Results tagged “cover letter”

I posted a few weeks ago about things not to do in a cover letter. Now I’d like to showcase a few cover letters I’ve seen over the years that fulfilled their mission.

To recap: A bad cover letter can affect an editor negatively—negatively enough, at times, to send the submission straight into the circular file. A good cover letter won’t sell a manuscript, but if it catches my eye in a positive way it can cause me to pick up the attached manuscript sooner than I otherwise would.

One purpose of a cover letter should be to provide a few selling points for the manuscript. Part of an editor’s decision to buy a manuscript is based upon its “saleability” in the eyes of sales reps and booksellers. Is the author an expert in his/her field? Does he/she have a big publicity platform that will help a publisher reach the target audience?

Here is an example of a cover letter that supplied a major selling point in an engaging way. If the author happens to read this and would like to identify herself, that would be great—my compliments on the submission letter, which came into an editor friend of mine more than fifteen years ago.

[more after the jump]

I keep a collection of manuscript excerpts and cover letters that have come in over the years. They’re useful as demonstrations of what to do—or not to do—in the process of submitting a book for publication. I quote from them at writers’ conferences and SF/fantasy conventions in hopes that others will learn.

This week I received a submission from a writer who informed me that several other publishers had already turned the project down. Lack of vision and publishing guts had led to those decisions, the cover letter said, leaving the project ripe for the picking by another publisher intelligent enough to recognize its value.

The inference was that if I rejected the material, we’d be added to the list of visionless, timid publishers who’d had their chance and failed to act. This did not go over well with me; I don’t react well to the badmouthing of other editors even if they remain nameless. [more]