Anyone else submitting to McSweeneys and sites like it?

I've been a reader of McSweeneys.net for a few years and have made submissions to it on and off for about three years, but for the past month or so, I've been sending little humor pieces off to more places. It took a while to find the most popular humor sites, found mostly through links in author bios. The ones I'm focusing on are McSweeneys.net, The Big Jewel, The Morning News and Yankee Pot Roast. Those seem to be the ones most people list first in their bios and all the sites are pretty funny, although Yankee Pot Roast is really hard to read because of bad font and size. I'm also trying Cracked.com, although their style is a bit cruder than the others. It took a while to get used to their style.

Some of my earlier submissions to McSweeneys were pretty bad, or not really the kind of stuff they publish, but I've had more success with the last half dozen or so.

Is anyone else submitting to sites like these, or found any others like them?

I remember sending something to Readers Digest at least ten years ago. It's been so long since I've read the humor sections in that magazine that I'd have no idea what to submit to them now. I think I remember that it was $400 they were offering back then. The only reason I'd remember that is because it seemed so big for such few words.

JEP, don't give up on McSweeneys. I had no luck for a long time, then suddenly I had two acceptances and one revision request (eventually rejected) out of five. I've got one there now, waiting for a response.

Got a rejection from The New Yorker today. But that's a magazine you send to with no hope of getting in anyway.

That's great about the contest, Dan. I wish I'd known about it. Maybe I'll remember next year.

I'm checking those links, too. I've seen about half of them before, but not the others.

Dale, I read some of your stuff at Yankee Pot Roast. It was good. I tried them with a little list over a month ago, but they don't seem to respond. It's even worse at Cracked -- almost three months. Yet I see people get a Mel Gibson piece or some other piece based on a recent news story published within a week.

Don't mind the complaining. I got two rejections today and I'm depressed.

Edit: This is unbelievable. It's an hour later and Cracked.com has gotten back to me with an acceptance. I should complain about these things more often. I don't think I've ever gotten three things back in one day, either.

I had the Galactica issue of Cracked. Loved that show more than I probably should have, and even now I still like it better than the new one.

By the way, if you submit to McSweeneys, they're not accepting anything with robots, zombies or video games. The editor said he had too much of that stuff in the archives, because he's a sucker for those topics, but he wants to avoid them at least for the time being.

JeanneTGC said:

Stupid question time -- I know there is a printed McSweeney's and an online McSweeney's. I can't find the printed one here (Phoenix, not the smallest burg out there, but also not NY or LA), but may be looking in the wrong places (like bookstores). So this question comes because I haven't been able to take a look at a physical McSweeney's yet.

When you all are submitting to McSweeney's, are you going for online or printed? And, why is or isn't one better than the other? Does the hard copy take longer pieces? Does one have more "cachet" than the other? Is this the humor version of The New Yorker, where the better expectation is that you'll get rejected but at least gave the best the first shot? Have I run over my question limit yet?

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I've never seen a copy of the paper McSweeneys, but it's basically literary fiction as far as I can tell, though I know they did an anthology of genre fiction with people like Stephen King. I think you can buy it at Amazon, but it's pretty expensive. I'd say the paper version is more prestigious than the web site, because lots of big names have been in it, although there are a few big names that have been on the web site, too.

The web McSweeneys doesn't pay, but they're one of the biggest humor sites on the Internet. For me, they're just below The New Yorker, which would be the ultimate. They're almost all humor at McSweeneys.net. I like to have a piece rejected by them before sending it to other sites.

Congratulations, Jeanne. I submitted my first piece there about a month ago, but haven't heard back from them yet. I'll be reading your piece within a few days, I guess.