news
The Most Overused Short Story Titles
Electric Literature must raise $35,000 to fund our next chapter. EL’s incoming Executive Director and Publisher, Denne Michele Norris, plans to grow EL’s reach and influence by every measure, while maintaining our sharp, independent spirit. We need your help to ensure our continued success.
Donate now to join us in building EL’s future.
Clarkesworld magazine, one of the great SF/F literary magazines, recently reached 50,000 submissions and editor Neil Clarke decided to run an analysis to see what the most common titles were. Here were the fifteen titles most frequently submitted to the magazine:
- Dust
- The Gift
- Home
- Hunger
- Homecoming
- The Box
- Monsters
- Lost and Found
- Sacrifice
- The Hunt
- Flight
- Heartless
- The End
- Alone
- Legacy
You can see the full list here and the Worldle image, shown above, of all titles. Clarkesworld is a SF/F magazine, but an analysis of literary magazine submissions would probably look pretty similar: a lot of one or two word titles that list one central element or sum up the feeling with an abstract noun — “The Game,” “The Child,” “Memories,” “Choice,” “Patience.” The title is the first thing any reader, including a submissions reader, will see, so the next time you submit make sure you aren’t sending a title that’s been used a million times before.
