Sewanee Publishing Panel

On Friday morning, James Wood moderated a panel that included the poetry editor for The Atlantic Monthly, the fiction editor for The New Yorker, and the managing editor for The American Scholar. Much of the material was familiar (“getting published is hard, but keep at it”; “We’re excited when we discover something good”; “We don’t have any limitations on content, only that it is honest and capably presented”; “Experimental stories can be as moving as traditional ones”; etc.) but there were also unexpected tidbits. First, The American Scholar‘s decision to start publishing fiction was directly sparked by The Atlantic‘s much maligned decision—for reasons of space—to stop publishing fiction. It was also interesting to learn that The Atlantic‘s selection of poetry is often governed, at least in part, by length, and that poems of over 40 lines are sometimes resisted because of space they’d take up on a page.

The most surprising news, however, came when the fiction editor from The New Yorker described their selection process. She said, among other things, that because so many writers they’ve published are now writing novels (and not short stories) they frequently scramble to find fiction, and it has been a challenge to find fifty stories per year—one per issue. Many writers don’t submit out of intimidation, but the fact is TNY editors discuss many more short stories—and strike up relationships with their writers—than they ever publish in the magazine. Of the 300-400 stories that arrive weekly, they discuss twenty or so seriously, and the editor said that about 40% of the writers published over the past few years had never published there before.

Less encouraging statistics, though, came from the discussion of agented vs. unagented fiction. While she said that only 15% of what The New Yorker receives comes from agented authors, that 15% leads them to 94% of the stories (48 out of 50) they publish. This means The New Yorker rejects over 2,200 agented manuscripts per year, along with a whopping 13,000 unagented stories. Those figures, for the record, assume a conservative estimate of 300 stories per week. You know you’re in a rough business when a crowd hears publication rates like that and responds, honestly, that the odds are better than expected.

Interestingly, the editor also said that in their experience it was very hard to find a good young writer who didn’t have an agent. As a young writer without an agent, I choose to answer . . . hmmm!!!!

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Jul 26, 02:39 PM.
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