Getting Published in The New Yorker is not Impossible (mathematically)Posted by John Woodington on December 4th, 2009

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my reference to getting published in The New Yorker magazine (or, more accurately, not getting published in The New Yorker).  It seems a lot of people want to know what the odds are of this particular magazine actually accepting a short story or poem for publication from a writer who can not be recognized just by their last name (i.e. Wolff, Updike, etc.)  So I thought I’d do some digging.

On the wonderful Duotrope’s Digest website, they have a robust list of various statistics on every imaginable literary publication, and The New Yorker is, of course, one of them.  Various stats include genres accepted, length, payscale, response time, and the types of responses (acceptions, rejections, non-responses).  Since we’re interested in the acceptance rate, we’ll skip to that.

As of today, Duotrope has 289 responses in the last year from people who have submitted to The New Yorker.  Here’s the data (courtesy, of course, of Duotrope’s):

Responses: (80.97 %)
Acceptances: 0.00 % (No publication has a 0% acceptance rate. This data is based on response reports sent to Duotrope’s Digest, and we have not received reports of any acceptances yet. If one acceptance were reported, the acceptance rate would be 0.34 %.)
Rejections: 80.62 % (65.8 avg. days per rejection) | 14.59 % personal, 66.09 % form, 19.31 % unspecified
Rewrite Requests: 0.35 % (50 avg. days per rewrite request)
Non-Responses (19.03 %)
Lost / Never Responded: 15.22 % (287.9 avg. days before reporting submissions as lost or never responded)
Author Withdrawals: 3.81 % (125.1 avg. days per withdrawal by author)

I know, I know.  It doesn’t look good.  A 0.00% acceptance rate sure gives the impression that getting a short story or poem accepted by The New Yorker is literally impossible.  We know, however, that this is not the case, since they publish over fifty short stories a year, and even more poems.  It is worth noting that Duotrope’s lists The New Yorker as both an “Extremely Challenging Fiction Market” and an “Extremely Challenging Poetry Market.”  But I’m sure we could’ve guessed that, right?

So where does The New Yorker get it’s fiction and poetry from to fill its fifty plus issues a year?  Ginny Wiehardt over at the Fiction Writing section of About.com writes, “The New Yorker publishes only one story per issue (devoting one issue per year to new fiction), and it’s safe to say that pretty much every ambitious American writer tries them at some point or other. And while The New Yorker does take chances on new writers, it tends to draw from a stable of established writers, like Munro and Murakami.”

So being an established writer helps.  From personal experience, I have an author friend who, after having a story published in Glimmer Train, was able to land a literary agent, who in turn said that they would push to get one of this author’s stories published in The New Yorker in order to help promote a new short story collection by this author.  So having an agent might help (though in this case, in fact,  it did not help, since they were unable to get a story published in The New Yorker, despite the fighting powers of the agent).

Over at The Stranger, they have an interview with Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker, in which she talks about the review process that the fiction staff at The New Yorker follows when deciding which stories to publish.  Also, she talks about why they select the stories they do.  She admits that people complain that The New Yorker publishes a lot of stories by the same writers (Munro, Murakami, Saunders), but she also makes a good point, that those writers are really good writers, and they are writing at the top of their powers.

Then, there’s an interesting an funny online diary of how one merry band of poets was able to get something published in The New Yorker, though it involved infiltrating the magazine’s actual New York office….

So basically you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle with this one.  I think the key to getting published in The New Yorker is the same as the key to getting published anywhere.  They want established writers, so make yourself established.  You don’t have to win the World Series the first time you pick up a bat.  Just be glad to bat .301 in little league, and you’re on your way.  Work your way up by starting with smaller, lesser known publications, and give it time.  You don’t need to be in The New Yorker today, or this year, or even in the next ten years.  It might take longer than that, and you need to be patient.

It’s also worth noting that The New Yorker is looking for literary fiction.  Your awesome short story or poem about a bodice-ripping druid is likely not going to be accepted (no matter how good it is) due to the subject matter.

Follow the guidelines I put forth in a previous post, and use those to get yourself some publishing credits.  Maybe someday in the future, The New Yorker will give you a call and offer you a bajillion dollars for your non-bodice-ripping-druid story.  Well, maybe more like $3000.00, but still.

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