There’s something too final about hitting the “send” button in email. There is no second chance to make a good first impression, so I stare and read and stare some more while my cursor hovers over the “send” button. Almost without fail, the error I’m worried about doesn’t reveal it’s self until after the message is sent.

I read a lot of books and interviews from agents, so I know it doesn’t take much to send your submission to the reject pile. I think I do a good job avoiding some of the big ones like not sending a submission the agent doesn’t represent and not being cocky. But the typos and poor sentence construction are a challenge to me (I have yet to master the comma). I have a vision of an agent reading until the first little error and then immediately hitting delete. “There is no apostrophe in ‘its’ when it doesn’t stand for ‘it is’”.

But there’s no way to get an agent without pitching, so I’ll keep hitting the “send” button until one says “Yes!”