I’ve broken down the 531 honorable mentions in this year’s Year’s Best Horror by market. You’ve seen me do this before with Year’s Best SF and the late lamented Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. I think it’s probably the most accurate way of guaging the relative "status" and "quality" of different markets.
A few caveats:
- Obviously a market that publishes more stories per year has a higher likelihood of receiving more honorable mentions.
- HMs necessarily reflect the taste of the editor of the YBH anthology. I don’t know whether Ellen has any built-in bias in favor of one editorial style over another (as Gardner admits he does).
- This list actually includes both the stories that actually made it into the book and those that didn’t. I actually track those lists separately. (If you’re interested, F&SF had the largest number of stories (5) in the volume itself.)
- This list includes only periodicals and repeating anthologies. I didn’t include the one-time anthologies.
Here goes:
| Black Static | 22 |
| F&SF | 16 |
| Weird Tales | 12 |
| Chizine | 11 |
| Postscripts | 10 |
| Space & Time | 9 |
| Apex | 8 |
| Asimovs | 8 |
| Goblin Fruit | 8 |
| Something Wicked | 8 |
| Subterranean | 8 |
| Crimewave | 7 |
| Andromeda Spaceways | 6 |
| Fantasy Magazine | 6 |
| GUD Magazine | 6 |
| Read by Dawn | 6 |
| Shroud | 6 |
| Mythic Delerium | 5 |
| Nemonymous | 5 |
| Not One of Us | 5 |
| Shimmer | 5 |
| Sirenia Digest | 5 |
| Alfred Hitchcock’s MM | 4 |
| Ellery Queen’s MM | 4 |
| Exotic Gothic | 4 |
| McSweeney’s | 4 |
| Midnight Echo | 4 |
| Nossa Morte | 4 |
| On Spec | 4 |
| OSC’s Int Med Show | 4 |
| Supernatural Tales | 4 |
| Borderlands | 3 |
| Cemetery Dance | 3 |
| Clockwork Phoenix | 3 |
| Flytrap | 3 |
| Illumen | 3 |
| Lone Star Stories | 3 |
| Midnight Street | 3 |
| New Yorker | 3 |
| Strange Horizons | 3 |
| Writers of the Future | 3 |
| Zahir | 3 |
| Abyss & Apex | 2 |
| Albedo One | 2 |
| Analog | 2 |
| Aurealis | 2 |
| Clarksworld | 2 |
| Dark Horizons | 2 |
| Gargoyle | 2 |
| Philippine Genre Stories | 2 |
| Realms of Fantasy | 2 |
| Star*Line | 2 |
| Talebones | 2 |
| West Branch | 2 |
| A Public Space | 1 |
| ASF | 1 |
| Boulevard | 1 |
| Carve | 1 |
| City Slab | 1 |
| Conjunctions | 1 |
| Crimsonhighways.com | 1 |
| Dark Discoveries | 1 |
| Farrago’s Wainscot | 1 |
| Fictitious Force | 1 |
| Full Unit Hookup | 1 |
| Harrow | 1 |
| Hayden’s Ferry Review | 1 |
| Heliotrope | 1 |
| Helix | 1 |
| Horror Library | 1 |
| Kaleidotrope | 1 |
| Mythic | 1 |
| Paradox | 1 |
| Relief | 1 |
| Rogue | 1 |
| Shiny | 1 |
| Sinister Tales | 1 |
| Sonoma Review | 1 |
| Speculative Poetry | 1 |
| Static Movement | 1 |
| Studies in the Fantastic | 1 |
| Succor | 1 |
| Swill | 1 |
| Tales of the Unanticipated | 1 |
| Tor.com | 1 |
If you look at the top 11 from this list, you’ll note that only 5 are SFWA "paying markets." I point this out because some newbies tend to think of SFWA publication as the holy grail of short story writing, and I don’t think it is.
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Kenneth Schneyer 
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