Pet peeve
Perhaps it's nitpicky of me, but I do sometimes wish that more writers submitting to us would pay more attention to the details of their cover letters.
On the plus side, the vast majority of submissions since the beginning of the year have conformed to our new formatting guidelines, especially the part about putting name, email, story title, and word count at the very top of the email. (Though a remarkable number of authors still aren't willing to round word count to the nearest hundred words.)
But on the minus side, some authors continue to make certain small but telling mistakes, such as:
- Misspelling one or more of our names. I realize that none of the three of us fiction editors have completely common names, but it's very easy to copy our names from the guidelines page and paste them into the cover letter.
- Addressing a cover letter to one of us but giving the wrong magazine name. I assume that this happens when someone is reusing a cover letter they sent to another magazine, and just forgets to change the magazine name, but there's always that moment of uncertainty (especially if the other magazine takes email subs): did they mean to send this to the other magazine?
- Addressing a cover letter to just me, or to "Dear Sir," or to "Dear Sirs," or to "Dear Mary Anne Mohanraj." I can't really blame people for addressing it to just me; it does seem likely from an outside perspective that the senior fiction editor is the one to address a submission to, especially if I was the one who responded to a previous submission (though we do explicitly say how to address cover letters, and explain that I don't have any more say in making selections than Susan and Chris do, in the guidelines). But both "Dear Sirs" and addressing it to Mary Anne seem to me to suggest that the author isn't quite clear on who the fiction editors are. (Btw, I've been pleased to see that the incidence of addressing Chris as "Mr. Heinemann" has gone way down.)
- Using actual italics for the titles of previous publications, which usually means that the submission's been sent using HTML rather than, as we request, plain text.
(I'm using the lj-cut tag for the first time. In theory, that should make this entry briefer in LiveJournal, while not having any effect for those reading this outside of LJ. We'll see if it works in practice.)
I should reiterate that most of what we're getting these days is formatted just the way we want it, so I shouldn't really complain. I should also note that of course we would never reject a story on the basis of a mistake in the cover letter, and that I know authors have plenty to fret about without worrying about accidentally offending some editor with a trivial typo in a cover letter. It's not that big a deal.
Still, I'm always pleased when stories come in with the right info at the top (so I can just pop 'em into the database lickety-split), and when cover letters are brief, polite, to the point, and contain no obvious errors.
