Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Inside the Editor's Mind, Part 3

One Story is one of my favorite literary journals; I love the idea of getting, well, one story in the mail every three weeks or so. Here's an interview with one of the founders of the journal, Maribeth Batcha (from Bookslut).

And if you’d like to submit your work, here’s what they’re looking for:

“We get about 150 submissions a week and publish 18 a year. Genre isn't an issue. We like everything, be it straightforward or experimental, or about mothers or zombies. Because of our format, the story has to feel complete and really stand on its own. We do quite a bit of editorial work on each story, so they don't have to be perfect to be selected, but we have to have a good idea of what the story will look like when it's done, and feel like the writer can work with us to take it there. Of course, the writing has to be really solid, but the story itself has to have some meat to it.”

I did the math…that’s about 7800 manuscripts a year, which is (I think; I was sick when we learned percentages in grade school and never really got how to calculate them) a .23 percent chance of getting accepted. The good news is that I suppose that’s a better acceptance rate than The New Yorker!