Dear Lit Mag Editor: Demystifying the Cover Letter By Maureen Langloss
Whenever I talk to groups about how to get published in literary magazines, people always have lots of questions about the dreaded cover letter. So I thought I’d share a few thoughts about these letters which all boil down to: DO NOT WORRY ABOUT THEM!
Many readers and editors don’t even look at them until after they’ve read the submission—and sometimes not at all. It is the work that matters, so spend your time perfecting that.
One caveat: This advice applies to submitting work to literary magazines, not query letters that you send to agents about your book or cover letters you send to potential employers. These cover letters are an art form to be addressed separately. Please spend a TON of time perfecting your query letters!
But for literary magazines, the less you say, the better. In fact, when people say more than is absolutely required, it can actually backfire. Some of the cute things people add to cover letters can turn editors off. If you summarize your piece or explain it, you might limit readers’ interpretations of the piece, bias them against it, or make it seem more simplistic than it is. Best not to give anyone the opportunity to pre-judge your work by sticking to what is absolutely necessary.
Salutations: It is fine to start your letter with Dear Fiction Editor or Dear Fiction Team or Dear Editors or Dear Split Lip Magazine. But if you want to include the editor’s name, use their full name. Dear Maureen Langloss. Do not address me as Mrs. Langloss, because you don’t know if that’s what I go by. I might be Mr. or Ms. or Mx. Langloss. You don’t want to make assumptions about people simply by how their name sounds. One reason it’s nice to include the actual name of the editor is that it gives you an excuse to find the magazine’s masthead. It’s good practice to see who is there so you can check for things like diversity. If you can’t find any editors’ names on a lit mag site, consider whether you really want your name associated with a faceless entity.
The meat of the letter: The only things you need to do in the body of your letter are thank the editors for their time, include a third-person bio, and give the basics about your piece (title, genre, word count). Yes, I said word count! (Though this is unnecessary for poetry submissions.) Readers and editors LOVE to know how long a piece is before they read it. There are times when we are only looking for pieces of a certain size and are scanning the queue for work under 400 words or over 1500 words, for example, to round out an issue. Sometimes we only have time to read a short piece at that moment.
The letter can be this simple:
Dear Split Lip Editors and Readers,
Thank you for considering my short story, “Awesome Title” (2500 words), for your Short Fiction Competition. Below please find my third-person bio.
[Insert Bio]
Thanks again for your time and for all you do for the literary community.
Sincerely,
Name
Contact Info (though if you’re submitting on Submittable, this isn’t necessary)
Flattery: No need! Honest! I have heard editors at other mags say that they like cover letters to mention something you admire about the magazine or a story in the mag that stood out to you. Showing an editor that you read the zine is very thoughtful, but it is also a shit ton of work to do for every cover letter. So at Split Lip Magazine, we don’t expect you to take that time. Please don’t worry about this element for us unless you sincerely just read something that made you want to submit to us. We are always curious, but mentioning it will not impact the success of your submission one way or the other.
Content warnings: Not all magazines want these, but at Split Lip, we do ask for them for topics like suicide, eating disorder, abuse, violence, etc. We want to take care of our reading staff, and if there are subjects that are hard for someone to consider, we prefer they not have to read them. We ask others on staff to consider them instead.
Consult the magazine’s guidelines: Every magazine has different tastes and needs from their cover letters, so make sure you read the guidelines. For instance, some magazines like you to inform them that the piece is being submitted simultaneously. At Split Lip we assume this, so no need to tell us.
But guess what our guidelines do ask you to tell us that other mags might not? We want you to disclose if you’ve used A.I. in any way, shape, or form in the writing or making of the piece. This is very important to us! So important that if we accept or publish a piece that we later find out was the result of undisclosed AI, we will rescind our acceptance or take the published piece off our site. We also ask accepted authors to sign a contract certifying that the work is their own.
Now let’s talk bios! It’s perfectly okay not to have any publications or awards or MFAs to list. Don’t sweat this or feel the need to add other stuff to pad it. In fact, we love when you say it out loud: This would be my first publication. We are always on the lookout for new authors and we want to be someone’s first publication. To discover a new talent is lit mag nirvana! It’s okay for your bio to be just a line. (for example: Maureen Langloss is a writer living in New York City.)
Take a look at some of the bios in our archives for great examples. Feel free to copy their style!
Titles: I’ve told you not to worry about the cover letter, but I want to use this opportunity to tell you to please worry a lot about the title of your piece! Your title is what we see first in our Submittable queue. If you haven’t seen a Submittable home page from the reader and editor side, it is just a list of names and titles. It’s human nature for the eye to scan the titles and for some to pop out. In fact, there are many times readers and editors read out of chronological order simply because a title is particularly appealing. They are curious about it. It’s a lot like going to a restaurant; if the plate put down in front of you looks appetizing, your mouth starts to water.
A bland title or a title that sounds like a thesis statement is one sure way to lose readers from the get-go, while a strong title will cause readers to warmly open your piece. A title does not have to be loud or long or sexy to stand out. Quiet titles can work too. But I do like a title to add a layer of meaning to the piece, to feel like opening a door, or to spark curiosity. Here are some from our archives that I love:
“Ymelda’s Infinite Eels”
“Submechanophobia, or the Feminine Urge to Be an Airplane On the Lakebed”
“His Petrol Smell”
“Yellow Mama, Take Me Home”
“Cruising in the Motor City”
“You Walk up to the Park and There’s One Chinese Guy”
“Ghazal for my Gay Ass”
“Vegetable Condominiums”
“Belly Aquarium”
“How to Win a Knife Fight”
“37 Ways to Clean Cum From a Suede Shirt”
“We’ve Got War to Cover”
“I Thought I Gave Up My Virginity to a Pretty Ricky Song But That’s Not the Point”
“Catching Babies”
I hope you found this little post helpful! I promise that we have never rejected a submission because of its cover letter. Thanks so much for sending your work to Split Lip! We look forward to reading you.
___
Maureen Langloss (@maureenlangloss.bsky.social) is a lawyer-turned-writer living in New York City. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Split Lip Magazine, and her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Her writing has been named a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories, received the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize in Prose, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Find her online at maureenlangloss.com.