Short Story Markets in the UK and the US, by Jarred McGinnis

Every morning from the age of five until I was eighteen, they made me pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America; so I’m duty bound to think, like rock and roll and spray cheese in a can, the short story is American. We get in, kick ass and get out before we hit 5000 words or a prolonged insurgency. Yanks achieve in a couple sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 what effete European hands couldn’t manage at Gandamak pass armed with an entire ream of A4.

The truth is that economies of scale and a more established MFA industrial complex have given the USA a larger and varied ecosystem for the short story. There are five times as many Americans (309 million) as people in the UK (62 million), but there are twelve times as many publishers of short stories (2278 in the US vs. 183 in the UK)*.  Whatever your genre, style and tolerance for rejection, the land of the free has a home for your story.

Here in the UK, a national short story award was recently handed out. Each story on the shortlist checked all the boxes for what makes a good story, but there was nothing in them that would have surprised Katherine Mansfield. The same breed of stories exists in the USA, Selected Shorts, but the difference is the size of the American market has enough room for, even at the national level, more than the meat-and-two-veg short story. There is Eggar’s Best American Non-Required Reading, and the New Yorker, hallowed be thy name, is capable of surprises.

The world of the short story used to be a seller’s market, which unsurprisingly is referred to as the golden era. Then it became a buyer’s market and the buyers, the people who edited and produced costly printed journals, decided courtesy be damned; there are too many submissions and too many are shit. So they made rules: no simultaneous submissions and expect waits of more than six months before a response (if a response is sent at all) to be shoved into an SASE the writer paid for.

We are now in a hardly-anyone’s-buying market. There is even more shit being submitted and the good stuff that is published goes largely unread except by editors, publishers and a small subset of submitters. Journals, online and print, have had to embrace submission managers such as submishmash, automated responses, and smarter workflows to handle the fire hose of slush. As a side note, US markets read 33.5 times (60,266 US submissions) as many submissions as their UK counterparts (1,798 UK submissions).

Despite the different sizes of the markets, the UK and the USA are comparable. On both sides of the Atlantic, journals accept roughly the same percentage of reprints (16.9% USA, 15.3% UK), electronic submissions (84.9% USA,  85.2% UK), have comparable percentages of non-responses (the most obnoxious of journal practices – 10.4% USA, 12.2% UK) and there is only a slight difference in choosiness (9.7% USA, 15% UK).

The only significant differentiation is the acceptance of simultaneous submissions. 48.6% of American markets allow them whereas only 20.2% of UK markets do, which might partly explain the 33.5 times as many submissions the American markets had to read. The reason for more Americans allowing simultaneous submissions might be competition. With twelve times as many journals chasing after the one-in-a-thousand story, it is in their interest to have more favourable writer guidelines. Although it is difficult to imagine that any writer of quality is going to exclusively send their best piece if they have to wait six months to get a response, it is impossible, troublesome and pointless to compare the quality of journals by these gross measures.

The closest we come is the percentage of acceptance but, considering a negligible 5.3% difference, equity is the most likely conclusion. I’m happy to call this one a tie. Anyway, if my nine years as a foreigner has taught me anything, it is that it’s all pretty much the same, everywhere.

* I would like to thank Duotrope (duotrope.com) for going above and beyond to get me the response statistics used in this article. Their donation-supported website is an indispensable tool for any writer submitting short stories. They would also like me to say that these statistics are based on what Duotrope’s Digest currently lists, which may not be entirely accurate or indicative of the market at large. For these reports, we are only including markets that accept fiction.

** We do not list a market as accepting SimSubs unless they explicitly state that they do accept them.

*** Non-responses include submissions reported as lost, never responded, assumed rejection or withdrawn by author.

Jarred McGinnis is a London-based American short story writer.

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