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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38265
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38265
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You're only half right. You seem to have forgotten these people are in business to make money by selling works, so the cover letter does two things for them that have nothing to do with your story in particular: They help them filter out submissions that have a lower probability of earning money.

A cover letter given short shrift can put them off, they expect a description of the story, not

> I wrote a horror / scifi story of 20,000 words. I can't explain it, I'm not good enough to write a compelling pitch for it, and I think it should stand on its own merits anyway. May I send it?

Of course that is exaggerated, but it sounds like the message they will get.

An author with no publication history really is a bigger gamble, and you are correct: A magazine that publishes 50,000 words is not going to devote 20,000 words to a newbie without a compelling reason, and if you are too haughty to give them one in the cover letter, they throw you in the assistant's pile of things to reject.

These people get about 100 times more inquiries than they could possibly represent, they have to manage their time. I've heard some say they will toss an inquiry into the reject pile at the first typo they see. They use your cover letter to judge whether you are a good risk. Your publication history IS relevant, to them. Their job is not to coddle artists, their job is to find art that will sell and make them money; and the more difficult you are to work with, the less forthcoming you are, the less they want to work with you.

Understand your place in the world; only **_proven_** commercial successes get to be prima donnas, the ones that have sold millions of dollars worth of books.

The agents and publishers do not have the **_time_** to read every story submitted, but they will at least _start_ to read your cover letter, and if you can't write a good one of those, that's where they stop, because they may have to sort through dozens of cover letters to get to one that grabs their attention and makes them think "this could sell."

Original score: 8