Tuesday Tip - Rejections

Welcome to She-Writers, nice to see you here.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach  140 rejections

Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo  397 rejections (and it became a film) - (Wow - she was persistent!)

Watership Down by Richard Adams  26 rejections

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle  97 rejections (and it won the Newbery Medal for best children's book of 1963; it's now in its 69th printing)

Cinder Edna by Ellen Jackson  40 rejections (and it has won multiple awards and sold 150,000 hard copies).

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot  17 rejections

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell  38 rejections

Dune by Frank Herbert  20 rejections

etc etc

Rejections are demoralizing, painful and hard to take. The best advice someone gave me after my book had been rejected by 10 publishers was, "believe in yourself and get on and write the next."

I took the advice, and was able to escape the feeling of failure (even if only temporarily) by immersing myself in a new imaginative world. It didn't make the rejections go away but by the time the next book was half-way done, the first had found its publisher.

Statistics are pinched from the excellent writing website of Mary Carroll Moore:
http://howtoplanwriteanddevelopabook.blogspot.com/