How To Write The Best Cover Letter To Submit With Personal Essays For Publication In Literary Journals

Want to get your personal essays published in literary journals? Then your first step — after polishing your creative nonfiction to perfection, of course — is to write a great cover letter. Writing the best cover letter for your personal essays and other creative nonfiction is not as complicated as you might think!

HELPFUL HINT: Short nonfiction pieces submitted to literary journals are referred to as personal essays, not memoirs. A memoir is a book-length work of creative nonfiction.

Why Do Literary Magazine Editors Ask For Cover Letters?

Most editors at literary journals require cover letters from writers who are submitting creative nonfiction for publication. When done right, cover letters offer editors information that helps them with…

· keeping submissions organized;

· getting to know the writer who is making the submission;

· publishing an author bio if a personal essay is accepted for publication.

That said, some literary magazine staffers rely on submission managers (online forms) to organize manuscripts. Writers can be prompted to upload a file containing a cover letter for their personal essay, or the submission manager might be built with fields that essentially require the same information that appears in a cover letter — you just cut and paste the appropriate parts of your cover letter into the corresponding fields.

Occasionally, writers discover editors who don’t want to see any kind of cover letter, with no information beyond contact information. But this is rare.

What’s The Difference Between Submitting A Cover Letter To A Traditional Magazine Vs. Submitting To A Literary Magazine?

Articles that appear in glossy commercial magazines and on large corporate websites must often be pitched to editors — as opposed to simply being sent over in their entirety with a cover letter. An editor at a large magazine or news website usually won’t read an unsolicited personal essay. Writers who want to pitch an essay to a publication like Time Magazine need to create a pre-pitch email that’s intriguing, memorable, and…