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I've seen some sub guidelines that ask for a "brief description of your story" in the cover letter, but infrequently. More often, I see sub guidelines that say "please don't describe your story in the cover letter" 😂.

When "please disclose if this story is based on your identity or life experience in any way you think we should consider" started to become relatively common, I saw a lot of cover letters with the synopsis sentence about "this story about X is based on my Y" appear, and even use it sometimes myself.

I have in my notes that Dreamforge wanted a logline. They gave a pretty specific template for it that I copied down.

We have been thinking of publishing stand-alone novellas. If we did so, I think our first step would be an "eleveator-pitch"-style query e-mail from an author. That said, we have not moved forward with it.

I’ve actually seen a few. But mostly I suspect it’s reading about how to write cover letters for your novel, and thinking that applies to all cover letters. Someone here suggested it’s AI, but I got it constantly at Grasslimb, which ran 2002-2020, before LLMs.

The guidelines at @foofarawpress.bsky.social are pretty lax. If someone has provided a synopsis for a short fiction sub, I don't see it until after I've read the story. And I do sometimes say to myself, "Oh, so *that's* what that story was about!" but that's usually not a good sign.

from my editorial perspective, that's absolutely baffling

Yeah, I've seen it a few times when submitting.

The only time I've seen anything specifically stated it's been a variation of, "Please don't describe your story."

… or are there LLMs that confuse a cover letter for a manuscript query 🤔 ➡️ 🚽

I have seen that, but I forget who/where it was! Because I probably went "no, it's a short story" and didn't submit there.