Simplicity In Your Literary Submission Letter Is Key(Especially For Short Stories) And Here’s Why

In my last couple of articles, I touched on a special website that promotes hundreds of publishing houses and magazines looking for countless stories you can submit to/get paid for (Click here for the link back to that article). I also discussed some of the odd quirks found on their website in this article, to help you navigate it. Today’s post does continue with helping you improve your chances of acceptances on that site, but it’s also something that can benefit you down the road when a publisher reaches out to you. Because if you keep working hard, polishing your manuscripts, and NEVER STOP SENDING OUT YOUR STORIES, then you will make it as a published writer for sure. It’s all one step at a time(I know, I hate the ‘patience is virtue’ crap too. Why can’t hurry the f*** up by virtuous also? Well, that’s why I’m here!) For today’s lesson, lets work on your submission letter.

For those of you just starting out in the writing world, a submission letter is the small email or letter you write to a publishing house/magazine interested in story submissions. This is where you are suppose to be direct and keep ZERO secrets from the editor. They are, after all, deciding if your book is good enough for publication. No sense it hiding secrets ‘until the end’ if the publisher isn’t interested to make that far. And before you say anything, no your manuscript isn’t good enough that keeping secrets will be ‘worth it’ in the end. Be straight forward here, I promise no one will steal your ideas. These publications are all legitimate, and wouldn’t want to lose their image by stealing. Plus, why steal when you can pay to have the real deal? Duh.

I’m sure a lot of you are wondering why a self-published author of steampunk romance and a #3 daily bestseller of Steampunk/alt-history is discussing submission letters to publishing houses? Well, that’s easy to answer: I wasn’t only a self-published author when I began. Although my novels were self-published, I still used Ralan (the’Unknown’ paying website I discuss here and in this article) as a side hustle to promote my larger pieces. In order to do that, I needed to make sure that not only were my stories edited to perfection, but that my submission letters were trim, direct, and held enough to captivate any editor reading it.

Allow my to start off by saying this: a submission letter is VERY DIFFERENT than a query letter. A query letter is often for larger books, where you are required to tell every important part of your story in about 1–2 pages. I will touch on this in later articles. I figure, though, we focus on submission letters first, since they are smaller and a simpler version of queries.

If you are writing a query letter for any publisher on Ralan’s website links(read this post for an insight to the genres they look for), or other similar freelance markets, take my advice from almost a decade of submitting manuscripts: Keep it short. That means: not even adding tag lines or descriptors to your email. In many cases, the publishers on Ralan will kick your email back and ask you to remove it. Or worse, they’ll delete your email before reading your story. Editors are sticklers for these rules. And can you blame them? Imagine how many stories they must get during the day? That’s including the ones unedited(which I know is something you won’t do, right?), didn’t follow format, or emailed the wrong file type(pay attention to that very carefully). Imagine how an editor yearns for a cleaned up manuscript and submission letter? I bet they’d be so proud to see someone following protocol, that they’d read your story just out of appreciation! You could be that writer, if you wanted to be. So why not give it a shot? You still might not get accepted, but it betters your chances, doesn’t it?

LESS IS MORE! I gave the simple answer of how to write a query letter in a prior post, but here is where I’ll go into a bit more depth with it.

Introductions kept simple: Once you click on a publisher’s link from Ralan, you will usually end up on their ‘Submission’s’ page. Here, you can be clean-cut and say “Dear Editors of ‘Magazine name here’,” which is completely acceptable. But, if you want to appear a bit more likable by the editors; do some digging on the site. You might find the name of an editor slipped into an article or on they ‘about us’ page. If you do find an editors name, use it in your introduction! That way it proves you did a little bit of research, and took the extra moment to appreciate someone’s work(which they’ll most likely return the kind gesture by reading your story).

All these magazines and publishers know they’re on Ralan, they expect you to send stories in all directions, that’s what makes such a healthy market right now nowadays(And if you have checked out Ralan.com, you know that’s true)! Know that editors do like seeing you took the time to learn more about them and their publications. That sort of courtesy goes a long way for them(they love their magazine the way you love writing).

Basics are Best for the Body: Introduce yourself. You don’t need anything more than your name here. Sometimes you will need to give a full bio of yourself, but that’s usually in the website’s submission instructions. Next, give the title and word count of your story, that way the editor knows what to expect with it. Sometimes magazines have different submissions open for multiple genres, so this will help keep the editor on track with what they need. (Remember, helping the editors stay organized makes them happy, which means, they’ll be happy to read your story.)

Again, doing a little can show a lot! This submission’s letter shouldn’t deviate much as you send it magazine to magazine. This is something every publisher on Ralan knows. So, I always take the effort to add a little line at the end, showing I took an extra second for them. Usually its: ‘I think my story would be a great addition to your ‘Magazine name’s’ publication.”

See what I just did there? By adding a sentence that states the magazine you’re emailing, you’re showing you did more than copy+paste a message beneath the “Dear Editor’s of,” line.

Make sure you know how they want the story in your email! Publishers and magazines work with a bunch of different document files. They will usually ask you to attach your story by PDF or RTF, or even paste it into the body of the email. Make sure to read their instructions!

I only repeat this ‘read the instructions’ stuff because I don’t want your ace story knocked aside due to you not looking at their requirements. I apologize if it’s a bit much.

Be sincere with your farewell. I’m serious. Just say ‘Sincerely…your name here’. They’re not your friends, and you want to keep an image of a respectful writer who can conduct business.(I hope)

At the end, it should look something like this(this is the letter I used to get accepted into Bete Noir’s magazine with my story ‘Wulver of the Highlands’:

Dear Editors of Bete Noire,

My name is Kyle Newton. Attached, please find my 2400 word short-story, ‘Wulver of the Highlands,’ which I believe will be of interest to the readers of Bete Noire’s ‘Haunted Edition,’ magazine. Thank you for your time, I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Kyle Newton

I know this article appears long and drawn out for only a few sentences, and I apologize if it came off this way. But, my first dozen or so stories were dismissed for poor craft of my submission’s letter. Once improved upon, with help from my writing mentor, I started seeing a turn around in acceptances! So, rather than wasting your first few efforts finding the sweet-spot on how to write these letters, borrow mine.

• **Final Note! I’m not going to promise instant success here. It still took two or three stories to be dismissed before this letter found an acceptance. Once it did though, I noticed about 1/3 of my stories were getting picked up by publishers. That may not sound like much, but as I stated in a previous post: these publishers pay 3–9 cents/word. That means a single 2,000 word story can land you a $180 paycheck! Trust me, do that three or four times, and you’ll have your side-hustle built in no time. And if you really push yourself, you can do this full-time. My former writing mentor and friend, Gregory Norris(Star Trek Voyager & M/M romance author), now writes to Ralan publishers as his main source of income. You can too, but it takes a while to build the audience.

So go out there, send your stories to countless publishers and I hope to be published alongside you one day! If you have any questions, message me, or check out my other articles discussing Ralan, so far. Don’t forget to ‘clap’ this article and follow me to stay tuned for more posts just like this!

Kyle Newton lives in New Hampshire, where he writes steampunk adventures/erotica short stories in his caboose-turned home(because it doesn’t get much more steampunk than that!). He is the current, two-time winner of Mount Washington Cog Railway’s ‘Steampunk Author of New Hampshire,” award. Once for his #3 Daily bestseller novella, ‘Revolution’s Reign,’ and the following year for his steampunk romance(later-turned erotica) short stories, the “Penny Punkers” series. His ‘non-erotica’ steampunk stories can be found on Medium.