Sending work out is a craft of its own

The block sometimes is not on the page. It is at the envelope. Read the guidelines. Put the right thing in the right pile. Keep a list. Expect silence and the odd bruising no. Persistence is filing, follow-up, and the refusal to treat one rejection as a verdict on your character.

Sending work out feels like a moral event. It is mostly clerical. Does this agent read the kind of book you have written, this month, in this form? Is the letter the length they asked for? Did you spell the name as it appears on their site, not as you remember it from a festival three years ago? The writers who are 'unlucky' are often the writers who posted a masterpiece to the wrong door and called the silence a judgement.

Keep a list the way a small press keeps a list: who, what, when, what they asked for, what came back. Memory is a romantic and a liar. A list lets you follow up without nagging, and lets you see the pattern — twenty noes in a genre you are forcing, or one encouraging note you forgot because it was not a yes.

A rejection is information about a fit, delivered bluntly, sometimes carelessly. It is not a medical report on your talent. If you need a day away from the desk after a cruel one, take the day. Then put the next letter in the next pile. The craft is the sequence, not the single send.

The page still matters more than the postage. But a finished book in a drawer is a private hobby, and there is no shame in a hobby unless what you wanted was a reader. If you wanted a reader, the envelope is part of the job.