Dear Sirs: A Cover Letter No-No
Posted by David Duhr in 
During the five or so years I worked at Fringe Magazine I was the only dude on staff. Fringe was created by an immensely talented band of women who were tired of, among other things, the attention heaped on the writings of so many white male writers (particularly the dead ones).
Fringe’s first theme issue was Feminism.
So when a literary journal is staffed almost exclusively by women, and is particularly interested in matters related to gender, addressing a submission to “Dear Sirs” is like shooting yourself right in the ol’ onions.
But that’s what many, many dozens of writers did during my tenure there. I don’t have hard evidence to back up the following assertion, but I’m fairly confident in saying that we accepted 0% of them.
I don’t want to overstate their importance; rare are the instances when a writer is rejected solely on the basis of his or her cover letter. But! Not rare are the instances when a writer’s cover letter will color the reading he or she receives. If you piss off an editor before that editor even opens your submission, you’re immediately playing from behind.
It’s a pretty simple lesson, but an important one: Know your masthead.
Three Traits to Avoid
The “Dear Sirs” example shows three traits that you must not exhibit if you want your submission to be taken seriously:
1) Presumption and prejudice. Whether the writer believes it or doesn’t, the message “Dear Sirs” sends is, “I assume that men are in charge of this magazine. Men should be in charge of everything.” Two words in and the writer has already marked himself a poor candidate for publication. (And life.)
2) A total lack of familiarity with the magazine to which you’re submitting. I’m not going to approach the whole debate about how lots of magazines urge you not to submit unless you’ve read that magazine, and how writers reply by saying that they have neither the time nor the money to read all these journals.
But you need at least a passing knowledge of the magazine, and you need to know that your story, your poem, your whatever, is appropriate for it. Send your sci-fi to Asimovs’, your mystery to Ellery Queen’s. Don’t send to Work Magazine a piece about the time you were a kid and your dad broke your bicycle. Don’t send your poetry to Fiction Magazine, don’t send your fiction to Poetry Magazine. And don’t send your “Dear Sirs” letter to a magazine run by women. Don’t send your “Dear Madams” letter to a magazine run by men.
3) You don’t respect, or care enough about, your submission to do the small amount of research required.
It’s like a thirty-second, four-step process:
- Surf to a World Wide Web search engine such as Google.com
- Type in the name of the magazine and the word “masthead”
- Click the offered link
- Read that shit
If you can’t even bother to do that, then you may as well just address your cover letter “Dear Whoever-the-Hell” and call it a day.
Can’t find a masthead? Then a simple “Dear Editor” is always welcome.
Negative Attention is … A Negative
All writers know that getting published is torturous, thankless, often humiliating work. But editors know this as well. And more often than not, they sympathize. This is partly because most editors are writers, too.
Look, all an editor really wants to learn from a cover letter is whether you respect the publication and whether you respect your own work. So at the very least, do the small amount of homework it takes to illustrate that respect.
And never (never never never) call negative attention to yourself. Particularly in the salutation.
Discussion & Further Reading
Editors: What are some of your cover letter pet peeves? email. And/or tell us about a time a cover letter made you read a submission with a jaundiced eye. Let us know in the comments below.
Writers: Any cover letter-related questions? Shout ’em out below or drop us an email.
And if you’re in need of a weekly (and tasty!) writing treat, subscribe to our email list, either in your right-hand sidebar or by ticking the “Join” box beneath your comment.
For some (much more cutting and perhaps NSFW) dos and don’ts, consider reading:
“Thou Shalt Not Piss Off the Editor”
And a popular blast from the past, “Worst. Advice. Ever.”
WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is books editor and fiction editor at the Texas Observer and contributes regularly to the Dallas Morning News, Publishing Perspectives, the Observer and others.
Why are the dont’s always more fun than the dos? I can’t believe writers do these things. Dear Sirs belongs in the 80s. Unless you’re writing to an NFL team or something.
The web abounds with NFL potshots. Too easy.
Remind me not to get stuck next to you on a transatlantic flight.
(That’s for PJ, not Les. “Les Izmore.” Haha.)
Thanks for reading and commenting, Les.
The don’ts are definitely more colorfully illustrative. It’s hard to inject any humor or bewilderment into a “Here’s how to write a cover letter” article.
Next week we’ve got another post lined up with some more don’ts, so make sure to check back.
Yes, automatic rejection in that situation. And probably many others.
I guess I don’t mind a “Dear Sir” if it’s specifically addressed to me, but it’s better to use a name. And if you don’t have a name, use something gender-neutral. Nothing’s wrong with “Dear Editor.”
My biggest peeve as an editor: writers sending a submission on like Tuesday and then writing back on Thursday to ask if I’ve made a decision.
Thanks for weighing in, Dustin. Yeah, always best to go with a “Dear Editor,” or “Dear Fiction/Poetry [etc.] Editor,” rather than make guesses. Between writers begging for responses after a day or two and some editors taking a year or more to reply, there has to be some middle ground. Somewhere. But I get it. When I send in my own writing, I itch for a response. If I send something in on a Tuesday, sure, I want to hear back by Thursday. But! Spending equal time as a writer and as an editor gives me (and you, I imagine)… Read more »
You all almost lost me with the dead male writer thing; aren’t we all really sick of these online gender debates on the Internet? Hating dead white guys is very 2004. But I read on. Not that this content is new info. Before sending something for publication, know the publication. Isn’t it rule number 1? I’ve been a writer and editor for 35 years and have been preaching that rule for the same amount of time. Good tips for a beginner maybe. Also, spell your name right in your cover letter.
Thanks for stopping by, PJ. Re the dead white writers thing, note that I’m not trying to spark some sort of debate, but rather providing necessary background info in laying the foundation for the post. Regardless of your (or my) take on the matter, it was one of the tenets (a minor one) upon which the magazine was founded. Which is why I included it; it’s pertinent to the discussion. As to your other point, yes, knowing the publication is an important rule. It’s also one that not all beginners/novices are familiar with. (Hell, not even all experienced writers seem… Read more »
OK, so I won’t write Dear Sirs in a salute, if editors start responding to submissions in a not absurd amount of time. deal? :)
I think my questions would be why do editors want cover letters? What if all submissions were anonymous and the writings judged only on their own merits, and not on name recognition or amount of publications on the writers cv. Wouldn’t that lead to better contents.
Thanks for reading, Anon. Your point about the “amount of publications” on a CV is well-timed, as next week we’re running a post where I (in part) cover that very thing. So make sure to check back for that. I’d be curious to know how large a role cover letters play in editorial decisions. If a magazine can only publish one story (poem, essay, what have you) and they have two pieces they like equally, and just cannot make up their minds, do they look at the cover letters? And if so, what information on the cover letters informs that… Read more »
This a much bigger problem if you’re writing a business letter and you have no idea who will read it. Although
“Dear sir or madam, as the case may be:”
could be mildly amusing in a sitcom, there’s really no good way to handle this situation.
“To whom it may concern:”
sounds like some kind of legal action is impending. I’ve had to finesse it by leaving the salutation off completely, which makes it pretty abrupt.
Yes, I can see that being a bigger problem in business correspondence. I doubt there’s a biz blanket equivalent to “Dear Editor.”
Other options:
Dear ?
Dear [picture your name here]
Dear Gentleperson
Oddly enough, I don’t usually read the cover letters until after I read the submissions. This is a particular quirk of Submittable, which let you read the submission first, and then click over to read the cover letter if you care to. So I don’t get a lot of “Dear Sirs” in the slush pile, but I DO get quite a number of them in my inbox from unsolicited folks who are unauthorized to be darking my virtual doorstep. That being said, I really fuckin’ hate being addressed “Dear Sir.” Particularly when my email address makes it pretty damn clear… Read more »
Thanks for reading and commenting, friend. A pleasure to see you back here. I am enjoying imagining some of your responses to “Dear Sir.” I think you and “Anon” would get along, as he/she (sir? madam?) is calling for writing to be judged based solely on its own merits, rather than having decisions influenced at all by cover letters. Again, I’m curious to know how big a role they actually play. Some editors probably never look at them. Others take them into consideration when reading the submission. I like the idea of looking at a cover letter only after reading… Read more »
I’m sure that it varies from editor to editor. Personally, I’d prefer that they did read the cover letter; but I don’t run the zoo. I can’t really understand the logic of not reading it. If the letter were well composed and to the point, I’d be inclined to invest more time in the submission itself. If the letter were written in Crayola by an obviously self-important blatherskite, I would probably just skim the submission — at most. If I, myself, were writing a cover letter for a submission, it wouldn’t occur to me to put a CV in it.… Read more »
“If the letter were well composed and to the point, I’d be inclined to invest more time in the submission itself. If the letter were written in Crayola by an obviously self-important blatherskite, I would probably just skim the submission — at most.” Exactly! That’s why they’re so important; they don’t make the decision for an editor, but they definitely inform the decision. “I know that If I got a rejection letter from an editor, I would respond with a thank you note.” I can’t recall receiving many (any?) of these. What I do recall is receiving, in response to… Read more »
Re: critiquing a submission If I were in your shoes I, too, would be very reluctant to respond to a request for a critique. I’m sure that editors have enough to do; and there are also “editors for hire” that do it for a living. Although they’re more accurately described as “writing coaches”, there is a lot of confusion about the term “editor”. If you think about it, an editor might be the editor of a newspaper; a gatekeeper for a publisher; someone who compiles an author’s work; someone who “curates” an anthology; someone who redacts someone else’s work; or… Read more »
“If I rework this substantially, would you give it another look?”
I would respond, but I would almost certainly say no.
At Fringe, if we were interested in a story but it didn’t quite work for us as written, we’d ask the writer if she/he would be willing to do some revision.
Any writer who received a boilerplate rejection, we weren’t at all interested in his/her story.
As a writer too, I understand these impulses to follow up with questions. Having your writing rejected sucks.
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