What Not to Do
I received the following email to my personal inbox just a few minutes ago:
was wondering if you accept or reject these various art forms: short-short
stories, storellas, literary pre’cis, “tonepoems”, literary blends, literary
pasticci and literary collages via E-mail? Some of my latest works are: “A Ten Pound
Large Man”, “Docta Freud’s House Calls”, “Kamikaze Shooterdowner” , “Falling
Way Out of Olivia”, “A Man from the California Settlement”, “Kafka’s Tomb”,
“Mind Wipe”, “So Long You All”,”Drinking in Whispers”, “Olivia’s Words”, “A
Poor Man’s Havaaaad”, “Tina of the Troy”, “Tom’s Outer Space
Journeys”,”Where the Facawee”, “Sleeping with Fishes”, “Sports Wars between
the Jinx Gods and Greek Gods – Especially English Rounders”, “A Hundred-eyed
Dog”, “Hyphenated All Americans”, “Once a Time Ago on Old Arthur Avenue”,
“Oedipus of the Knowing”, “What the World Needs Now Is a Cure – Forget about
“Love” – Where Did It Go?”, “Singing Wombs”, “Tommy TomTom”, “Byrom of the
Flame”, “Farting Anxieties”,”The Pseudo War Between Brazil and
Canada”, “Why We Hate the French Like Ourselves”, “Look Whose Nose Is up a
Shrub’s Ass” and “The Whistling Man’s long Dark Journey into Night -
even on the Great Lakes!”, “Hyphenated Americans Like”, “If I Say
It First and You Second – I Win – Ginky said!” “One Finger Pointing Three
Coming Back at One” “Tips from Nick Machiavelli”, “Green Ship Coming In?”,
“When Autumn Leaves” and “Born in the Eyes of Memory”, “Under the Marmalade
Trees” ….
Most of these works were done using 800 words or less. I also have
collections of short stories: “A Dying Living”,”The Last American-African”,
“An Old Born Baby”, “When the Fan Hit the”, “The Village Idiot Comes Home to
Oedipus”, “Wake Up Before Going to Sleep!”, “Thirty After Noon”, “Once
Catholicism Meant Liberal”, “Just a Mean Mean Hearted People”, “No More
Baggage to Carry”, “When The Bronx Was a Home Becoming Brooklyn” and “When
the Boy Gave Birth to the Man” …. My works have been published in many
places such as Greece, Scotland, Canada, Australia, USA, Romania, Ireland,
England, India, Singapore ….
Thank you for your time and kind attention and please accept my apologies if
I have bothered you before. Often I receive E-mail addresses from friends
and since I have lost most of my files, I can not recall if I sent you this
query before. Again I am sorry for this ….
I know you must put much effort and time in your endeavor – without much
thanks. I thank you. <FIRST NAME LAST INITIAL ….
At first, I thought that this was spam, until I googled the name in question and saw that this has been spread about the Internet. Problem #1. Don’t send an obviously cut-and-pasted pitch letter to anyone, even if you’re only pitching to a website that doesn’t pay for content. I mean, make at least an effort to personalize the email.
#2. There is no salutation in the letter. Capitalization is spotty. There’s no real signoff. I woulddn’t know the author’s last name unless it was in the email address. Again, no matter who you’re pitching to, act like you can at least write a letter.
#3. The laundry list of story titles. So? I can come up with a list of fake titles of stories that I have allegedly written, too. How do I know where these have been published? How do I know if they are even real? And ps, do you really think it’s professional to include a story titled “Look Whose Nose Is up a
Shrub’s Ass.”?
#4. What kind of stories are these? Humor? Fantasy? Sci-Fi? It would be good to know.
#5. What’s a storella? What’s a “tone poem”?
#6. Being published in Singapore does not (necessarily) a good writer make.
#7. And don’t tell the person you’re writing to that you can’t remember if you’re contacted them, and that you ‘receive email addresses from friends’. Obviously, you don’t know anything about my publication and don’t really care, so why should we care about you?
#8. Acquaint yourself with the paragraph.
#9. Bonus tip: if you are going to write a sloppy, cut-and-paste pitch, you had better make sure it’s not Google-a-ble.
If you are the person who wrote the pitch and you’re reading this, I apologize if this seems cruel but I think this input will be more helpful than putting any of your work on my site.
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