100 Best Literary Magazines From a Totally Bullshit Ranking System We Tried To Make
But hey, they're still pretty damn solid.
What better way to kick off 2024 than with our biggest failure of 2023!
In October, we decided to create our own rankings system for literary magazines. We thought the ones that exist are too limited, too America-centric, too focused on winning prizes. We thought, we can do better than that!
Three months, 300 hours of work, three advising editors and a data engineer later…we…uhh, can’t. The main reason we failed was that we tried to create a system based on too much data we couldn’t keep track of.
Here is the breakdown:
Prestige
Based on a magazine’s positioning in all current prizewinning-focused lists (Krouse, Brecht, Garstang) with a heavier weight on Garstang because Pushcart has no geographical limitations. And we placed a greater weight on the past three years to give more points to new mags and not let decades of legacy wins trump everything.
We also included points for any magazine that nominates for industry prizes.
Popularity
Bookmarks
Submission Stats,
Socials Following
Website views
SEO positioning.
Established
Founding Date (age)
CLMP Membership
“Affiliations” (Universities, Funds, arts council affiliations)
Nonprofit status
Investments and transparency
Unique web domain
submissions method
clearly defined guidelines & submission windows
masthead
Whether they pay writers
Whether they charge a fee
There was a logic to all of this that…doesn’t matter now. But basically we wanted to make a ranking system that focused on how good the magazine was for writers and the community as well as highlighting those with a history of prestige. The problem was, we had to get all of this data for every single magazine (we list over 3000) or the rankings wouldn’t work. You can’t really tell an editor, “Oh you were ranked lower on our list because we missed this thing in your guidelines, oops. Sry!”
The results weren’t bad. Our list wound up somewhat different from those that exist and we got to see several magazines you wouldn’t normally find making their way much higher than you’d expect while others plummeted.
One big problem ended up being that those who published in multiple genres got way more points than a really great magazine focusing on a single genre.
Another was that magazines are called different things all over the web. Like, ‘The Paris Review’ might be ‘Paris Review’ on some lists which makes sense to the eye, but when you’re dealing with gathering loads of data about different magazines it’s totally unreliable.
We also didn’t want to leave out sci-fi/fantasy & humor publications but they have their own awards that we’d need to accommodate to make it fair.
It was a mess. But that’s kinda how we do things. Not messy, but we take risks. It would have been easy to just go with a simple structured ranking system but we wanted to create something new and special. It’s how we are with everything. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But as they say, if at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail, and fail again.
The conclusion we ended up with was that magazines are so diverse, and there are so many factors that differ depending on why you’re submitting, that creating an “ultimate ranking system” is not possible, and however you slice it up, you are being unfair to one group or another. The good news is that this whole process got us thinking about how qualitative data would be more valuable for people. So we pivoted and are starting to source a lot more of that.
The magazines on the top 100 are still pretty great, and if you think what we’re doing is worth it enough to support us through these failures, we wanted to share them with you. So yeah, welcome to 2024, and enjoy our 100 Best Literary Magazines from a Totally Bullshit Ranking System We Tried To Make.
For each, I’ve included descriptions, genres, fee, pay, themes, founding dates, and a link to the journal’s website.
This is one of our paid subscriber lists this month. Our paid subscriptions are what give us the ability to gather all of this information and maintain our database. If you have the means, you can upgrade here.
Of course, we are always happy to comp those in need, just let us know.