When submitting a story to Dagan Books, authors often make one of several common errors, not in the story itself, but in the accompanying email. While these mistakes rarely mean an immediate rejection, they may affect the final decision if the story was already in danger of being rejected.

1) No cover letter at all. We sometimes get emails which simply include an attachment, and no other information whatsoever. Given the possibility of malware, we are considering no longer even opening these orphan attachments.

2) Incorrect Subject Line. We ask that writers use a specific subject line on their emails because we get submissions on more than one project at a time, and we want to keep track. By ignoring our guidelines or refusing to to follow them, you run the risk of your submission being mis-filed, which means an otherwise good story may not get published. If the guidelines ask for [PROJECT NAME] “Title”, LastName then that’s what you should use.

3) Pointing Out You Aren’t Following The Guidelines But We Should Buy Your Story Anyway. We’ve gotten several of these for our most recently anthology, and there are two examples which stick out…

I understand in your guidelines that you are only looking for [REQUIREMENT]. My story unfortunately breaks this rule. I do care that you take your
guidelines seriously, but still hope my work will be considered.

or …

While my story doesn’t actually meet your requirements at all, my main character is interesting/special/wonderful, and that might just qualify her for your anthology.

4) Pointing Out You’re Not Sure It’s Good/Right.

I tried to do it in a [Insert Famous Writer]-fashion. Tried for pretty sounding.

Tried, but you don’t think you succeeded?

 I wrote this short story but am not sure if it will fit with the collection.

Then why are you submitting it?

I have to admit I had some difficulty in coming up with an idea for this anthology. I knew I wanted to use the story of [Mythology] in some fashion but all of my early attempts were, how shall I put it, horrible. Really, not worth the bits the words on the screen were made of.

We understand, as writers ourselves, that being a bit nervous about a submission is natural, but you don’t need to tell us what you were “going for”, expecially if you’re not sure you reached that goal. We should be able to understand and enjoy your story without explanation, and we can decide for ourselves whether it works. Taking self-depreciation too far might cast doubt on your story for the reader, when otherwise it might have been accepted without question, and we don’t think that’s what you’re going for.

5) Not a Cover Letter, But a Query, Sort of. A query is when you write to a publisher to ask whether a story which does not quite meet their guidelines could still be considered. Some examples of this are asking if a 4300 word story could be considered if the cut-off is 4000, or asking to submit a day late due to a religious holiday. Some authors don’t want to risk having a story tied up in the queue unless they’re certain it’s going to accepted, and so will send a synopsis of the story and ask if we’d be “interested”. Unfortunately, there’s no way to say for certain whether a story (as long as it meets our guidelines) would be accepted or not without actually reading it. If you look at your story and it has all the elements we asked for and you feel it would be a good fit for that project, the only advice we can give you is, “Send it in and let us decide.”

6) Sneaking In A Different Submission Altogether.

Since you’re accepting short stories about fish, I thought you’d like to see my website / novel excerpt / one-act play.

No. No, we wouldn’t.

If you’re unsure of what makes a good cover letter, this is one possibility:

Author Name / Pen name (always state if you’re using one, and definitely specify which is which)

Date

Greeting (Dear Editor is fine, using our names is nice too, as long as you get them right; Dear Sir is probably a poor choice for a project edited by two women):

I have attached my submission for the X Anthology, “Title Of Story”. It is XXXX words long and has not been previously published.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Author Name

Please note: this isn’t meant as a rule, only an example of what many authors use when submitting to us.