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]
