Sillybean

Cover letters for asshats

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has found some really dreadful advice on writing cover letters:

Tip Four: Still worried? Never published anything? Lie a little. Yes, lie. A cover letter is a persuasive document designed to do one thing: entice an editor or agent to read your manuscript. Say whatever you have to, within reason, to accomplish this. No publication credits? Write the words “West Coast Fiction Review” on a piece of paper, staple it to one of your stories, and boom, you’ve just been published in West Coast Fiction Review. Is there such a publication? Not that I know of, but it sure sounds impressive. ...

DON‘T EVER DO THIS. ...

Tip Six: Never, never, never list the word count. Not even on short stories. It’s says, HACK, in bold letters. It is a lie perpetuated by Writer’s Digest Books. No one cares about the exact word count. Editors and agents can see that a 300 page manuscript is, well, a 300 page manuscript.

Is he insane? Of course you should mention the wordcount. Three hundred manuscript pages from Darren Rhett Bird, who uses proportionally spaced type in a small point size, and scants his margins and leading, contain between two and two and a half times as many words as the same number of manuscript pages from Joan Skriftlode, who prints out her pages using twelve-point Courier in a canonical manuscript format. This variability undoubtedly accounts for our otherwise inexplicable habit of saying WE WANT TO KNOW THE WORDCOUNT.

(via BoingBoing)