The Magical Cover Letter Revisited

I’m finally at the stage of finalizing my manuscript “The Theory of Supramolecular Motion, the Primary Structure of Lignin and its Application in Adhesives”, or quantum gravity in action for submission to Nature. The manuscript itself is ready, but I still need to get an all-clear from the companies involved in my projects. I’ve given them a deadline of this Friday (November 14^th 2025) to raise any concerns. This means that on Friday I can submit the manuscript.

So, I’ve already started the process of submitting the manuscript. The initial stage is automatic and basically involves downloading all the necessary files of the submission onto the Nature server and writing down the details of myself and my coauthors. I’ll reveal a secret: I had already begun this a couple of weeks ago but lost the data, as there is a deadline from the beginning of the submission to its end. I could have applied for a 5-day postponement, but this would have been too short.

I think I have all of the necessary files ready, except for one: the cover letter. I’ve actually talked about this stage in a post that’s over two years old: “The Magical Cover Letter”.

If you wish, you can read the post by clicking the above link. However, the main point of the post can be summarized in this paragraph:

You see, the editors of top scientific journals are very seldom (possibly never) the experts who can deduce from the content of the submitted manuscript whether it is likely to be correct and almost as seldom able to know whether is sufficiently important to be published in the journal. What this means is that a cover letter is required to convince the editor to pass the manuscript to be peer reviewed. In some sense, the editor could pass all submitted manuscripts for peer review, but to prevent the journal to be flooded with insignificant papers, the editor acts as a gatekeeper.

However, the following sentence from my last post shows my problem the last time I tried to submit a manuscript to Nature:

What makes this especially difficult is that I don’t want to make the article on the theory of everything at all about my experimental findings and my hypotheses based on those.

I didn’t think my experimental findings were sufficiently strong to be coupled with the presented theory. Indeed, I only now realize how different the old manuscript is compared to the new one. In the old manuscript I didn’t talk (possibly) at all about lignin but tried to build the entire manuscript around a proposed elementary particle of energy. In retrospect this seems like an impossible task. While the equations presented in the original paper aren’t too different to the ones in my new manuscript, the biggest difference is that in the old manuscript I attempted to apply them to a completely new particle of energy, whereas in my new paper the equations relate to regular molecules. And best of all, the new equations make physical sense: not just mathematical sense.

What this means is that the writing of the new cover letter should not be as tortured a process as before. The funny thing is that while I didn’t include any of my experiments with lignin in the original manuscript on the Theory of Everything, I ended up using this data in the cover letter. While I’m still not sure what I’m going to say in the cover letter, I’m sure it will flow out naturally.

If I have submitted the manuscript by Friday, I’ll surely let you know. Before that, I’ll give some status update on the preprint. In the past two weeks it has been viewed 201 times and downloaded 58 times. This is pretty average. Not bad at all, but by no means exceptional. There are still no signs of the paper becoming viral. Perhaps in the next few weeks we’ll see something.

And once again as I don’t have a handy picture I asked ChatGPT to illustrate this post. I think the picture sums up the writing of my previous cover letter rather well. Not necessarily as accurate anymore.