I got an email over the weekend asking how I dealt with rejection before I sold. The real answer is this: I just did. I dealt with it - like everyone else deals with it - because the only other option was to stop writing and that wasn’t a choice I was willing to make. I dealt with it because that’s how the business works for most people. I dealt with it because I had a goal.

Getting rejected sucks. It does. You can learn from it, blah, blah, blah… It’s still rejection. It means no. If there is any solace in being one of a group, then this may help. Here are some rejection stories from this site :

**Dr. Seuss’s first book was rejected twenty-four times. The sales of his children’s books have soared to 100 million.
**John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill, was declined by fifteen publishers and some thirty agents. His novels have more than 60 million copies in print.
**Mary Higgins Clark was rejected forty times before selling her first story. One editor wrote: “Your story is light, slight, and trite.” More than 30 million copies of her books are now in print.
**The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck was returned fourteen times, but it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

And, in case you think you’re the only one out there getting rejections, the following authors - in addition to Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz - were all rejected before selling:

George Bernard Shaw
Stephen Crane
Ernest Hemingway
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Alexander Pope
Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Edgar Allan Poe
Walt Whitman
Ezra Pound
T. S. Eliot
Henry David Thoreau
Rudyard Kipling
Stephen King

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 7:41 am and is filed under About Authors, About Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.