Some more common cover letter errors

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Back in April, I posted about common mistakes found in cover letters addressed to us. Here are a few more.

  • Author neglects to put any name at all on the story. I also don't like it when the author's name appears only at the end of the story, or only in the From line (because so many From lines contain names other than the author's), but it's worse when the author's name doesn't appear anywhere in the submission. It's truly not that big a deal (I just send a brief form-letter note requesting the name, and the author sends their name), but it bugs me more than it should, and it's happening more often lately.
  • Author misspells his or her own name. (If, among the From line, the pre-cover-letter info section, the cover letter, the signature, and the byline, it's spelled more than one way, then I tend to assume at least one of those is a misspelling.) I know, intellectually, that attention to detail doesn't necessarily correlate with storytelling ability or even English-sentence-writing ability; there are great authors who can't spell. But this seems particularly sloppy to me, somehow. Don't obsess over cover letters, but do proofread them.
  • Author copies our sample cover letter from our guidelines, but neglects to remove the bracketed numbers from the ends of lines. As noted just above the sample, the numbers in square brackets are references to footnotes, and are not part of the text of the example.
  • Cover letter contains a plot synopsis, a tag line advertising the story, or even a general description of the story. (Made-up example: "This thrilling horror tale explores an entirely original idea, never before seen in fiction: what if vampires were real?") You do need to provide a synopsis of your story if you're trying to sell a novel (though not quite in that form); but for short stories, it's a bad idea.
  • Cover letter contains multiple obvious typos. See above about proofreading.
  • Cover letter states the genre of the story. (Especially if it's horror.)
  • Cover letter includes information about what rights the author is offering. As noted in our guidelines, we buy first-printing world exclusive rights for two months; we assume that all submissions sent to us are offering those rights.

Remember: the shorter the cover letter, the fewer opportunities there are to make mistakes in it.

Oh, and a note to those of you who we know or who we've corresponded with extensively, including those of you we've published: we still adore you, and please don't fret about this, but for future reference please do include the four-line info section (your name, your email address, story title, rounded-off word count) at the top of every sub. That info is intended to make it easier/faster for me to enter story info into the database, and no matter how well I know you, it helps me if you include that stuff.

I should reiterate my disclaimer from before: most of what we're getting these days is formatted just the way we want it, so I shouldn't really complain. And I should note again 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 or other mistake in a cover letter. It's not that big a deal.

7 Responses to “Some more common cover letter errors”

  1. Jay Lake

    We’ve had analogous problems with POLYPHONY subs, which are 90% papermail. The chief offense seems to be formatting an mss with absolutely no name or contact info on it. If the cover letter moves into the Great Beyond, that mss is doomed. We actually had one of those in the P3 stack that made the almost-final round, and we chucked it because we didn’t know who to buy the story from.

    That’s why the P4 guidelines say we *will* reject out of hand for improperly formatted mss. With 500+ subs expected (maybe a lot more than that) I as the first reader won’t have time to wrangle with bum subs.

    Those of you who know me IRL know it’s not really in me to be a hardass, but that one’s pure self defense. I’m glad Jed is able to be more flexible.

    Jay

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  2. Jed

    Well, I imagine we’d be stricter if we took paper subs. With email subs, and with our current (relatively low compared to, say, Asimov’s) submission volume, some things that would be impenetrable barriers for paper subs are just inconveniences for us. Frex, it’s impossible for the address and the story to get separated; the only time we can’t respond to an author is when their email address goes away or changes and they don’t tell us. (Which has happened a couple of times, alas; very frustrating.) Similarly, we could just bounce the large number of submissions from Windows machines using curved/slanted quotation marks (which show up as unreadable gibberish on my computer), but it doesn’t take me all that long to copy the text to BBEdit and do a replace-all. And likewise for some other formatting problems; they’re inconveniences for me, they don’t make me kindly disposed toward the story, but they only cost me a little time rather than actually making the story unreadable, as similar problems in a printout might do.

    One reason that I don’t generally enforce our “improperly formatted submissions may be deleted unread” rule is that I know how opaque the process is to writers. Formatting guidelines, even the standard ones, are almost invariably ambiguous about certain subtleties, and many’s the time I’ve worried that an editor is going to say “He underlined this entire paragraph, so he doesn’t know standard MS format, so I’m rejecting this.” The worst part is that (I always thought) a form rejection might just mean “You made some little formatting error that you didn’t even notice, but that causes us to reject manuscripts; we didn’t even look at the contents of this one.” I find the lack of information really frustrating, as a writer.

    (So Jay, a thought: might you consider having a separate form rejection for stories you’re bouncing unread due to improper formatting? To let people know they can resubmit if they fix the formatting, and that you’re not rejecting the story based on its contents?)

    Note: I’m of course not saying email subs are inherently superior to paper, nor that all editors should take email subs; merely that in certain areas, they allow me to be more flexible. (In other areas, of course, they cause the problems: 90% of all formatting problems in our subs are things that the authors probably can’t see on their own computers. It’s formatted correctly when they send it out; they just don’t realize they’re using HTML, or curly quotes, or whatever.)

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  3. Jay Lake

    > So Jay, a thought: might you consider having
    > a separate form rejection for stories you’re
    > bouncing unread due to improper formatting?

    Not a bad idea.

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  4. Heather Shaw

    Heh. For Flytrap #1, we only invited people who we knew and whose writing we liked. And I was shocked — shocked! — at the number of improperly formatted submissions we got! I ended up buying quite a few that had no name at all on the attached Word document (one from an editor, none the less). Perhaps we were a bit too informal sounding in our guidelines. It didn’t really annoy me overmuch, more amused me, but then Tim was the one who had to reformat everything for layout.

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  5. Tempest

    I was shocked to see an article in this year’s Novel & Short Story market about cover letters that gave absolutely horrible advice. I’m talking cover letters for short story submissions, not novels or queries or whatever. I’ve decided to write an article for the books about cover letters that basically talks about the points you made here. they are the same problems I see in the cover letters I see.

    I am also appalled at how many people who should know better send us improperly formatted mss. Including people who refuse to put things in Courier and send us icky times new roman.

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  6. Jay Lake

    Hey Tempest —

    To Courier or not to Courier is a real flame war now. Some editors HATE Courier, because it’s hard on the eyes. Some editors DEMAND Courier, because it’s traditional. My default used to be Courier unless the guidelines said not to. For the sake of my own eyes, I switched to Times New Roman unless the guidelines REQUIRE Courier.

    There used to be some good reasons for submitting in monospace fonts, but with electronic story files, they’re all but irrelevant. It’s an issue of tradition now as I understand.

    Jed, receiving subs as text, is majestically immune to this issue.

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  7. Jed

    Yeah, I have a feeling I saw some guidelines recently that requested Times Roman. I personally don’t like Times (I prefer Stone Serif, New Century Schoolbook, or Palatino for print, Verdana for web), but I’m told that studies indicate the most readable font for most people is whatever one they see the most often.

    I do want to note, though, that even if you use Times for a paper submission, you should still follow certain standard formatting, such as using underlining to denote italics. I would guess that editors reading print manuscripts would probably prefer double hyphens to em dashes, too, for the same reason: easier to distinguish. (If an em dash, an en dash, and a hyphen are all similar lengths in your font, it can sometimes be hard to tell which you meant.) But I don’t have any actual evidence for that; just a guess.

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