August 14, 2017: 
There’s always encouragement to be found. Read lots of blogs. Study
grammar rules. Research a new angle - this one is a particular favorite of
mine. I love research. But sometimes, it just helps to know you aren’t drowning
alone in the rejection pool. Check out some famous authors and how long it took
them to make it:
·
1. Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things
Fall Apart, was rejected by several London publishers on the argument that
books from African writers wouldn’t sell. Heinemann took it on after some
initial hesitation, and the novel has now sold more than 8 million copies in 50
languages.
·
2. Richard Adams’ Watership Down received 17
rejections before it was picked up by a one-man publishing firm. “Do you think
I’m mad?” Rex Collings wrote to a friend before taking a risk that paid off big
for both him and Adams.
·
3. Judy Blume got nothing but rejections
for the first two years of her writing career. She says the rejections
from Highlights for Children were so embarrassing that the
sight of a copy of Highlights still makes her wince.
·
4. John le Carré had published two novels
before The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, but the editor who
rejected his latest manuscript believed the writer hadn’t “got any future.” The
novel became a bestseller and one of his most famous works, along with Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy.
·
5. E.E. Cummings not only had difficulty
getting his first book published but also, after several publications,
self-published six volumes of his work in the 1930s when he was unable to get
them published any other way.
·
6. William Golding published his first
novel, Lord of the Flies, after 21 rejections.
·
7. Zane Grey’s first experience getting
paid for what he scribbled came when he sold a short story for ten dollars in
1902. His first novel, written the following winter, was not as successful, and
when every publisher he submitted to rejected the work, his wife paid to have
it published. The book did not turn a profit. If Grey was discouraged by this,
he luckily got over the discouragement enough to become a prolific and
widely-read author. The sales of his 90 or so books have exceeded 40 million
copies.
·
8. Frank Herbert first published his
seminal work Dune in installments in Analog magazine,
but when he tried to sell it as a novel he received twenty or so rejections
from major publishers. One editor wrote prophetically in his rejection, “I may
be making the mistake of the decade, but…”
·
9. Tony Hillerman, an award-winning and bestselling
author known for his Navajo Tribal Police series of mystery novels, was advised
“to get rid of all that Indian stuff” by an editor who rejected The
Blessing Way. That editor may have missed the point, but an editor at
Harper & Row didn’t make the same mistake.
·
10. Jack Kerouac’s On The Road became the defining novel
of the Beat generation, but an editor who rejected the manuscript wrote, “I
don’t dig this one at all.”
·
11. Stephen King sounds downright proud of
the number of times he was rejected as a young writer. In his On
Writing, he says he pinned every rejection letter he received to his wall
with a nail. “By the time I was fourteen,” he continues, “the nail in my wall
would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I
replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”
·
12. Ursula K. Le Guin has preserved for
posterity a rejection letter in which an editor calls The Left Hand of
Darkness “unreadable.” Being kind, she has withheld the editor’s name,
and presumably this unnamed editor was already pretty embarrassed when the
novel went on to win a Nebula Award in 1969 and a Hugo in 1970.
·
13. Jack London, rather like Stephen King, kept
his rejection letters impaled on a sort of spindle. The impaled letters eventually
reached a height of four feet.
·
14. L.M. Montgomery was so discouraged by a
string of rejections that she put the manuscript of Anne of Green
Gables, her first novel, away in a hat box for two years. When she took it
out again, she found a publisher within a year and a little later her novel was
a bestseller.
·
15. George Orwell was rejected by no less
than T.S. Eliot, then editorial director at Faber & Faber, who wrote in a
letter in 1944 that Animal Farm could “keep one’s interest”
but as political allegory it was “not convincing.”
·
16. Robert M. Pirsig weathered an amazing
121 rejections before selling Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
a book now considered an American cultural icon.
·
17. Sylvia Plath was an established poet
when she sent The Bell Jar out under the pseudonym Victoria
Lucas. An editor Knopf rejected it twice: once with no knowledge of who the
author actually was, and once with the knowledge of her identity. The editor
wrote that Plath’s name “added considerably to [The Bell Jar’s] interest,”
but “it still is not much of a novel.”
·
18. Beatrix Potter decided to
self-publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit after rejection letters
started to pile up. The original run was 250 copies; the book has now sold over
45 million copies.
·
19. J.K. Rowling, the great literary success
story, failed to sell Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to
12 different publishers until the daughter of an editor at Bloomsbury
Publishing took an interest in it. Harry Potter is now worth at least $15
billion.
·
20. Dr. Seuss suffered through 27
rejections when trying to sell his first story. He gave the credit for finally
selling And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street to the
sheer dumb luck of running into a friend who worked in publishing on the
street.
·
21. Gertrude Stein’s poetry may be famously
idiosyncratic, not to say esoteric, but it didn’t stop her from becoming a
pioneering Modernist writer and a central figure of the “Lost Generation.”
Neither was she apparently hindered by the editor who parodied her style in his
rejection letter, telling her that “hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly
one. Hardly one.”
·
22. Kathryn Stockett was turned down by 60
literary agents before she found someone willing to represent The Help.
“Three weeks later,” she says, “we sold the book.” The Help later
spent 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
·
23. H.G. Wells received a note in which the
editor predicted, “I think the verdict would be, ‘Oh, don’t read that horrid
book.’” Nevertheless, The War of the Worlds was published in
1898 and has not since gone out of print.
December 18, 2017: I’ve said this already a couple of times, but I
continue to be amazed at how many closet writers have come forth since my book
was published. To them, I always take a moment and encourage them to never give
up. I’m reminded of what my critique partner repeated over and over: a winner
is a loser who tried one more time. To anyone reading this who enjoys writing,
I repeat what I know works: write and revise (and repeat), work with a good
critique partner, market research, and submit, submit, submit. Be ready for the
rejections--if you are afraid of rejections, there are many blogs out there
that deal with this. Go read as many as you need. Pretty soon, you’ll
understand why rejection is important to a writer; but equally important is to
read what IS selling. If you write children’s books, read as many as you
possibly can. If adult is your preferred genre, read all the best-sellers and
then some. A good writer is a good reader--not to plagiarize, but to understand
what the public is buying; also, you glean an understanding of what publishers
want. This would be a great time to repeat last week’s advice to writers: plan,
perseverance, and patience! My 3 “p’s” to publishing.
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