Check out the FISH list of lively indie lit mags

The ultimate ranking of the world’s liveliest indie literary magazines, curated by author and editor Charlie Fish.

We’ve been all over the place with our own stuff lately. Too much. So it was such a pleasant surprise to hear from Charlie Fish about his FISH list of lively indie lit mags. So nice, actually, we gave him full access to our data and asked him on here to write about his journey creating the first rankings list of independent-only literary magazines. Read on below.

Then come back and check out the list here. And if you use your Chill Subs bookmarks, you can save all of these top 100 lit mags from this list to your favorites.

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I’ve published a ranked list of lively independent literary magazines, and it’s awesome. It’s called the FISH list– Finest Independent Story Houses. (Oh yeah, my name is Charlie Fish.) I’m going to tell you all about the FISH list, but first:

Having spent many days visiting literally thousands of lit mag websites, I FEEL SO INSPIRED. There are so many people out there making beautiful literary art, so many niches snugly filled, so many jokers and prophets and lovers and fighters, so many wonderful stories finding an audience. Literary magazines are packed full of love, craft, art for art’s sake, art for life’s sake.

There are mags from across the world: from Florida to Wales; New Zealand to Singapore; Eastern Europe to Africa; India to Indonesia. All genres are represented: from noir crime to sci-fi poetry; ghost stories to punk. There are mags publishing voicemails and postcards and memes and musical mash-ups and description-defying surrealism. There are mags dedicated to speculative cat stories and chicken poetry. There are mags dedicated to younger writers and olderwriters; people of colour; parents and childless; queer and trans and non-binary; veterans and refugees.

In a world full of divisions, where we are bombarded by shallow media and tyrannised by selfish politics, literary magazines are antidote, antithesis, haven. We must support them, for they ARE US.

Now, pull up a chair, because I want to tell you how the FISH list came about, how I put it together, why I think it’s valuable, and what it has taught me about the many-hued universe of literary magazines.

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The big idea, and why I did it

Six weeks ago, I had a crazy idea. One of those ideas that got under my skin. I could think of nothing else for the five days (and late nights) it took me to finish it.

The idea was to make a list of the best lit mags, similar to Brecht de Poortere's, Erika Krouse's, Clifford Garstang's - but focussing instead on indie lit mags.

Granta and The New Yorker are great, but I wanted to focus on the passion projects. The kaleidoscopic cutting edge.

I selected 14 metrics – things that I personally consider important and attractive for a venue that might publish one of my own short stories – and scored 1,000 literary magazines against those metrics. (Yes, a thousand. It took many, many hours.)

The results pleased me greatly. The magazines at the top of the list were exactly the kind of underappreciated gems I wanted to draw attention to. The hardest working, volunteer-run, lifeblood of the literary world. The ones that survive on wit, will, and way too much caffeine.

You see, I love Brecht’s list, it’s an incredibly valuable resource, but the way it’s put together doesn’t allow for much diversity. It focusses on magazines that have won the most awards – Best American Short Stories, Pushcart, O. Henry, PEN DAU, Best of the Net, Wigleaf, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction – all of which are USA-based awards. Therefore, Brecht’s list leans heavily towards USA-based publications. Especially those affiliated with USA universities, which have the resources to attract big-name authors.

(To illustrate the point, the top 100 literary magazines on Brecht’s list include just three from outside the USA, and exactly zero genre mags. Not so the FISH list.)

My metrics for the FISH list focus less on awards and prestige, and much more on the features of the magazines themselves. Is there an active community of readers? Do the editors give feedback on submitted stories? Is the magazine going to stick around, or fade away like so many do? As an author wanting to find great venues to submit my own work, these are things that matter to me.

And I confess, I have an ulterior motive. I’m the founder-editor of my own literary magazine, Fiction on the Web. I’ve been publishing short stories there since 1996, but I made a New Year’s resolution at the start of 2024 that I would make it one of the best magazines out there. Since then, Fiction on the Web has:

· Recruited an Associate Editor and a staff of readers (after 27 years of being a one-man-show).

· Started routinely giving feedback on rejected stories.

· Started regularly publishing audiobooks.

· More than doubled its readership.

All of which has taken a LOT of work. The FISH list gives me a way to validate how I’m doing against my fellow indie lit mags, and recognises all the other editors out there who are dedicating the same amount of passion and commitment.

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The even bigger idea, and the eligibility criteria

The whole idea of the FISH list seemed very aligned to the Chill Subs vibe – like, I'm a huge fan of their Community Favourites lists. So, rather than publishing the FISH list straight away, I pitched the idea to Chill Subs co-founder Ben Davis.

He loved it. And he made me an incredible offer. He provided me additional data from the Chill Subs database so that I could make the FISH list bigger and better, and he agreed to integrate the FISH list into the Chill Subs database’s new Lists feature. Now, on top of the 1,000 magazines I’d already scored, I was going to add another 2,500.

(Oh my goodness… another 2,500? Do you know how long it took me to do the first 1,000? I was gonna have a LOT of time to reflect on the virtues of this list…)

So, how was I scoring these magazines? First of all, I created four criteria for eligibility:

1. Independent, i.e. not affiliated with or funded by an institution.

2. Active, i.e. published in the last year, and plans to keep publishing.

3. Relies on unsolicited submissions, i.e. more than 0% acceptance rate.

4. Fiction on the Web is excluded (although it would come in at #7!).

That first criterion by itself is a stumbling block. How do you define independent? What about magazines that rely on grants? What about 501(c)(3) non-profits? I wanted to spotlight the ardent volunteers, not the revered critics; the spare-timers not the salarymen. In the end, I pretty much only excluded the magazines that were explicitly affiliated with educational institutions, and relied on the third criterion to filter out the rest.

By excluding magazines with a 0% acceptance rate (the third criterion), I hoped to filter out the ones that mostly commissioned their content. Cutting out mags that can’t afford to rely on unsolicited subs makes room for indie energy, and makes sense to me as a small-time writer because I might actually have a chance of getting published there. I want to find the lit mags propped up by hard work rather than money.

As for the second criterion, active-ness, so many literary magazines seem to go defunct after just a few years. Sometimes they fade out, and their ghost is visible as a never-to-be-updated web page. And sometimes they vanish, taking all their great literature with them. This I knew, but as I painstakingly scored 3,448 lit mags, I was nevertheless astonished by the vast number of dead magazines haunting the internet. I want lively magazines. Liveliness is at the core of the FISH list manifesto.

After applying those criteria, the list of magazines had halved, leaving 1,829 magazines eligible for the FISH list. Well, to call them all “magazines” is deficient – they are all flavours of publishers: websites and presses and hybrids and experiments; publishing short fiction, but also poetry, CNF, visual art, and more.

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The scoring metrics, and “liveliness”

My score comprised 14 metrics, each weighted with “liveliness” in mind, but also thinking about where I would personally want to be published.

The first metric is the primary focus of the other lists I mentioned (Brecht’s, Erika’s, Clifford’s). But rather than asking how many awards a lit mag has won, I’m just asking whether they’ve ever won any at all – they get full points even if they’ve only ever won one. That’s because I don’t want to give too much weight to the same-old darlings of the lit mag scene: I want to illuminate the margins.

Being free to submit, and being a paying venue, both score a chunk of points. Oh, how I admire the 515 eligible magazines that manage to achieve both!

Then there are two metrics that are vanishingly rare: magazines that attract reader comments, and magazines that give feedback to all/most submissions. The “reader comments” metric is worth lingering on, because it underscores the intent of the FISH list, but also hints at its limitations:

For reference, at the time of writing, the last nine stories published at Fiction on the Web got an average of 1,937 reads and ten comments each. That means 0.5% of readers left a comment. To wit, fostering a lively community of readers that regularly leaves comments is a Brobdingnagian task. Some writers may not care, but I’ve received plenty of feedback from writers who find it incredibly validating to see their readers’ reactions right there in black and white. So, I gave a bunch of points to magazines that attracted reader comments.

But, of course, that disadvantages print-only magazines. Which perhaps seems unfair; after all, some of the print-only magazines on the list are exactly the kind of idiosyncratic hothouses of creativity that I want to highlight. There’s the rub – the FISH list is not really a ranking of the “best” lit mags. No such thing can exist. My vision is for it to be a ranking of the “liveliest”. Just as Brecht de Poortere’s list is not a ranking of the best lit mags, it’s primarily a ranking of the most awarded. Nevertheless, to help compensate, I’ve also given a point to magazines that regularly publish a print version (rather than being online-only).

Another benefit of the “reader comments” metric is that no-one has measured it before. It’s a point of differentiation. The more differentiation, the more likely that the FISH list will surface hidden treasures.

Of the remaining metrics, three are aimed squarely at “liveliness”: publication frequency, whether the magazine gets a lot of submissions (please report your submissions and responses on Chill Subs to help improve the accuracy of this stat!), and whether the lit mag is active on social media. None of those things by themselves suggest a lit mag is good, but they do suggest it is lively. Most of the rest of the metrics are about hygiene. Together, they help answer whether this is the kind of lit mag I’d like to submit to.

One last metric I want to talk about is whether the lit mag has a masthead, or at least a named editor. By giving a point for this, I’m effectively penalising anonymity. Rare as it is, there are some charlatans out there posing as lit mags, perhaps phishing for personal data or money; but there is zero overlap between those dastardly few, and the magazines that proudly display their editorial staff. However, there is another reason some lit mags get published anonymously – because they’re marginalised, and their very identity is dangerous. It pains me to disadvantage these kinds of platforms, so I applied this metric very lightly. For example, it’s not really clear who exactly is behind the t4t project, “a zine by/for/about trans artists & storytellers of color”, but they got the point anyway.

Not everyone will agree with my scoring system, but I’ve published the raw data in full, so you can pick out the things that are most important to you, and you’ll get a FISH list of your own. And any other editors out there that value the same things I do can see exactly what they need to do to boost themselves up the list. Perhaps if they responded to submissions a bit quicker, or started nominating for awards, or revived their dormant social media account, they could crack the top 100.

Despite my earnest attempt to be rigorous, there is still a lot of subjectivity in this list, and there are bound to be errors. I warmly encourage feedback, and I will happily re-score any magazine on request.

My hope is that the lit mags that have come out at the top of the list will earn more readers as a result, and that the editors will be proud of their position (I’ve created “Top 100” and “Top 500” badges they can display).

Above all, my hope is that the FISH list will help you find your new favourite magazine.