After reading tens of thousands of cover letters, readers develop a fairly detailed aesthetic concerning those letters. A legendary sommelier might be a kind of olfactory and gustatory genius for matching wines and food, but the cover letter operates in almost exactly the opposite way: One good layout matches everything. Very blue plate special. Formal poems, prose poems, short short stories, memoir, they all need the same sort of cover letter: short and informative. In all the guide books to publishing, the advice is consistent, and good. Your contact information. The names of the piece(s). A very brief bio (no publishing history? No problem. But you don't need to mention the lack in the cover letter, either). Ask us to please return or recycle the manuscript. Check if simultaneous submissions are OK and tell the editor if you are, in fact, submitting simultaneously. Here are some things to avoid:
1. The wrong magazine and/or editor. We get a few submissions addressed to people who haven't been on the masthead for a while. Or the submission is addressed to a different magazine. Before you send anything out, take a minute and go to the magazine's website--ours or anyone else's. Check the most recent masthead. If the magazine looks like it's run by students (and only students), then you might just use the "Dear Genre Editor" opening. But please don't actually write "Dear Genre Editor" (yes, we get those, too). Use the actual genre. If a guideline listing says to address your piece to "Fiction/Poetry/Reviews Editor," DO NOT address the letter "Dear Fiction/Poetry/Reviews Editor." We want you to choose an editor so we know in which genre you're writing.
2. Listing every publication you've ever had. If you've had hundreds of publications or only two or three, it doesn't matter. List the high points (or the points you consider to be the highest). An exhaustive list simply isn't necessary. A concise list suggests that you're professional and secure in your profession. Even if you're new and feel a bit terrified.
3. Testimonials. The temptation here is strong, I know. You were in a summer workshop with a Name, and they wrote a brief response to your work that you loved. You asked the Name if you could drop the reference in a cover letter. They said to go ahead and do that, "if you think it'll help." I am here to assure you that their implication that their blurb on a cover letter won't, in fact, help is correct. We're sure that you and they are lovely, supportive, talented people. But a cover letter just isn't the right place for a blurb. Save that for your book.
4. Explaining the submission. Another strong temptation, but we all need to let the work speak for itself. I can tell you that the readers at Prairie Schooner are extraordinary. Well-educated, dedicated to literature, highly skilled with their own work. And many of us are quite a bit older than you might think (we range in age from 25 to over 60). Our interests range from traditional forms to the wildly experimental, and we make sure that appropriate readers get to see each piece that comes in. I'm sure that we're not alone in this breadth of skill and approach. Of course, summarizing a long piece is a useful exercise. But a cover letter is better without the summary.
5. Other appeals or extra cleverness. I know that it can seem like the cover letter is the place to set up the reader for your style, that a couple of jokes for fake chumminess can soften up the reader, but this is an error. First, you run the risk of being funnier and more interesting in the cover letter than you are in the submission, and that's no good. Second, the effect can be cloying and offer more than a passing whiff of desperation.
What extras might you include? Good question. Have you been in the magazine before? Mention that publication; editors can't keep an exhaustive list of previous contributors in our brains, but we like to know if we've had a good relationship with a writer in the past. Have we sent you an encouraging rejection in the past? Mention that as well. We all get far too many submissions to respond favorably all that often, so if you've gotten a positive note from us, then we meant it when we said we would like to see more work. But, again, we're unlikely to remember everyone, so a little nudge is good.
Keep sending work out! None of us--not a single literary journal--can survive without submissions. We are always, always looking for great work. So make sure that yours is in an inbox somewhere.
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