What do you put on your covering letter?
I usually put dear name i am emailing to put myself foward for name of role,i am 14 years old and a couple of words about me then i have attached a cv and photo including my agents details.
Can you give me any tips please ?
Covering Letters
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Re: Covering Letters
Hi fizzycandy
Is this for unpaid work? If it is paid work I would suggest asking your agent to submit you - I think it is always best to go via your agent, submissions from agents are normally taken more seriously. The exception to this would be if you had a direct link to the person casting (though I would still keep your agent informed).
If it is unpaid work then you presumably wouldn't be expecting them to get in touch with your agent? You can still mention that you have an agent of course if you want to. Your agent is unlikely to want to be bothering with unpaid work as there is no financial interest. I would still make sure that your agent knows what you are applying for though ( I would always clear this kind of thing with my agent before applying, in case I am cutting myself out of something higher profile/more lucrative that my agent has in the pipeline).
Otherwise what you have put sounds great!
General advice on covering letters would be: keep it brief, keep it friendly but professional (no pleading!), check spelling and grammar, point out any particular reasons why you are perfect for the role (e.g. any special skills mentioned) and if you know who the company is/what else they have done then show that you have done a bit of research. If you know the name of CD or Director then use it rather than a Dear Sir/Madam.
I hope that's helpful.
It can help to know that in many cases the covering letter doesn't make a huge amount of difference (in my opinion) if you are applying for a specific casting via the Internet. If you are applying speculatively (not responding to a casting call) then that's different - your letter needs to capture the interest of the person reading it - but if someone is just ploughing through submissions then, as long as your covering letter isn't BAD (e.g. dreadful spelling, full of "pleeeese give me a chance" etc) they will just be concentrating on your photo and CV and will in all probability only glance at the cover letter. Writing a really brilliant one is very hard indeed - great if you can manage it, but a "good enough" one will still get you considered.
I know this has come up a few times on NAPM but it's probably a difficult thing to search for as the words are too common. Lots of other people had good suggestions too. If you search through ruby95's posts I remember she had some good suggestions on this a while ago. I remember irrelevant (I think it was) suggested a better way to search using google, but I can't now remember how that worked!
By the way, when writing cover letters - do not adopt the pg style of rambling, very long and slightly incoherent sentences!
Is this for unpaid work? If it is paid work I would suggest asking your agent to submit you - I think it is always best to go via your agent, submissions from agents are normally taken more seriously. The exception to this would be if you had a direct link to the person casting (though I would still keep your agent informed).
If it is unpaid work then you presumably wouldn't be expecting them to get in touch with your agent? You can still mention that you have an agent of course if you want to. Your agent is unlikely to want to be bothering with unpaid work as there is no financial interest. I would still make sure that your agent knows what you are applying for though ( I would always clear this kind of thing with my agent before applying, in case I am cutting myself out of something higher profile/more lucrative that my agent has in the pipeline).
Otherwise what you have put sounds great!
General advice on covering letters would be: keep it brief, keep it friendly but professional (no pleading!), check spelling and grammar, point out any particular reasons why you are perfect for the role (e.g. any special skills mentioned) and if you know who the company is/what else they have done then show that you have done a bit of research. If you know the name of CD or Director then use it rather than a Dear Sir/Madam.
I hope that's helpful.
It can help to know that in many cases the covering letter doesn't make a huge amount of difference (in my opinion) if you are applying for a specific casting via the Internet. If you are applying speculatively (not responding to a casting call) then that's different - your letter needs to capture the interest of the person reading it - but if someone is just ploughing through submissions then, as long as your covering letter isn't BAD (e.g. dreadful spelling, full of "pleeeese give me a chance" etc) they will just be concentrating on your photo and CV and will in all probability only glance at the cover letter. Writing a really brilliant one is very hard indeed - great if you can manage it, but a "good enough" one will still get you considered.
I know this has come up a few times on NAPM but it's probably a difficult thing to search for as the words are too common. Lots of other people had good suggestions too. If you search through ruby95's posts I remember she had some good suggestions on this a while ago. I remember irrelevant (I think it was) suggested a better way to search using google, but I can't now remember how that worked!
By the way, when writing cover letters - do not adopt the pg style of rambling, very long and slightly incoherent sentences!
