Dear writers,
A great deal of the material published in McSweeney’s is written by kind strangers whose work comes to us via email or in manila envelopes. Our system for reading submissions is intricate and steadily improving, but we’re still a very small organization—McSweeney’s has just a few editors—and some things move slowly. On the other hand, every single submission gets read. Please be patient and understanding, for we want very badly to discover and nurture new and developing writers, and are doing our best. You can help us by observing the following guidelines:
SUBJECT MATTER
Is addressed below, toward the end.
LENGTH
Is up to you.
COVER LETTER
Please keep yours brief, though we do like to hear from people who read and like the magazine. We’re not concerned about writing degrees or past publications, though, so don’t be daunted if you don’t have an MFA or much in the way of previously published work.
SUBMISSIONS FOR THE WEBSITE
Should not be submitted here.
FORMATTING
It’s better if you don’t use colors or Fun Fonts or strange formatting.
YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION
Should be on your submission—not just on the cover letter. Cover letters can disappear. Please include your name, mailing address, phone number, and email address, ideally on every page.
AUTHOR BIOS
Feel free to include a brief biography of yourself.
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED WORK
Can’t be considered here.
PAYMENT
Fluctuates somewhat, but has been impressing contributors recently. Contributors are paid at the time of publication.
RESPONSE TIME
Can be anywhere between a few weeks and nine months. Please be patient. We’re really reading as fast as we can.
SPECIAL ISSUES AND READING PERIODS
Because our staff is so small, we aren’t continually reading submissions for the quarterly. More often than not, we read in month-long bursts, when we’re approaching the deadline for a new issue. And special issues sometimes create longer delays in our response time. For example, if we just closed an issue, and we know that the issue after that will be devoted to political journalism, that would mean we wouldn’t be reading new fiction submissions for up to four months, as we prepared the journalism issue. Our response time, then, can vary a great deal. And given that we’re a quarterly, and not a weekly or monthly, we ask that all submitters bear in mind the very slow nature of the entire enterprise.
CHECKING ON THE STATUS OF YOUR SUBMISSION
If you were kind enough to submit something, and haven’t heard from us in six months, feel free to resend the piece. We can’t, however, personally respond to each request for a status report. If you need to know if we are or aren’t running a piece, for the purposes of your sending the piece to a better publication, assume that we aren’t.
POETRY
Can be wonderful, but is not something we publish.
MEMOIR
We don’t generally publish memoir sorts of pieces, though there can be exceptions.