comporstand

Competition or Standard—how to decide.

Things to consider:

Reading fees help make substantial cash prizes possible for competition winners (from $1200 to $2000 for first place), and literary agents on the lookout for new talent take note of award winners.

Top-25 competition winners are posted here and are announced in our monthly bulletins, as well as on other major blogs for writers. Those stories that didn’t quite make the Top-25 list, but are in the top 5% of submissions make Honorable Mention and are emailed a link to that list.

There is no such thing as a profitable literary journal. To the best of my knowledge, all surviving literary journals are supported by universities or individuals who love literary fiction and are willing to put their own time and money into them. That said, competition reading fees do help keep litmags alive. (In the ideal world, writers would routinely subscribe to their favorite journals, and reading fees would become unnecessary.)

There are no reading fees for the standard story category, and we pay $700 for accepted pieces.

We welcome your stories, whether you submit them to the standard category or to the competitions. We will never eliminate our standard category because we do not want to eliminate people who do not want to, or cannot afford to, pay reading fees.

If this didn’t answer your question, click here.

Every story we publish is unsolicited, and 86% of the stories we accepted last year came to us directly from the writer.
That's exactly how we like it.

One of the most respected short-story journals in print, Glimmer Train Stories is represented in recent editions of the Pushcart Prize, New Stories from the Midwest, O.Henry, New Stories from the South, Best of the West, and Best American Short Stories anthologies.