Editor Interviews
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Read all the editors' answers to Duotrope's interview question: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you? Learn more.
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Here is a small sampling from our recent Editor Interviews. We have interviewed over 2,200 editors.
Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?
A: No cover letter or biographical information needed until one is requested if poem(s) accepted.
A: We want to know as much as the submitter feels comfortable disclosing. We do like to put emphasis on our submitters when publishing their work and will welcome and encourage submitters sharing more about their inspiration, their work and themselves, as well as their social media presence. We, likewise, respect our submitters desires regarding their identities, appearance of their persona in our publication and desires for anonymity.
We love cover letters where the submitters talk about their work and inspiration behind it.
We welcome previous publication credits, because we like our submitters proud of creating, showing their creations and talking about them.
A: I like to get some sense of who the writer is. The cover letter has almost nothing to do with whether a submission gets accepted or not, but it is the first impression — if it’s poorly written or full of typos, you have me going into your submission in a negative frame of mind.
Having short stories placed in respectable literary magazines is always taken as a good sign, but we are happy to publish someone with no publication credits if the work is good.
A: Cover letters can offer the editors insight that helps us see the context of work. Long lists of publications don’t sway us, though knowing someone has been published before never hurts. But we’re also interested in writers who have never been published before. Telling us what compelled them to write or why or when they got started might be more intriguing than a long list of previous publications.
A: We do ask for an author bio in the cover letter field, as place and identity matter to us! Author bio can be as simple as “Anne Carson lives in Canada,” although frankly we hope for a little more.
Feel free to list other publications! Moist does love first time submitters, and throws a party when we publish someone’s first poem.
A: While we value cover letter that provides short biographical details, it is not mandatory. Request will be made for one upon selection. However, a list of previous publication details holds no value at Lunaris Review.
A: A brief cover letter is always appreciated, and previous publication credits are welcome but not necessary. You can certainly be a first-time author for 'Vector.'
A: All we need is your contact and a brief bio. Forget cover letters. We are interested in what you have sent us today.
A: A cover letter is always nice since we receive email submissions, but a bio is totally optional. Even then, we usually don't look at bios until after we've made a determination on a piece. Whatever the case, we aren't going to publish anything based on an author's or an artist's bio. If it's not a right fit for us, it's not a right fit.
A: We don't need much information about the author -- I don't care what pets you have or how many kids or that you lived in Texas before moving to Arizona. If you have publication credits, it's worth mentioning, since it means other editors have judged your work worthy of publication before, which makes it more likely that I'll feel the same way. (A lack of credits doesn't mean your work isn't publication-worthy, but the existence of credits, especially from impressive publishers, might suggest it is.) If other authors whose work I know and admire have had positive things to say about your writing, that can be good to know -- they might have said those things as a personal favor or out of kindheartedness, but they might legitimately have thought your work was outstanding, so it can't hurt to share if they said that. If you have personal expertise that's relevant to the subject matter of your book, that can sometimes be interesting to know -- "I wrote a novel about a jewel heist and I've spent 20 years working in Interpol to foil exactly this sort of heist" or "...and I'm the world's leading expert on gems and minerals" or whatever. But mostly a book needs to speak for itself, so no need to spend too much time crafting a biography for the cover letter.
A: We prefer a cover letter that addresses the editors and includes a list of poems that are being submitted. Publication credits don't matter to us UNLESS you have 2 more full-length books. We only publish emerging writers (anyone who has no more than one full length book).
A: Nope! Formal education, publication credits, and awards are not required. We value voices from all backgrounds and ages, and we would love it if The Seraphic Review was an emerging writer's first publication! Oftentimes, the most meaningful works we read come from young writers trying to make sense of the world through language, and that's just what we're looking for.