Cover Letters
Rachel Swirsky has perfectly good ideas here, but…what kind of cover letter should you include with your submissions when it comes to something I’m editing? (We’ll restrict it to that, because I can’t speak for anyone else, although I think Ann would generally agree.)
I recommend any or all of the following approaches:
(1) You are a pointless pink boil on the backside of the world. Do not respond unless you publish my story. Publish my story or die. That is all.
(2) I am Hambone O’Mallet III and I have published in Stringbean Rivet Review, Givenup Quarterly, Starry Tales of Hairy Men, Bored Off My Ass Biannual, and The Vegetarian Shoemakers’ Annual Census Report. My story “Thermonucleus of the Brain Pan from Hell” has 5,000 words in it and is about a thermonucleus that escapes from a brain pan. In Hell.
(3) I am a member of SFWA and [rest redacted due to National Boredom Security Standards].
(4) Good morning! May the Lord bless you! I am a psychic currently living in a small house in New Hampshire who has had the most amazing experience with an alien life force. No one would believe me if I wrote it as nonfiction, so I have made you a short story, which I have attached to this email. I am looking forward to your thoughts about my experience.
(5) I have been having the ribbon dreams again, and this is what the ribbon dreams produce–this story, about my ribbon dreams. I think a lot of people will want to pay good money to read about my ribbon dreams, so I hope you can offer enough cash to make it worth my while to choose your anthology as the final home for my story.
All five of these work equally well. Do you know why? Because I won’t read your cover letter, and if I do, it won’t make any difference. Cranks have written great literature and pros have written turds.
I’ll sample your story, and if I like that sample, I’ll keep reading. And if I don’t, I won’t.
(And: If I know your name, I know your name. If I don’t, I don’t. As far as influence of that nature goes.)
Jeff
October 12, 2007 at 9:16 pm
I am Hambone O’Mallet III. You have rejected my story. Now you must die. That is all.
[Thanks for giving away my secret identity, Jeff. Psssh!]
I started reading this — perched on the edge of my seat, no less — thinking you were going to just give away great advice. And then I started reading. Then I was disappointed. Then I started laughing. And in the end? You did give away some great advice. As a newbie-who — who? Exactly — I’ve wondered how import cover letters are. Most of the opinions I’ve come across seem to be in agreeance with you. I don’t include a cover letter unless one is requested. When it is, I format thusly: Name, credits, summation, closing, attach SOLID STORY w/paper clip.
October 12, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Yes, well, a lot of what I do is supposed to be funny. But it is true–as long as you don’t say anything heinous, cover letters only matter to uptight editors. But Swirsky’s post has plenty of sane advice.
The terrible thing is…every example I gave is actually real, if slightly changed.
Jeff
October 12, 2007 at 9:50 pm
That is terrible . . . but it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling. There’s hope for me yet . . . LOL!
October 13, 2007 at 9:20 am
You should really do a follow-up of obnoxious responses from editors to submissions. I’ve got a couple of good ones, myself, but they seem to have slipped loose from my archives.
October 13, 2007 at 9:29 am
I can’t think of any that were obnoxious so much as ones that were stupid. Like, I had written a far-future story in which a man seeks out a new heart for her sister, who has heart problems. He goes to a bioneering facility under a ruined city and begs for one from the genetically altered species he finds there. The Earth in my far future is wasteland, humans living in a subsistence way.
The reject from this one editor was simply, “This doesn’t make any sense. We have artificial hearts already today.”
Wha–?
October 13, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Crazy. I love that story.
October 14, 2007 at 11:41 pm
“cover letters only matter to uptight editors.”
I admit it: I’m uptight.
Also, we’re primarily a reprint market so I am more than averagely looking for stories to come with the endorsement of other editors. Why should I filter my slush when you and Ann and Gordon and Ellen and Sheila and Kelly et al. have already done it for me? :-)
(I’ve also heard people complain on more than one occasion that they don’t send out stories at all because they’re scared of writing cover letters. So clearly, I’m not uptight, I’m altruistic. Anyone buying that?)
October 14, 2007 at 11:44 pm
“The terrible thing is…every example I gave is actually real, if slightly changed.”
When I was reading for a magazine published out of a small liberal arts college, we once received a bundle of poems attached to a cover letter written in gold ink on yellow paper, in which the poet informed us that he had been ordered to share his poems with the world.
I guess he can’t be blamed for the poor quality of the attached poems. After all: he was only following orders.
October 15, 2007 at 6:50 am
Great stuff Jeff. From the writer’s perspective, for what it’s worth, here’s my generic ‘cover letter’:
“Attached please find a submission for [publication] titled, ‘Bocchi? My Bum’. Thank you in advance for your consideration.”
I don’t submit to any place that mandates a ‘cover letter’ for a short piece.
October 15, 2007 at 8:19 am
Cover Letters? I can take them or leave them. Sometimes it’s nice to learn a bit about the writer but in the end it is the story that counts. A clever cover letter will not make me love your story any more and a bad or missing one will not make me love it any less.