This post was previously published on Things We Do While Waiting to Die. You can find the full, original post here.
I spend a lot of time figuring out what makes a "good magazine"—the type that will last and be well-respected in an industry of deeply entrenched favorites.
The real truth? Money. It often comes back to money. These magazines have huge contests, large grants, or patrons. Add a university affiliation, and it's not much of a mystery why these magazines continue to dominate.
But lit mag rankings never say, "Well, this magazine is great because it got $150,000 in pandemic aid money to solicit famous writers!" or "This magazine is great because they have contests pulling in $100,000 each year!"
So, what do they say?
How rankings actually work
Book Fox ranks journals by Best American Short Stories appearances. Clifford Garstang uses Pushcart. Brecht de Poortere's TOP 1000 gives 96% weight to Best American Short Stories (90%) and Pushcart (6%). Erika Krouse weighs score (aka, prizes won), circulation, money, and coolness, but there's only circulation data for 25/500 magazines and payment info for 139/500. I’d love to say that “coolness” is pulling its weight here, but when you look at the list, the ranking is mostly by score.
The recipe
It's pretty obvious. We base rankings of literary magazines on prizes and anthologies. So why wouldn't every magazine nominate for every possible damn prize? If I were to give you a recipe for making the best breakfast, I'd say, "OK, first, get some eggs." If you don't get eggs, well, that's on you.
✷ Side note: When you look at those folks published in these anthologies, lots of them are agented writers from magazines that take fewer submissions from their slush piles. But that's a whole other hornet's nest I’m not going to poke right now.
✷ One more bone to pick: Does anyone else find it a little fucked that many #1 ranking systems are based on "American" magazines?
Alright, let's look at those prizes, slash get into where you can buy some eggs.
The major awards
The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of print and online publications. A guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected—and most popular—of its kind.
✦ The O. Henry Prize Anthology
The O. Henry Prize is the oldest major prize for short fiction in America. Awarded annually since 1919 (with a break in 2020), the prize seeks to provide a prominent platform for short story writers from all around the world and at all points in their careers. The winners’ stories are collected and published annually by Anchor Books.
Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Every volume contains an index of past selections, plus lists of outstanding presses with addresses.
✦ The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers
The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers recognizes 12 emerging writers each year for their debut short story published in a literary magazine, journal, or cultural website, and aims to support the launch of their careers as fiction writers. The 12 winning stories are selected by a committee of three judges who are well-respected experts in the art of the short story.
The smaller awards
The Best of the Net is an awards-based anthology designed to grant a platform to a diverse and growing collection of writers and publishers who are building an online literary landscape that seeks to break free of traditional publishing. This space has been created to bring greater respect to the continually expanding world of exceptional digital publishing.
Best Small Fictions is the first-ever contemporary anthology solely dedicated to anthologizing the best internationally published short hybrid fiction in a given calendar year. Now in its eleventh year of existence, Best Small Fictions features the best microfiction, flash fiction, haibun stories, and prose poetry from around the world.
The Best Microfiction anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer.
The reality
Literary magazines based in the U.S. have an extreme advantage here. The U.S.'s nonprofit structure means only a few magazines with time, money, and staff have the resources to get funding for more time, money, and staff. Then, on top of it all, we're ranking magazines based on prizes mostly limited to the U.S. and/or organizations based in … the U.S.
This is how it's done right now. I think it's messed up, but if you're a magazine trying to make a name for yourself, it is your only option.
We are, at least, trying to fix that a little bit ourselves: We now have our own ranking system, where you can explore indie lit communities, magazines, and journals inside and outside of the U.S.
Since, you know, the institutionally-funded, prize-obsessed approach doesn’t appear to be working all that well.
Benjamin Davis
Benjamin has stories and poems in 25+ literary journals like Booth, Wigleaf, and Moon City Review. His book of poems, The King of FU (2018), was such a smashing success it shocked the indie press who printed it into an early grave. He is now working on his first six novels.