Literary Magazine Rankings Spreadsheet

To help get my short stories published I created a list of the most highly-regarded literary magazines as decided by various writers, split into three tiers based on how “prestigious” they are.

You can access this list by clicking here.

Methodology: My methodology in compiling this list wasn’t very fancy. There are three bloggers who I’m aware of, Erika Krouse, John Fox, and Clifford Garstang, who maintain rankings of literary magazines based on various criteria, and the O’Henry awards website also reports how many of their awards a given literary magazine has won. I took the raw scores from the rankings of Fox, Garstang, and the O’Henry website and added them up and used the resulting number to create a composite score for each magazine. Based on this composite score, I organized the magazines into three tiers. Within each tier, the list is sorted alphabetically. In my spreadsheet, I’ve included the raw scores assigned by each person/institution to a given literary magazine (bigger number is better).

My spreadsheet also includes information about the response times (the median number of days it takes the editors of a given magazine to respond to submissions) as well as the acceptance rates (the proportion of submissions accepted) of the magazines included. These statistics are compiled from Duotrope and Submission Grinder.