And Why It Is Difficult to Get Published
Writing a book is one thing, and publishing it is another thing on its own. You can write all you want but never get published, or maybe, decides not to publish. Both are different decisions which required different level of courage to pull out. But whoever had the courage to write should better have the courage to publish. Yeah, it absolutely takes an enormous courage to get your work out there. You only have control over your work when it’s still with you, but whenever your book is published, you no longer have absolute control over what happens to it which includes, how readers would perceive it and whether it does well in the market or not. There is only so much you can do.
I have seen people who have written many things, manuscripts, but never published. Those manuscripts were just there in their drawers gathering dusts. It’s all just depends on what you want and what you care for. But if you have been writing for a while, isn’t it enough time to pause and ask yourself if it is not yet the right time to have something in your own name? I mean, it’s not a bad idea. But that is where another dimension of work comes in, which is one of the major reasons why people are afraid to get published. Because it takes some level of courage, resilience, and determination to get published whether you are going through the traditional route or self-publishing route. Each of the paths that works out for you would require some amounts of investments and sacrifice. Of course, you can’t fold your arms to publish a book!
Each of the paths is not easy. For the self-publishing route, you are going to bear all the costs of what you didn’t really know for one hundred percent if it is going to work out or not. For the traditional route, you must ought to be more resilient and indefatigable by consciously updating the level of your determination. Because no matter how good you think you are as a writer, you must get countless rejections. That’s for sure. And don’t think it’s going to be once, or twice, ten times or twenty, but as many as it would require to get published. You would hear so many No’s, and that door would keep slamming right in your face. The only thing you have to do is to reject rejection and keep going by modifying your approach and trying different strategies that had worked for others.
This is How Frustration of Rejection Begins Among Authors
Rejection don’t suppose to sound strange to anyone who has ever published or tried to publish traditionally. It is a general famous badge which every writer has. Rejection is one of the greatest fears of all writers. It’s a dreaded word. But no matter how you hate it, it is really necessary that you still have to face it and go through it.
When you have finished writing and polishing your manuscript, your synopsis, and your query latter, you are probably filled with confidence that you are going to be accepted and land a publishing deal, right away. But then your first email was not even yet replied. You are sitting there waiting, days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, and in most cases, it can even turn into years. And I can tell you out of experience, the delay can be soul-crushing. Suddenly you realized that it is over and you need to send more emails to multiple publishers or literary agent. So you kept sending your manuscripts, but all you kept seeing was the subtle reasons why it would not be published. At first you wouldn’t take it seriously, but as time went on and as the track record of your rejections compounded, you became afraid and began to take it personally, you cry about it, you think about it, and you even resent everything and hated yourself because of it. But this is one of the mistakes most budding authors make, they take the whole thing too personally. But you can’t blame them, there are things they don’t know yet. They didn’t know that rejections are the normal parts of the publishing process and of transiting from a writer to an author. And this is not only in publishing business, it applies to life in general. For example, if you want to get married as a man, you can’t just stop asking girls out just because a couple of girls declined your proposal or told you that they are already in a serious relationship. No, you better have to keep going until you finally meet the love of your life.
You should know that most of the greatest books and authors of our time, and all time also faced rejections and for most of them, it took a long time before they got published, passing through the tough pains of rejections. It pains a lot, no doubt. But are you going to endure it and go through it and win, quit, or kill yourself because of it just like John Kennedy Toole did?
John wrote the book, “A Confederacy of Dunces.” John got countless of rejections for his book, which threw him into depression and anxiety, and when he couldn’t take it any longer, he killed himself in 1969. But then, his mother supported his work and showed it to author Walker Percy. Walker helped John’s mother to get the book published in 1980. In 1981, the same book won the Pulitzer Price. Although, that was an extreme testament of impatience, what if only John sticks around for a while. On the other hand, it’s a testament of the importance of having a strong support system in our journey to success.
The story of John Kennedy was a tragic one, but we have so many authors who had gone through that phase of so many overwhelming rejections and still came out stronger.
Kate DiCamillo became a best seller after she was rejected 473 times.
J.K Rowlings, the author of Harry Potters was rejected 12 times, which many people, including her, believe that it is more than that number.
Elmore Leonard was rejected 84 times by publishers and producers when he was trying to publish The Big Bounce. After the book was finally published, it was made into a movie, not once, but twice.
Beatrix Potter and Proust got so many rejections that they decided to self-publish their book and which eventually became a success.
Stephen Kings’ first novel, Carrie was rejected by over 30 publishers.
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor co-authored a book and sent it to multiple publishers and got rejected. But they kept sending, the more they sent, the more rejections flowed in. From 10 rejections to 20, from 50 to 80, then from 100 to 120, and it kept rising until they had accumulated a whopping 140 rejections. And after they had conceived 144 rejections, they finally found a publisher, and the rest was history. Right now they are such a formidable empire known as Chicken Soup for the soul, and left other publishers to wonder what they did wrong for not accepting them. Today, they have published over 250 other books and became a public traded company.
Real Reasons Why Authors Get So Much Rejections and What You Have to Do
You may be wondering if it is an intentional approach properly designed to punish authors? But let’s put straight little realistic statistics on why authors get so much rejections. Traditional publishers collectively put out thousands of titles every single year. And each of them gets hundreds of submission every day, and thousands of monthly submissions, also. Among all those submissions, 99.9 percent of all the submissions are rejected. To be clear, this is not because all the manuscripts that were rejected are not good, or because they are not up to the professional standard, but it is mostly because, the traditional publishers do not naturally have the capacity to take more than that number. And the biggest factor is that if they take on a lot of books that is more than what they should, there is no way they are going to make a lot of money by selling millions or thousands of books every month. The sales from each title won’t be enough to cover up other several expenses that they had to incur in the production of the book, such as the editing, cover art, printing, distribution, marketing etc. In overall, this is simply because, the demand for books is not that great enough to support the catalogue of so many authors which would happen when they accept or take on a lot of manuscript for publication.
That is the subtle, but major reason why traditional publishers reject a lot of manuscript and why it is difficult for authors to get published traditionally. Because remember, publishers are business people. But digging deeper, there are also some personal reasons why traditional publishers may likely reject a manuscript. Because each publisher has one or more type of books which they would never like to publish. And they may also have reasons, personal reasons why they would not like to publish a particular manuscript, which may be ranging from a lot of factors which includes: they feel that the manuscript is poorly written, they think there is no market for the manuscript, or they think that the manuscript has a theme about what they do not believe in, or they didn’t understand or agree with the theme of the book.
Finally, to increase your chances of being accepted by a publisher, this is one of the things you have to do, pay close attention and submit more of your manuscripts to the publishers who publish similar books like yours. By submitting to such publishers, there are much likelihood that they might take on your manuscript because it is what they already used to, and your work would not be totally strange to them.
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