Famous books that were first rejected.

I just read John Grisham's The Last Juror. It was utter drivel and yet it has the usual reviewers quotes of "Grisham at his best", etc etc. I can't believe these reviewers aren't paid off by the publisher. If this book was submitted by an unknown writer it would have been tossed in the bin after the first chapter. The first chapter by the way is well written.

Its interesting to read the reviews on Amazon. The first couple are 5 stars and glowing, and I can't help feeling these are paid reviewers by the publisher. If you read the one star reviews they seem to give a more accurate review.

So it would seem a good part of getting published is having a name in the first place.

 

I've heard that Marcel Proust was always rejected and had to pay (=vanity press) to publish.

 

Well, what this really shows is that if you get rejected but actually have a really good work, persistence will likely pay off. If you get rejected because your submission really isn't very good, persistence isn't likely to help.

 

Stephen King said that once you're in the Olympus of Published and Famous Writer you can write anything atrocious and get "fantastic" reviews.

It also happened to him with a pair of his unfortunate books, I may add...

 

The main problem is to understand if you get rejected because of the quality of your work or because the agents or publishers just read the first ten pages or they think that there's no market for the story and they are wrong.

 

Mostly what I've been told is that even though agents are very busy, they'll still usually take the time to mention if a work is of high quality or is marketable, but just not in their scope of the authors they handle. Most agents are in the business become to some degree they actually care about writers and writing, so will do what they can in favor of writers, even if that only means a short note of explanation and encouragement.

 

Or, perhaps it proves that only the great works of art get rejected at first, so one should rejoice if they get rejected as you're sure to become a legend!

 

Yeah, that's the trick. To make it worse, I think some editors use a generic "this just doesn't meet our needs right now," even when they don't consider the manuscript to be very good. In an attempt to spare the author's feelings, they do a disservice.

But having been a fiction editor, I can tell you that the vast majority of what I rejected was not very good it all. It just wasn't. Some stuff was quite good but wasn't what I was looking for, and I tried to make that clear to the author and recommend they submit elsewhere. And other times I took stories that really weren't a good fit but were just so good that I had to have them

Sweet. I only had one story ever accepted the first place I submitted it, so I should be hitting legendary status in no time!

 

The novel Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen was initially turned down by many publishers, she finally found success with a small publisher - and that is honestly a book that makes me jealous, the author is so good. VERY well written.

 

That's what I thought too. Harry Potter rejected by a few publishers. Now it's a multi-billion dollar franchise with 7 books, 8 movies, a theme park and god knows what else.

 

J.K. Rowling was rejected 12 times until she was picked up by a Children's book publishing house. They even told her children's books don't make much, and to find a day job. Look at her now.

 

Going with small publishers is the advice I've heard a lot of time for writers who haven't published much or anything yet. In general, a book is quite a financial gamble for publishers, so far as I know - it takes a lot to print and market the thing, and it might not make enough profit at the end of the day. I think that that's why so many books get rejected - publishers don't want to take a risk with an unknown author; these days, if Rowling or Stephen King submitted something, they'd get published right away, because the publishers know there's a fandom that's willing to spend money on it. As for an unknown... it's a risk.

I don't remember the name of the author, but I remember that he and some other writers/journalists decided to test this out. One of his books had won the Pulitzer Prize (or something really big), so he decided to re-submit the book under the guise of a new, unpublished, aspiring writing. It was instantly rejected by every publisher, and usually because the submitter was a "newbie", for lack of better wording.

But of course, publishers can't always do this, since they'd never publish anything at the end of the day - they just aren't willing to take many risks that might not make sense for them (at the time), and, sad as it is, I have to sympathize with them on this one. Publishers know there's a chance a book might become a bestseller, but the chances of that are probably much, much lower than the chances of them having a flop.

 

She's like the only billionaire author in the world. The franchise is worth $15 billion nowadays. Funny how things work out, isn't it?