Rejection…
What do Melville, Orwell, Hemingway, Clancy, and Rowling have in common? You’re correct if you say they’re well known authors. But they’ve also been rejected by agents and publishers. Most of our lives are filled with good and bad events. Some of the latter correspond to rejection. For an author, rejections are especially painful.
According the NY Times, Melville was asked, “Does it have to be a whale?” Orwell’s essay on British cooking was rejected because someone didn’t like his recipe for orange marmalade. Hemingway was told his writing was “tedious and offensive.” Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Clancy’s Hunt for Red October were almost never published.
Authors have to live with rejection, of course. Even self-published authors are rejected by readers, and traditionally published authors have to run the gantlets created by agents and acquisitions editors even before their books reach readers. We must be thick-skinned about it.
Among my 1000+ rejections during the first years of this millennia—I’m counting both agents and acquisitions editors—I received the ubiquitous “Sorry, not for me” in many form emails where I probably outdid the X-Files’ “Cancer-Stick Man” (I’d stopped smoking long ago, though), yet I continued to write my stories. My old English professor at UCSB, Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday, once said, “I simply kept my goal in mind and persisted. Perseverance is a large part of writing.” That’s what I did. I experimented with self-publishing—first POD and then ebooks—and then added in some traditional publishing too, making myself into a mongrel. My thick skin is a bit pocked now, but I forge ahead.
Besides the form rejections, I had agents sit on manuscripts for months, only to say, “Sorry, not for me.” Sometimes their rejections were more complicated: “While your novel has promise, we have too much of a backlog right now.” One agent proved she didn’t understand that world building is essential narrative for sci-fi, saying, “There’s too much narrative in this manuscript.” (She sat on the manuscript for around six months.) Honestly, there were times I thought of throwing in the towel, but Momaday’s advice always lifted me up to try again.
Authors have to grin and bear rejections. They also have to recognize that reading tastes are subjective. This holds for agents and acquisitions editors as well as readers who do not work in the book business. For traditional publishing, a rejection is often just an expression of the book professionals’ tastes. They claim that their decision is based on marketability, but that’s often just used as an excuse for justifying their tastes. The famous cases I’ve mentioned show book professionals have no special talents they can use to predict a book’s success, i.e. its marketability. The other famous cases, and maybe all of them, also show they don’t know much about literary excellence.
There’s one other thing those famous writers have in common: they’re fiction writers. That’s also where many book professionals fail. They often can’t recognize good storytelling because they’ve rarely written a good story! Fortunately, there are many exceptions so that I have enough good books to read, but I always wonder about the good ones that didn’t make the cut.
And about that marketability: I’ve seen hundreds of stories that are good to excellent (I read about fifty books per year), but their sales are abysmal, qualifying them as “unmarketable” in the eyes of the pros. Any book professionals who say “I told you so!” when seeing these sales numbers either (1) never read the book, or (2) don’t know a good story when it bites them on the butt.
Of course, publishing is a business. Publishers like to make money, and they need to make money to stay in business. They and authors want royalties. Everyone wants to recover their upfront costs—editing, cover art, formatting—and then some. That explains all the blathering about marketability and the many rejections, of course. Agents are told by publishers they only want manuscripts that will become successful books. Acquisition editors are told by company boards they only want those kind of books too. But the impetus toward profitability can often deprive readers of good stories, especially considering that publishers do very little to promote a book nowadays, leaving that to the author—they want marketability (return) without marketing (investment). In this way, readers will never learn about the book, hence the deprivation.
Publishing now is like a huge iceberg. At its underwater base you have all the authors, most of them drowning because most of the base is underwater. At the apex, you have Big Five publishers and their stable of old mares and stallions—those sure-bet authors who keep the publishers above water.
The age of digital publishing has exacerbated this problem, i.e made the base of the iceberg larger and the tiny apex sky high. Except for all those old mares and stallions, most authors cannot make a living with their storytelling. Authors have to recognize that reality and have a backup plan. But we can still write our good stories. Our love for storytelling, though, just might be our only consolation.
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Comments are always welcome.
More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. The apocalypse comes via an ET virus. The post-apocalypse has some positive elements because Homo sapiens 2.0 is created. What do these new human beings do? They colonize Mars! This is hard sci-fi with thriller elements, and it led one reviewer to compare it with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars tales. Available at Amazon, Smashwords, and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo etc).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
