How Long Do New Yorker Submissions Take To Get A Response?

It takes a long time! I’ve heard of stories taking from a few weeks to over a year to receive a decision. Most nonfiction (especially short pieces) and queries receive a decision within a few weeks, but fiction tends to take months to years to receive a decision. As for cartoons and poetry, it can take anywhere from a few weeks to months to receive a decision. I try to remember the date I submitted a story, set a reminder for 6 months for longer pieces of writing, and continue to send the story to other publications in the meantime. If an editor does happen to request revisions, that’s a huge indication that they like your work. But form rejections are simply a matter of a publication’s “fit” and not a reflection of your work’s merit. The suspense can be agonizing, but it’s also taught me that each submission is a training exercise for the writer, and that the excitement of a yes is like a shot of espresso – it may come at any time and will definitely give you a lift whenever it does.

Waiting to hear back from The New Yorker can be a lengthy and suspenseful period of time. From my experience with my own submissions as well as the feedback from writers and forums online, it really does vary depending on the type of submission you’ve sent in. Short personal essays and reporting-based queries can get looked at within weeks, but fiction and longer form pieces can take anywhere from 6 months to a year or more to receive a definitive yes or no. This slow process is in part what makes The New Yorker so unique in its voice and perspective, but that doesn’t necessarily make waiting any less frustrating. Cartoons and poetry have their own unique timelines as well. Some cartoonists report getting a decision on whether or not their work will be published within a few months, but often their best work will get thrown back into the pile and re-viewed multiple times before it gets accepted. As for poetry, it can vary greatly from poet to poet with some hearing back within a couple of months and others not seeing the results of their work for half a year or more. Rejection letters from The New Yorker are often very standard and brief, whereas acceptance letters can come at any time and are often worded simply with a yes. What I’ve gathered from submitting my work to The New Yorker is that there is no doubt that they receive an overwhelming amount of high quality work and that even the most exceptional pieces can get passed over for a host of reasons including but not limited to: there simply isn’t enough space in the magazine to print everything that is submitted of high quality, or perhaps the work just doesn’t fit the particular department’s mandate for the issue at hand. Having a practical system in place for tracking the submission has helped me in my wait time, as well as not emailing the editors before the 6 month mark for fiction pieces. Most importantly, celebrate the small wins, such as a writer receiving a personal note from an editor, getting asked to revise a piece, or even simply knowing that your work was read by multiple people. There is a lot of discipline involved in waiting for answers, but there is also faith. I continue to enjoy the thrill of hitting send on a new piece of writing, and regardless of the outcome, the act of submitting my work is always enough to sharpen my craft even further.

If I had to plan out when I'd hear back from a place, I'd say a minimum of 3 months, but it's often 5 or 6 months or more. I got a rejection letter at 16 weeks, by which time I'd revised the piece to send out to other markets, and had in fact sent it out to other markets. They don't do simultaneous submissions, which makes their long response time particularly hard to deal with. The hardest and most consistent part of the process of submitting your work for publication is the waiting. Some writers use the first reader as a benchmark for quality and it's true that if they like it enough to send it on to second readers even if it's not accepted in the end, then it's a good piece of work. But you'll never know that. All you get is silence followed by a yes or no.