How Accurate Are Acceptance Rates for Literary Magazines, Really?

This post was previously published on Things We Do While Waiting to Die. You can find the full, original post here.

Every time I think about stats in indie lit, I get that Lil Jon song stuck in my head. You know, the one that goes:

Shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots

Shots, shots, shots, shots, shots

Shots, shots, shots, shots, shots

Except, well, it's not exactly that song, because in my head I just think:

Stats, stats, stats, stats, stats, stats

Stats, stats, stats, stats, stats

Stats, stats, stats, stats, stats

And yeah, I mean, I don't know if you can even call that "getting a song stuck in your head," because I don't know any other words to that song. So it might be more accurate to say that every time I think about stats in indie lit, I yell a single word at myself inside my head over and over and over.

Neat.

Why am I thinking about stats so much, you ask? Well, we recently hit 100,000 tracked submissions, then we partnered with The Submission Grinder to make our stats more accurate (adding on another 500,000+), then we got to thinking how the only truly accurate stats would have to come from Submittable, and then and then and—hey, let's just take it from the beginning.

Not so long ago in the Chill Subs Universe …

Karina and I always thought stats should be free. By "stats," we mean acceptance rates for submissions to literary magazines—the percentage of submissions a lit mag accepts and publishes.

Basically, what are your chances of getting in?

I don't know many writers who full-on don't care about stats. Personally, when a lit mag with a <1% acceptance rate accepts me, I feel better than when a lit mag with a 7% acceptance rate accepts me. It’s the same reason it means more when my dad says "I love you" than when my mom does. Scarcity breeds value.

But like, how are these stats created? And what might we be missing when we see them?

The first issue is that not all writers track their submissions. We did a poll on X once, and it came out like this:

Second, there’s the issue of how these folks are tracking their submissions. There are like, a dozen different trackers you can use, not to mention the many-many people who use their own spreadsheet.

All of the above means that when you’re considering acceptance rates, you're really looking at 10-30% of all submissions for a lit mag, depending on where you're looking.

But there’s more!

Generally speaking, rejections are under-reported. That’s for the same reason I call my brother to tell him our dad said, "I love you," but don't on days our father just says, "Catch you later." We are proud of our acceptances and want to tell people when they happen. Hell, we want our future selves to remember those wins on days when seven rejections come in at once that we can't be fucked to go and log into our tracker.

Then, on the editorial side, magazines change hands, readers come aboard, boards get shaken up, and those running the magazine three years ago might not be those looking at your work today. So the statistics you'd be getting aren't even relevant anymore.

Different places have tried to manage these problems. The Submissions Grinder, for example, only tracks submissions from the past 12 months to account for indie lit's revolving door of readers and editors. And Duotrope paywalls their tracker, claiming it makes their statistics more accurate because their members are more invested and therefore more likely to actively track submissions. Because, sure.

We went a couple of different routes to experiment with what works best. First, we just asked editors what their acceptance rate is. We assumed this would lead to the best rates and likely would if all editors were honest, up to date, and controlled their admin panels on Chill Subs. Hmm, not always the case, let's say.

So … what to do?

As a platform trying to suss out this information, it's on us to come up with new, fun ways to do so. For some outlets, we now have our data, their reported data, and Submission Grinder's 12-month average, which we hope will give writers all of the information they need to make an informed decision. But we’re working on something even better that will give us 100% accuracy for some magazines.

What can you do in the meantime?

Have a little bit more perspective on stats, especially with acceptance rates. A lot of times, a mag is way more competitive than you think. For an example, I asked Shannan to share some of ONLY POEMS’ statistics with us.

We have ONLY POEMS at 277 tracked submissions with a 0.78% acceptance rate and a 31-day response time. Submission Grinder has 33 tracked submissions with a 0% acceptance rate. Want to know how many submissions they've actually had? 3,438. How many acceptances? 9. That's an acceptance rate of 0.26%

Is 0.26% all that different from 0.78%? Maybe not. But when you're dealing with an equivalent disparity of something like 7% vs 2%, that is much different. Right or wrong, people perceive a 7% acceptance rate differently.

The good news is that a lit mag is almost always more competitive than its statistics might indicate. The bad news is that acceptance rates don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. They tend to be a side-effect of what actually matters, depending on your goals: readers, awards, popularity, presentation, community building, etc.

Following acceptance rates can be fun and can reflect a publication's popularity. But they can also just reflect that a lit mag has limited space and a super choosy editor.

Scarcity doesn't breed value; value breeds value. That being said, I'm also a human with a dumb brain that likes shiny things and to be in the club that says, "Not a lot of people get to be in this club!"

So maybe don't care? Maybe do? Maybe tell your kids you love them more so they don't have this problem later in life? And maybe I've run out of shit to say about acceptance rates because they aren't so important.