Editor Interview: Failbetter

Work that takes chances.

DIAGRAM, Handsome, Linebreak, Ninth Letter, Poor Claudia, The Tusk.

Our fiction editors are fond of Raymond Carver, George Saunders, and Kelly Link. Our favorite poets include Louise Glück, George Oppen, and Jake Adam York.

We're slightly less pompous and hopefully less boring than your usual literary journal.

For fiction, capture our attention within the first four sentences. For poetry, put your best poem at the beginning of the submission. And overall, seriously, send only your best work. If you don't love it, how can we?

Polished, concise, and visceral.

For fiction, we often get submissions that are clearly first drafts, which is a huge turnoff. For poetry, we sometimes run into problems with folks who don't follow our simultaneous submission policy. Frustration ensues.

Cover letters ought to be brief. A quick introduction, a sentence or two about your previous publications or writing experience, any interaction you've had with failbetter, and done. Let the work speak for itself.

We read each submission to the end for both poetry and fiction, but we know very quickly whether or not we're interested and want to accept the work.

Our fiction editors discuss the merits of each piece before a decision is made, and our poetry editors often call attention to a particular poet or poem if we're really invested in the piece.

A day in the life of an editor is often spent, frankly, doing non-editorial things: work, life, sleeping, etc. We cull through our general submissions on a quarterly basis, or at the request of our editor-in-chief, Thom Didato, and then make acceptance decisions based on the input of our genre editors. We also solicit work sporadically throughout the year.