Everybody loves a fast response time, but more often than not, that’s not really a thing. Well, that’s what I suspected, since every time I look up a dream magazine, their response time is significantly more than one to seven days. What is patience? I would not know.
This being Chill Subs, we had to turn to cold, hard data to see if that hypothesis was correct. After looking at 2,377 publications, it turns out I was wrong. Well, not about the less-than-7-day thing. But most lit mags are extremely reasonable when it comes to response times.
After crunching the numbers, the main takeaway was this: The majority of magazines—74.9%, to be exact—respond to submissions within three months. And while the most common response window is between one and three months (at 40.9%), nearly 38% of mags respond within the first month.
Here’s how it breaks down.
Response times by time range
- Less than a week (< 7 days): 3.6%
- Less than 1 month (7-30 days): 34.0%
- 1-3 months (31-90 days): 40.9%
- 3-6 months (91-180 days): 18.6%
- 6-9 months (181-270 days): 2.1%
- 9-12 months (271-365 days): 0.7%
- More than 12 months (> 365 days): 0.1%
Cumulative breakdown:
- 37.6% respond within 1 month
- 78.5% respond within 3 months
- 97.1% respond within 6 months
- 99.9% respond within 1 year
Key insights
Quick responders are rare. Only 3.6% of publications respond in less than a week.
Long waits are uncommon. Only 2.9% take longer than six months, and virtually none (0.1%) take over a year.
All in all, it looks like the sweet spot for most pubs is the one to three-month range, with over three-quarters of publications responding within 90 days. Considering all it takes to make a mag work? Pretty impressive, tbh.
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rachael vaughan clemmons
rachael is the Senior Editor of Chill Subs. Sometimes writing, always procrastinating.