Example of a Cover Letter for a Media Kit

Hooray. I am almost finished editing the second edition of The Frugal Editor to be released in January.  I ran across this sample letter in the Appendix and thought it appropriate to get some writers started out on the right foot for their 2015 marketing campaigns.  Here it is, but four other examples of query and cover letters are available right now in the e-book edition.

 

A cover letter is very similar to a query letter except that it introduces a media kit or some other marketing material or enclosure like a manuscript requested by an agent. A query asks for something specific, like representation or media coverage. (See Appendix Five for samples of queries.)

If you know or have spoken to whomever you are contacting, your cover letter may be friendly and, depending on your personal style, you may use a first name. If this is a first contact, use the person’s proper title (Mr., Mrs., Ms. Miss), but avoid stiff formality unless you perceive an overwhelming reason to maintain a strictly formal tone. A cover letter uses the Times New Roman font (12 point). It is single-spaced and one page only.

Notice the sample cover letter below includes an invitation to an event mention at the end of the letter. It is both polite and smart marketing to invite members of the media to be part of your plans. Find more information on what to include and avoid in Chapter Five “Dangerous Corners Ahead: Covers and Queries.”

These two examples of cover letters and all but one of the examples of query letters I include in Appendix Five are for fiction rather than nonfiction. Generally speaking, it is easier for authors to find the right information and tone to sell and promote nonfiction. Fiction writers often need a little extra guidance, but ideas from all the examples can be applied to both fiction and nonfiction.

SAMPLE COVER LETTER FOR A MEDIA KIT

As you can see, this cover letter serves as a query letter as well because it tells the contact exactly what the author is hoping might come from the communication.

 [A professional letterhead goes here or that information becomes part of your signature if you use e-mail.]
Date: xxx

Contact’s name, e-mail, Web site address, and street address or post office box address

Dear Marilee,

It has been a while since we spoke about your reviewing my book, This Is the Place. As you can see, it is a bit late, but July 1st is now AmErica House’s release date. Since we spoke, This Is the Place won Sime-Gen.com’s Reviewers’ Choice Award in their mainstream category. Nominations are made by reviewers nationwide. I hope you can find a spot for an interview in your busy radio schedule.

I am a journalist who got lost for about forty years. I conceived an idea for a novel when I was writing for my high school newspaper; it gestated through my years as a staff writer at the Salt Lake Tribune, Good Housekeeping, my years as a publicist, and for about four decades doing various things after that kept me from writing.
 

Many, including the editors at the Los Angeles Daily News, have found my writing a book at an age when most are considering retirement an interesting news angle. At the age of sixty-two I found a publisher, several of my short stories placed in the finals of national literary contests, I completed my first screenplay, and I started to study writing again at UCLA and several universities in Europe.
 

That This Is the Place tells the stories of four generations of Utah women, from the 1800s to the 1950s, makes it of particular interest to western history buffs and those who like women’s literature. Its premise is that intolerance can be corrosive even when it is cloaked in family, love, and community.

This Is the Place’s release date coincides with the burgeoning interest in Utah as the 2002 Winter Olympics approach.
 

I am enclosing a media kit and an unedited review copy of my novel (with a generic cover). If there is anything else I can do for you, please let me know. I have headshots, a jpeg file of my book cover and other assorted promotional materials you might need. My first official reading and signing will be at Vroman’s on Thursday, July 26, at 7 p.m. and I would love to see you there.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Encs: 2

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor .

Getting Submission Protocol Right

This is from the regular Q&A a la Ann Landers column in my SharingwithWriters newsletter. I used to edit her column (make it fit into available space) when I was a staff writer for The Salt Lake Tribune back in the days of the dinosaurs and love this format for learning about life--and that includes just about everything. (-:

Getting Submission Protocol Right

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Question:

Dearest Carolyn, I am designing a new business card to send to editors that will be attached to the top of my manuscripts when I submit them. I would like to know if the correct title under my name should be "Writer?" or "Novelist?" Thank you for your help. I appreciate it so much! Your newsletter was full of wonderful information. I enjoyed it and look forward to the next one with great anticipation!. Hope you are having a good week.

Sincerely, Kae Kleinman (student from Eve Caram's UCLA class).

Answer:

Kae, sounds as if you need The Frugal Book Promoter. Though a business card is OK, you need a cover letter or query letter with your manuscript and you didn't mention that. The Frugal Book Promoter or the chapter on query letters in The Frugal Editor (www.budurl.com/TheFrugalEditor) will keep you from doing something that will mark you as an amateur. I take it your book is a novel. You should follow each publisher's or agent's submission instructions exactly. That probably means you won't send the whole manuscript.

If you want to slip a card into the package, fine. But don't attach it to the manuscript. And, I'd use "novelist" if that's what you're shopping and not a whole range of genres which is  what the generic term "writer" connotes.

Having said that, you can probably get by without a business card--at least for this purpose. Maybe you'll want to wait for a bit. Say until you have a great Web site page or a blog that showcases your platform.

Hope this helps.

CHJ

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second ediction of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

Jim Cox Gives Writers the Inside Story on His Review Process

If you receive (and love!) the Midwest Review newsletter that gets delivered directly to your e-mail box as much as I do, you may disregard this post for you will have already read it. To all others, Jim Cox, trusted leader of Midwest Review, always has a valuable perspective on some aspect of publishing, in this case an aspect of our world that he probably knows more about than any other. Here is an excerpt from his letter. Read and take heed! (-:


Dear Publisher Folk, Friends & Family:

When I started my career as a book reviewer more than thirty years ago, I had the basics -- a desk, a bookshelf, a typewriter, a telephone, a rolodex with 60+ publisher's contact information, letterhead stationary, and a roll of stamps.

I worked part-time at what was pretty much the glorified hobby of a dedicated and life-long bookworm. I would get 2 or 3 packages of books a day and took the greatest delight in opening them up to see what was inside. It was pretty much Christmas Morning six days a week.

Now some 32 years later it's more like 30 to 50 packages a day coming into a mail room for one of my guys to open for me. So I thought I give a brief description of what happens to these books being submitted for review that now number about 2300 a month. Here's the process:

Basically when a book arrives in our mail room it is taken out of its packaging or box. The flattened out cardboard boxes and bags of packing material (foam chips and bubblewrap) are taken to a recycling center -- a trip which happens once a week.

The cover letters and publicity releases are placed physically inside the book. They are then piled in a carton with all the other titles to have arrived that day (and the numbers of books arriving on any given day will fill between two and four cartons).

These cartons of books are then taken to my office where their contents are piled on my desk. It's a very big 1950s era L-shaped steel secretarial desk that must weigh half a ton -- and th one enduring component that has been in my office from the beginning. Desktop computer systems and telephone systems have come and gone, but that big old desk is forever!

I then perform my daily literary triage and separate the books into three stacks: Rejection, Immediate Acceptance, and Provisional Acceptance.

The rejections are placed back into cartons to await their ultimate fate ranging from donation, to liquidation, to recycling centers. Those that are Immediately Accepted outright are set aside for their assigned reviewers. Those that are Provisionally Accepted are placed upon our bookshelves to await review assignment sometime within the next 14 to 16 weeks before they lose their eligibility for assignment and must be removed to make room for newly arrived review submissions.

So that's basically the daily process, Monday through Saturday.

A word about cover letters and publicity releases that absolutely must accompany a submitted book if it is to not be automatically rejected from consideration. The cover letter and the publicity release should both be printed out on business letterhead stationary. All too many self-published authors just jot down a note on plain paper, have no publicity release, or simply resort to a newspaper clipping in lieu of a formal PR.

As to what should be in those to essential documents and how they differ from each other, I've written it all down in simple, thoroughly 'user friendly' instructions that you will find on the Midwest Book Review website at:

Writing An Effective Cover Letter:
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bookbiz/advice/cvr-ltr.htm

Writing An Effective Publicity Release:
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bookbiz/advice/prelease.htm

Jim Cox
Midwest Book Review
Midwest Book Review
278 Orchard Drive, Oregon, WI, 53575

Note: It'd like to add that The Frugal Editor gives even more advice (and samples) on writing great query letters and my The Frugal Book Promoter gives the most complete information on putting together a media kit specifically designed for authors I've ever seen (if I do say so myself!).

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

Q&A a la Ann Landers: Using Tip Sheets to Promote

In The Frugal Book Promoter I talk about including a tip sheet in the media kit you send out to editors--particularly newspaper and magazine editors. I always get questions about the use of tip sheets. Perhaps Diana's questions and my answers will help you with the concept of tip sheets.


Diana Dodson Asks:

I recently sent you a copy of my, "Tip Sheet." I had told you that a paper had asked me for a press copy and we did not know what they meant by a “press copy.”. The paper wanted a copy of my book to look at.

CAROLYN COMMENTS:

I think we were both assuming they were referring to a ocpy of the tip sheet. Interesting how communication can get blurred.

Diana asks:

I did have another question though. I had thought about this when I was reading your book. If we sent tip sheets to newspapers, why would they necessarily want to use one, where they know nothing about the author or the book?

ANSWER:

For them to be interested, you want to make your tips something that would interest the public. Or the specific audience of the media you are submitting to. Example, one of my tip sheets is on “Everything You Wanted to Know about Utah but Were Afraid to Ask.” I only send it out right after there is a big brouhaha in the news about polygamy or some such thing. My book This Is the Place is set in Utah. So the tips aren't about the book but they are related to the book.

Diana asks:

Is there a form letter that should be included with the Tip Sheet?

ANSWER:

You may adapt the query letter examples I’ve given in both The Frugal Editor and The Frugal Book Promoter (they’re all a little different). You tailor them to become a query for your tip sheet. Remember, when you submit a tip sheet it is like any other submission, you are in effect ASKING for something to be published. Thus you would want to send along a query letter, not a cover letter. There is no possible way to provide templates or samples to cover all the exigencies for anything an author might submit for consideration to a variety of people including agents, editors and publishers. Thus, the samples in both books are templates and you will need to make them fit your different needs.


Diana asks:

Do you feel papers will put these in, even if they know nothing about you?

ANSWER:

When you write a query letter you let the editors know a little about you. Did you see the section on building relationships with editors in my book? If you submit releases, tips sheets, etc. often enough, eventually they WILL come to recognize you.

And, of course, the whole idea of tips sheets is that editors often need--really NEED--little fillers. So, if a tip sheet that might appeal to their audience comes along, they very well might use it, whether they know you or not. Don’t forget to tell them they can use it at no charge and be sure to include a 25 word or less credit line, usually only your name, the title of your book and maybe your e-mail or Web site.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor blog.

Selling Your Book The Way People Want to Buy It

Or Your Per Book Net Profit and What You Can Do About It

Stop Whining!

You know, about how much money you make per book.

If you self-published and your margin is too small to accommodate the profit margins of bookstore or Amazon sales it's your own fault. You didn't do your homework upfront. So swallow hard and console yourself. You've learned a valuable lesson for the next time you publish.

Ditto for subsidy- or partner-published books. Your publisher doesn't give you enough royalties? Next time negotiate better or choose another publisher or, better still, self-publish (yes, a new learning curve for you but you'll have more control over your profitability).

If you're traditionally published, you made the tradeoff! You hoped for fame. And you hoped for big sales. You may have gotten one, both or neither. You knew there were no guarantees. And didn't you know, too, that the publisher was taking the financial risks and therefore needed to take a bigger share of the pie to pay for his or her expenses and to make a profit to stay in business? If you didn't, maybe you should have taken a Business 101, Basic Economics or The Essentials of Capitalism course before you embarked on what, after all, is a business. In fact, an industry!

So the fact remains, you're boo-hooing because you don't make enough per book, right? Well be comforted because volume counts for something, too. So, roll up your sleeves and go for more sales. Promote like crazy. To do that, you'll want to be able to write a picture-perfect query letter so you can:

 Pitch your next book to a publisher or agent who can be a partner in increasing your profits.

 You'll want to know how to query appropriately for feature stories on you or the content of your book.

 You'll want to know how to write a presentable cover letter to contest judges so you can win some awards to make your book stand out.

 You'll want your query to entice radio and TV producers so they'll want you on their show. To do that, get controversial -- yes, even in the query!

 You'll want to query magazine and e-zine editors to publish your articles and/or excerpts so you can build credibility for your book and more easily sell the next one. And you do that by -- you guessed it -- doing your homework. Buy a book that tells you how to do that.

By the way, The Frugal Editor is a good start on all of the above!)

And then get a few good books on promotion. You need to understand what the different kinds of editors need. And you need to know how to offer them what they want in a way that makes it supremely easy for them to pick you.

You want to sell your book any old way your customer wants to buy them. Many people prefer to buy from Amazon so why would you try to force them to buy direct from your site? What if it doesn't work and they buy somebody else's book from Amazon instead. You know, they may be at Amazon spending their money and be interested in a book like yours. Lots of people are. They may need one more book to make the minimum to get free shipping. Or they may not want to pay sales tax. Or they may not want to take the time to make two purchases, one with credit card, one with Paypal. Or they may just get ticked because you're trying to make them buy your book YOUR way, they won't buy your book regardless.

What if they like to read e-books or need a book instantly and your book isn't available that way? Yep, they'll buy somebody else's! Loyalty only extends so far.

Ditto for Kindle!

What if they long for a signed book? Do you offer a way for them to get your treasured signature? With a label sent directly to them. Your autograph is one way to entice readers to buy directly from you if you prefer that.

Many authors rely solely on online bookstore sales. Authors can avoid some or our industry problems by selling their books that way. But what about customers who prefer to buy from bookstores? You should have at least made the effort to assure that your book can be ordered for customers who request them at B&N and Borders or at your local independents.

And here's a last idea for boosting your profitability. It's especially useful for authors who have only one book. Sell another book with yours at book fairs and your speaking engagements. It helps if the second or third books are related to yours but don't duplicate it so closely that a reader wouldn't need or want both. You can offer a little gift with purchase if a customer buys both. Authors' Coalition does that at their booth at the LA Times Festival of Books.

To make something like this work, of course, the second book must be purchased in quantity and marked up. Here are some ways to do that:
 You can cross-promote with an author friend.
 Or you can contact an author, tell them your plans and ask for a bookstore discount if you buy, say, six of his or her books.
 Or you can sell The Complete Writers' Journal which was designed with this purposed in mind and is available at discounts in quantity. Find it at www.redenginepress.com.

I guess it comes down to this. We all make mistakes. But we don't benefit from them if we don't own up. Hoist up your panties, do what you can to rectify the mistake this time around and avoid making it again.

And keep learning. You do that by reading, reading, reading. Add evaluating to that list. Not all resources are born equal. Listen but don't swallow whole anything you hear or read. (I'm sure you've noticed that there is a lot of griping-to-no-purpose going around the Web!)

Once you've been around the industry a little while, it will be easier to tell if what you hear is right for you. You'll know what to adopt and what to discard. Hooray for you. Now you're a real author. An author who knows the industry you're in and how to make it work for you. The school of hard knocks isn't all bad.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author THIS IS THE PLACE; HARKENING: A COLLECTION OF STORIES REMEMBERED; TRACINGS, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books, THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER: HOW TO DO WHAT YOUR PUBLISHER WON'T; and THE FRUGAL EDITOR: PUT YOUR BEST BOOK FORWARD TO AVOID HUMILIATION AND ENSURE SUCCESS.
Her other blogs include TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com and AuthorsCoalition.blogspot.com, a blog that helps writers and publishers turn a ho-hum book fair booth into a sizzler.