I'm going to tell you how to improve your chances of getting published — here, and anywhere else.
I could say read the journal first. You've heard it. Every editor says it. It's true, but let me present a variation.
You want me to read your work closely. Have you read mine? Not my writing. The journal — the thing I've shaped out of a few hundred small decisions about what belongs here.
There is something I see that you don't. Every submission tells me whether the writer asked to be subscribed. When it says subscription not requested, I learn that you have no interest in what Inkhorn is or where it's going. You're passing through. I've started calling these drive-by submissions.
Now: please don't check that box because you think it will help you. It won't, it never has, and if I suspected that's why you did it I'd find it insulting.
But a great many of the pieces I accept come from writers who have subscribed. That isn't cause and effect. It's the same quality showing up twice. Whatever makes a writer curious about where the work is going is sometimes the thing that makes the work belong there.
And I do understand the arithmetic. If you read every journal you submitted to, you'd never have time to write. You're playing the odds. I'd only point out that reading might change the numbers.
Here is what the odds actually look like from this desk. Most of what I decline is well written. I'm usually not reading for errors and I'm barely reading your cover note. I'm reading the piece and asking one question: does it belong in the next issue of this journal? Usually the answer is no, and it has nothing to do with quality. The poem is doing something we've done three times. The essay wants a reader we don't have. The story is good and would be better somewhere else. That's fit, and fit is most of what an acceptance is.
So when you read a journal, don't read it for quality. Read it for argument. What does this editor keep choosing? What do they never run? Where does a piece like yours sit among them, and what would it have to do differently to sit there well? Ten minutes of that is worth more than ten more submissions.
Or do the harder version. Go read for somebody's journal, even a small one, even for a month. Sit with two hundred submissions and watch yourself begin to reach for the ones that know where they've arrived. Nothing will teach you more about your own submissions than reading a stack of other people's.
Myself, I can always use thoughtful readers.
Then come back and send us something.