‘I ask the world to be kind to editors at this moment’: Literary magazines in the age of AI

Reading for the August issue of The Bombay Literary Magazine has begun. As usual, fiction submissions were capped at 400 entries, a number that was exceeded before the third week of the month had ended. We are a team of eight editors, six of whom read the stories in the first round. The upvoted stories (about a quarter of the whole pile) are then divided between the two remaining editors. After this and another round of reading (in which the two editors have exchanged stories they liked), the surviving stories, usually about 20, are read by the whole group.

We then conduct an all-hands meeting, discussing each of the shortlisted stories one by one. A publication list is finalised by consensus.

The method

The above process means that each team member has to read about 60 or more stories. Our publication schedule leaves an editor with about five to six weeks to do this reading. That’s ten stories a week, about 40,000 words. As voluminous as a novella, you might say. Actually, reading a novella’s worth of words each week may not sound too extreme. But we do have lives outside TBLM, you see, lives that do not run on clean timetables, and this is unpaid work,...

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