What's a cover letter actually for? I'm not asking for the usual tips and tricks on how to make one; I'm more confused about what people are doing with them on the other end. How long does someone spend with one? What are they using it to determine? Is it preparing them for how to read the story, or is it filling in for parts of it so they can read through it faster? (I mean, yes, I don't want to write them. But I also want to know why someone wants/needs them on the other end. The tips and tricks never seem to convey much of that.)
Okay; let's start with the very basics, then move on to what you're curious about.
What I was taught about this (and I have a memory of my agent nodding with approval when he heard it) was as follows:
All your cover letter needs to do is announce to your intended recipient who you are and what you're enclosing with the letter, with the very VERY briefest description of the contents of the enclosure itself... and then to express the hope that your intended reader at that agency will enjoy it.
Job done. Sign it and send everything off. That is all you need, and all that anybody at the agency end wants to see. Your brief description of what you're submitting will let them know how to move forward from there.
We'll come back to the "what are they getting out of this?" issue momentarily. But let me touch on a couple of small but important details here:
Don't just send a letter to an agency or a publisher. Find the name of the specific person you want to be sending it to. (And one of the pages I'll recommend to you [and everybody else] in a bit begs you to spell their name correctly. You'd think this would be a small thing that everybody would get right, but... no. )
And also: Carefully read the agent's or agency's or publisher's page about what kind of material they're looking for (and what they're not looking for). Sometimes they'll even tell you exactly what they want to see in a cover letter. Ignore such instructions at your peril.
That goes to the heart of the "what's all this for?" question. And the simplest answer is:
The way you handle your cover letter helps the agent determine whether you're likely to be worth the time they may be about to spend dealing with you.
Agents are a very specific type of creative (many of them are also writers: mine certainly is...) and they have the same dread of wasting time that all the rest of us have. The way you handle a cover letter reveals to them some very basic things about you that will affect whether an agent or publisher wants to deal with you any further.
Think of the cover letter's part in this evaluation process as your reaction to being presented with an entry-level sieve featuring pretty wide holes. If you can't make it through those holes, you may well be deemed to not be worth the agent's time. The cover letter is your chance to demonstrate whether you can make it through the initial (and easiest) level of the sieve.
And the most important of the issues your potential agent is "sieving for" may simply be this:
Can you follow instructions / directions?
Publishing is full of situations that have to proceed/unfold in a certain way, or in a certain order, to succeed. Your cover letter—how it looks, how it's addressed, what it contains, what comes with it—will give your potential agent, publisher or editor a vital initial sense of where you fall on the following-directions spectrum. For example:
Have you actually read the agency's or agent's info on what they're looking for? (Because if your cover letter makes it plain that you haven't, or if you've responded as if you haven't, you're already in trouble. This may involve genre-based limitations (don't want SF or mystery, do want romance, don't want a specific kind of fantasy the field's glutted with at the moment, etc etc...). Or it may involve something length-oriented or structural. Is your correspondent asking for, let's say, a specific kind of "partial"—three chapters and an outline used to be typical—but you've sent them a whole novel instead? Uh oh. Not good.
Does the tone or content of your cover letter suggest that you think you're the next [fill in the name of currently-hot writer]? Calmly-expressed self-confidence is one thing: overexcited declarations of your fabulous talent are something else. Come across as any kind of a prima donna, and you may invoke a bout of agentic eyerolling that will deep-six your chances.
So even in so short a thing as the introductory part of a cover letter should be, tone is an issue. And now comes the next layer of the sieve. where the hole you have to slip through gets significantly smaller.
Does your very, VERY brief description of your enclosure make your letter-reader more interested in reading it, or less?
This is where stuff gets tough, and where even the most experienced of us could well spend hours laboring over a single paragraph. I'm sitting here thinking "How can I concentrate into a single paragraph the necessary information about a single book that will create enough interest, both in the content and in my voice, to make someone want to read it who'd never heard of me before?" ...And the concept unquestionably makes me break out in a sweat. Because this isn't easy to do... and is still so revealing, even if the writer doesn't pull it off.
With all the above in mind, the answer to the question "How long will they spend with my cover letter?" is, "Only as much time as it takes to work out whether you've passed the test or flunked it."
...So let me play a hand of this game. Here's a cover letter.
That looks straightforward enough, yeah? For something written in about ten minutes, it's not too bad. It accurately sums up the novel in not too many words (84, I think, for that one long paragraph), the tone is quirky but otherwise neutral, and hopefully leaves the reader thinking "Okay, what happens next?"
...It is, however, a definite fail on one minor and one major count.
The minor one is that the author (perhaps obsessing over lamb recipes again...) has neglected to mention her email address or phone number in the cover letter. ALWAYS let your correspondent have email / phone contact info for you in your cover letter document, and on the cover page of the PDF of the work you're submitting. Addresses and contact info do get lost in busy agencies. It lies with you to make sure that doesn't happen to your query, by providing contact info in every appropriate place that you can. The appearance of a letter without this basic necessary info could very well get the query immediately tossed without a second thought: who needs the extra effort involved in tracking down this person's mail info? Honestly.
More to the point, though, when reading the agent''s own info page at their website, you need to make sure that person is actually accepting queries... and Don's page expressly and explicitly says that for the last year, he's "permanently closed to queries except by referral or invitation." So egregious a Failure To Read And/Or Follow Instructions is almost certainly going to get that query tossed. (shrug) Them's the breaks. Hopefully next time this author'll be more careful.
So the best advice about cover letters is: slow down, take your time, don't leave out anything important. And polish that sentence or two of description of your work until it shines... because it will do 90% of that letter's work.
...Now let me add a couple of links to good pages that deal with other points.
"The Perfect Cover Letter" at JaneFriedman.com
The Perfect Covering Letter with Literary Agent Simon Trewin
...In any case: hope this has been some help. :)
