Short Story, Long turns 3! 🥳 🎂 🥳

Announced this last week, but we are going to take the next couple of months “off” (from publishing new fiction and accompanying interviews with the authors), as something of a summer break. As a college instructor, I find summer breaks equal parts relaxing, productive, and just incredibly rejuvenating, and have found the same with working on this journal. A little break can go a long way toward sustaining energy and enthusiasm and keeping everything feel as alive and thriving as possible.

That said… not totally off-off. We have our now annual update of journal “stats”; submissions will be opening next week; and, throughout the rest of summer, we’ll have some interviews with our authors as well as the artists we’ve worked with this last year, some thoughts from our readers reflecting on reading submissions, and a bunch of other fun bonus material celebrating short stories.

And so, some of those updates…

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Submissions!

Submissions will be open all June (meaning they’ll open… Monday!).

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Stats:

I don’t know if people find this stuff interesting or not, but I always enjoy transparent peeks behind the curtain, and so I’ve been sharing updates on SSL “by the numbers.” The last couple of years, that looked like this:

The 2025-2026 Short Story, Long stats:

• 20 stories published (2 solicited)

• $4900 paid to contributors

  • $2200 ($100 each to 11 writers & artists in 2025)

  • $2700 ($150 each to 9 writers & artists in 2026)

• 970 submissions (379 in September ’25, 591 in January ’26)

  • 11 acceptances (6 from Sept. ’25 call, 5 from Jan. ’26)

  • 58 withdrawals (25 from Sept. ’25 call, 33 from Jan. ’26)

    • (assuming mostly accepted elsewhere? if so: congrats!)

• 3304 Substack subscribers, 91 paid

  • $5082 “gross annualized revenue” (per Substack)

A few notes:

• 20 stories is, to my mind, the perfect number for the year. As noted last year,

  A story every other week would be 26 stories in 52 weeks, but then take a month or two off. I think shooting for an even 20 in a calendar feels even more right. Something I’ve been brainstorming is publishing a limited run print anthology of those (20) stories. A kind of Best American Short Story, Long Short Stories. Make that a gift for subscribers. I’ve been in some kind of informal talks about the logistics of figuring that out. I wonder if people would be into that?

• If those money numbers are right ($5082 gross, $4900 paid out), Short Story, Long more or less broke even this year? Which is the goal! Doing this stats check-in last year made me notice that there’d been enough of an uptick in paid submissions that the site was making a little money, and so we increased contributor (writer & artist) payment from $100 to $150. It feels good — in general, but maybe especially in 2026! — to pay artists!

• The acceptance rate numbers probably look… disheartening? 11 acceptances for 970 submissions is barely more than 1%. Oof! A couple thoughts on that:

  • I really only accept stories that I love. We receive a lot of submissions that are really strong, but don’t quite feel like a match for us, or just fall into that admittedly frustrating and mysterious zone of “I really, really like this, and can’t put my finger on why not, but I don’t quite love it.” A lot of these have been accepted and published in many of our favorite journals, and it has been exciting seeing them find their perfect homes!

  • I think that 1% acceptance rate is at least a little misleading. The January call got >50% more submissions than the call before it, and yet one less acceptance. That is, of course, always a little random, but I think the spike in submissions represents a growing awareness of the journal, but I also think being a paying market (and increasing that pay this year) means being mentioned in a lot of writer “resources,” which, it turns out, puts you on the radar of a lot of writers who are enticed by the payment but don’t have much familiarity with the journal… or even lit journals at all? I couldn’t begin to estimate the percentage, but a lot of these submissions are just not even close to the kinds of stories or writing we publish.

This year felt like a real success, in numerous ways. As mentioned above, the goal was to be able to pay writers and artists, and to hopefully break even doing so, and we reached that goal enough to even be able to increase payment. I’ve never said as much out loud, because I didn’t want to jinx it and also because outside validation shouldn’t ever really be a “goal,” you can’t control that, but I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that something of a dream was to get a Short Story, Long story into a “best of” anthology, and this year, Amy Stuber’s “Swans” was selected to be included in the coming Best American Mystery & Suspense 2026! And, finally, this year the journal grew and I want to end with a thank you to all of you for reading and sharing stories, and especially to the growing SSL team — Jessica Dawn, Christine Gainer, L. Andrew Huffman, Tyler McAndrew, Thomas Mixon, and Michael Pershan.

Thank you!
-Aaron Burch
Editor, Short Story, Long