Rejection: Part 2
In part one I talked about rejection and the inevitability of it. Continuing on the same theme, please take a minute and cheer yourself up with some of the more famous literary rejections. These anecdotes always give me hope because they all have a common thread: every writer here persisted despite the rejections. 
- Robert M Persig‘s Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance received 121 rejections and then went onto to sell three million copies.
- JK Rowling was initially rejected by 12 publishers, her first Harry Potter book was finally taken on by Bloomsbury and only on the advice of the CEO’s eight year old daughter. And then they told Rowling not to quit her day job as she would never make any money.
- Stephen King‘s Carrie was his first novel published, but the fourth one he wrote.
- John Grisham‘s A Time to Kill was rejected by 28 publishers. As of today, more than 250 million of his books are in print.
- Agatha Christie‘s her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles took three years to get published after being rejected by six publishers.
- Richard Adams‘s Watership Down was initially rejected by seven publishers.
- William Saroyan (pictured) definitely gets the prize for persistence: according to rumor, he didn’t get a story published until after 7,000 rejections or a pile 30″ high. That is enough to make anyone lose the will to live.
- Beatrix Potter‘s her first novel, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was rejected by all six publishers that she sent it to. Eventually, she self published and the rest as they say, is history.
- Patricia Cornwell initially wrote three novels, all of which were rejected. Her fourth, Postmortem, was published in 1990 and introduced Kay Scarpetta and was the start of that best selling series.
Save every rejection letter and keep writing and maybe someday, you’ll have your own ‘rejection’ story to tell.
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That’s very encouraging! Onwards into 2011 with another submission 🙂
I was gutted when I got a rejection a couple of weeks ago when I got a rejection letter only three days after I sent in my short story to a magazine, with snail mail! They must have gotten the envelope, read the first paragraph and rejected it.
Then I turned it in to something positive and praised them for their speedy reply! and now when I look at the story I think I would have rejected myself on that first paragraph.
“JK Rowling was initially rejected by 12 publishers, her first Harry Potter book was finally taken on by Bloomsbury and only on the advice of the CEO’s eight year old daughter.”
Isn’t that amazing? To think what a cultural icon Harry Potter has become while JK is a billionaire. One must take inspiration from that.
My takeaway – I’ll continue to pound away at getting better and quicker with my writing. Maybe it will only take 12 rejections – please God not 7000!