How I would try to get a story published in the New Yorker (if my dream was to be published in the New Yorker)

Being published in the New Yorker is pretty awesome. You get a few million potential readers (assuming each copy has more than one reader) and they also pay pretty well. But there are a lot of things in life that are pretty awesome: book deals; Stegner Fellowships; cloudless summer days; etc…and, for whatever reason, being published in the New Yorker has never been one of my particular daydreams.

I think this is mostly because I don’t read the New Yorker. I have literally never opened an issue of the New Yorker and read the short story inside it. I’ve never watched a story go from being in the New Yorker to being on the tip of everyone’s tongue—I just don’t have the same positive associations with it that I have with Asimov’s or F&SF or The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

But ever since entering this MFA program, I’ve learned that getting published in the New Yorker is an obsession in the literary world. Many MFAs subscribe to the New Yorker. Even more MFAs read it. And almost everyone is familiar with what is published in it. Over the last six months, I’ve had countless conversations where someone said the words, “Last week, I read in the New Yorker…”

There’s nothing wrong with that. The New Yorker is a great magazine. And even when it’s not great, it’s still very influential. The New Yorker’s readership makes it the definitive place to publish a short story. It is the only place where general readers might encounter a contemporary short story writer.

So if you write short stories and love short stories and want your short stories to be culturally relevant, then by far the best place for them to be is in the New Yorker.

So, before I go on, let me stress that I am a guy who is very much on the outside of the publishing world (particularly the world of literary fiction). With one exception (my story in the Diverse Energies anthology), I've only ever sold stories through open submission systems (and I have the 982 rejections to prove it). Although I take on a pretty definite stance in this post, everything within it is based on observation and supposition--it's entirely possible that a bunch of it is wrong. However, when you're on the outside, supposition can be all that you have.

So here is where the chain of supposition begins.

It appears to me that if you want a short story in the New Yorker, there are two ways to do it:

• Submit directly to the fiction editor (i.e. bypassing the regular slush pile) through some personal contact. I imagine that this personal contact takes one of three forms:

  • Direct networking – meeting her and making her acquaintance.

  • Being put in touch with her through a mutual friend or one of your teachers.

  • Being a staffer (an editorial assistant, proofreader, secretary, copy-editor, etc) at the New Yorker (a la Nell Freudenberger)

• Have your agent submit the story on your behalf.

Note what I left off this list: submitting through the online submission form. There’s nothing wrong with the online form, but even if it was possible to sell through it, then the odds (assuming they buy 1 story a year from the slush) would be 1 in 40,000. That’s such a low probability that, to me, it’s not even worth fantasizing about.

However, there is also substantial evidence that it is completely impossible to sell to the New Yorker through the submissions form. The previous fiction editor of the New Yorker, Bill Buford, never bought a single story from the open slush during his eight-year tenure. The current editor, Deborah Treisman, is a bit more cagey, but, in interviews, she has never named a single person whose story she’s selected from the online submission form. She does name unagented and unsolicited authors she’s published, but it feels entirely likely that all of those stories were submitted through connections. And when she’s asked how to get a story into the New Yorker, she basically says, “Through your agent.”

Thus, it’s possible that the last time the New Yorker published a story it got through the open slush was sometime in the mid-90s.