Dealing with book rejection

People drive different cars, wear different clothes and eat different food. They also watch different films and read different books. There’s never been any product or literary work that manages to please everyone. If everything written appealed to every reader the world would be a pretty dull place. I mention this purely to give you a sense of perspective when you receive the inevitable rejections to your writing. I use the word inevitable because rejection is part of the learning process as well as part of the selling process. Negative feedback with constructive criticism can help you to remould your writing into a product that someone with influence in the market likes. It’s not enough that your dentist thinks you should be published: you need to convince a publisher.

The problem for all writers is that even when your writing is perfect and your manuscript is professionally presented you may still encounter rejections. When a publisher tries to sell a new book into the bookshops many of those shops will reject it. But this doesn’t necessarily reflect any inherent flaw in the book, which may still go on to be a bestseller amongst those shops with the sense to stock it.

Part of the reason for good manuscripts to be rejected is that most writers create their works of art in a vacuum, with little regard for what the publishers actually want. They then waste valuable time trying to hammer a triangular peg into a semicircular hole that’s probably boarded up anyway.

For the average new writer it’s not easy to find what publishers are looking for. They certainly won’t get a phone call asking if they can come up with a book on X by Y date for Z amount of money like some established writers. A writer who comes up with the apparently brilliant idea of a novel written entirely in rhyming couplets with twenty bonus recipes at the end is going to be highly disappointed by the rejections that will follow. Although you don’t have access to a publisher’s editorial meeting in which they discuss what kind of books they want to look out for in the next season, you can be sure they won’t be looking for rhyming novels with recipes. The way to be sure is easy. Go to a bookshop. Look at the shelves and how they are labelled. Where is the shelf that says ‘rhyming novels with recipes’? Exactly. If the book doesn’t fit squarely on one particular shelf, the bookseller won’t know where to place it. And if the bookseller doesn’t know where to place it the buyer doesn’t know where to find it.

The only thing you can do is to look closely at the actual labels of the shelves, look at the books on those shelves and see how similar they are within each genre. Commercial writing is not about art for art’s sake. It’s about creating a product that can be marketed and sold as easily and quickly as possible in order to create a profit for the publisher and the bookseller. Without that profit they can’t survive, and they’re looking to you to provide them with the raw materials for their next slice of profit.

So learn what you can from each individual rejection. Try to re-read your work from the point of view of the person who rejected it. (And remember they rejected it, not you.) If they provided any feedback it’s vital to read the work with their comments at the forefront of your mind. Are they right? Can you think of a way to fix it?

They may not be right, of course. Your writing could be rejected for a number of reasons aside from its inherent quality. During many years as a publisher I’ve rejected books because they were similar to books that had just flopped, and I didn’t want to risk losing more money with another book like it. I’ve declined books on the grounds that my acquisition budget is fully allocated for the foreseeable future (which meant that we’d run out of money and couldn’t pay any more advances or print bills for a time). I’ve said no to writers because despite my personal interest in the book others in the company have persuaded me not to publish it. I’ve had to reject authors who are quite clearly mad and unprofessional in their approach and who would be too much effort to deal with. Sometimes the rejections have been because we had already decided to produce a similar book either in-house or using our existing author contacts. Or it could be that I’d decided on a change of direction and was no longer interested in commissioning new titles in a particular genre which I felt wasn’t right for my company. I’m sure there are editors out there who have rejected books simply because they’re having a bad day and want to take it out on someone. And don’t forget, of course, that most books are rejected because they are simply not good enough to publish.

Laugh off the rejections. Frame them and mount them on the wall of your bathroom. When you’re a bestseller they’ll be priceless. And remember you’re in good company – the company of virtually every other writer on the planet.