51 Fiction Magazines with 5-10% Acceptance Rates
With a guest essay on What It’s Like to Have Your Work Copyedited by Jordan Koluch
In this week’s guest essay, Jordan Koluch shares tips on handling edits, the inevitability of errors in published work and also clarifies some misconceptions about being copyedited as a writer.
There’s a lot to worry about in the run-up to publication: What are you going to do about marketing and publicity? How will reviewers react to your work? Will anyone even read this thing anyway? So it’s understandable that the first thing on your mind isn’t your copyedit. After all, it’s sort of buried in the process—after the developmental edit but before you see typeset pages of your book. Seeing it can come as a surprise, especially if you thought you were done with actually writing the book and now have all these edits to sift through. So here are a few things to think about once you receive your copyedit.
1. Copyediting isn’t just a spell-check.
Finding typos is important, and they’re sometimes the hardest edits to make in a copyedit because of the way our brains process languages we’re used to reading. But that’s not all your copy editor is doing. The copy editor went through your book looking for a bunch of things, including consistency of styling, accuracy of factual statements, correct usage of words, and syntax. It’s the copy editor’s job to act as the first reader of your work, someone removed enough from the process of creating it to point out how your readers might react. The copy editor’s job is to go through your book word by word and make sure you’re communicating as clearly as possible with the reader.
2. Your copy editor isn’t judging you.
It’s easy to feel like there’s something wrong with your work when you get a heavy markup back from your copy editor. But there’s nothing embarrassing about being copyedited! Every single piece of copy requires copyediting. Even copy editors require copyediting when they write. You are way too close to the work to see the things the copy editor is looking for. Even your developmental editor is too close to do the copy editor’s job. A heavy copyedit isn’t a failure of you or the work; it’s an essential step in the process to making your book the best it can be.
3. You don’t actually have to take any of the copy editor’s suggestions.
The copy editor did their best to show you how a reader might react to your work. But they are not the author—you are! If you don’t like some of the changes the copy editor made, you don’t have to keep them. They’re just suggestions. Hopefully, seeing the copyedits will help you think about the choices you made: Why did you use that word in that sentence? Were you being intentionally vague in that paragraph? Do you want readers to think x at this stage in the narrative? No one knows your work as well as you do. So if you’ve thought it over and you don’t agree with the copy editor, that’s fine. Just stet.
4. What the hell is a style sheet?
Every copyedit comes with a style sheet, a document created by the copy editor that explains all the choices they made in the process of the copyedit. This can seem a little like inside baseball. But it’s not! There’s a good chance you’ll never get to talk directly to your copy editor, but looking at the style sheet is the next best thing. Wondering why the copy editor adjusted your comma usage? Check the punctuation section of the style sheet. Not sure why some words are hyphenated while others are closed up? Check the word list. Your developmental editor can always answer your questions, but the style sheet is basically your copyedit at a glance.
5. No piece of published work is error free.
Copy editors are not gods. It would be extremely convenient if we were, both personally and professionally. Alas, we are but mere mortals, fallible like everyone else. In fact, everyone involved in the process of making a book is human, even you! Copyediting errors happen. I guarantee that every published book you’ve ever read has at least one—editions of classics, bestsellers that are in their twentieth printings, you name it. There are fail-safes in place—proofreads, cold reads—but things slip through. So you could lose sleep over errant commas, or you could accept that most readers won’t even notice (again, because of the way our brains read languages we’re familiar with). I bet there’s even one in this article because in my own writing, I am queen of the typo.
Receiving a copyedit of your work can be overwhelming. You felt like you were done writing this thing, and now there are a million more decisions to make, sometimes about individual words or pieces of punctuation. Hopefully, the more familiar you are with the process, the more you see your copy editor as helpful rather than someone just trying to get on your nerves.
If you’re interested in learning more about the copyediting process, check out my class Editing for Style with Write or Die, starting on May 7.
Jordan Koluch is a print production professional with a decade of experience in the book publishing industry, most recently as the copy chief at Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull Press. She has copyedited and proofread for ABRAMS, HarperCollins, Milkweed Editions, Simon & Schuster, and a number of other publishers, big and small.
51 Fiction Magazines with 5-10% Acceptance Rates
Stats! Stats! Stats! Love it. OK, so for today’s list, I only pulled fiction magazines where we had more than 100 tracked submissions. I started with the most tracked (nearly 3.4K for one mag) and went down from there, stopping at 100.
I kept it between 5-10% because I think it is a sweet spot for quality competitive mags that are absurdly strict with everyone trying to submit there at once. So many are so good.
If you want to help us improve our stats, you can upload your entire Submittable history to our tracker or input things manually. We will keep improving it along with these stats. Try it out here (it’s free). Now, on to the list.
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