form letters if the work seems especially in tune with our needs, but I probably only scribble thanks on 10% of the rejections, certainly not all of the good ones. It takes several hours to stuff, seal, and log a hundred rejections without taking the time to write notes. I'm finding this process takes me about eight weeks, maybe longer for some stories, shorter for others. My assistants have stories from late October, I'm reading work from mid-October, and I'm rejecting work from the middle to end of September. In general, if I've hung onto a story longer than around eight weeks, it's in the strong maybe pile.

All of this is why we accept simultaneous submissions. I imagine these numbers are similar for most literary journals (Ploughshares and The Southern Review might get several thousand submissions per issue rather than several hundred, but that's why they're Ploughshares and The Southern Review). There are more good stories floating around than the market can support (which is good news for readers, bad news for writers), so for a good story, it really seems like publication is as much a lottery as anything else, finding the right editor at the right time.