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The slings and arrows
I was browsing M.J. Rose’s Buzz, Balls & Hype blog the other day. It was the “Doctor is In” segment, and a writer was agonizing over just receiving his fifteenth glowing rejection letter from an editor.
Fifteen, I think you’ll agree, is not a lot compared to some of the stories we hear. But this writer is in the unusual position of being championed by another bestselling writer, and apparently all the rejection letters have been glowing in the extreme.
And yet, the old cash register keeps popping up with that NO SALE button.
And so the writer is doing what writers typically do when rejected–no, not drinking, eating chocolate to excess, posting wild and bitter diatribes on message boards (at least, I don’t think so). No. He’s second-guessing himself. Perhaps if he took the substance out of his work…
Perhaps. Who knows? Apparently all these glowing rejection letters didn’t have any practical advice, and that is always crazy-making.
Not that the alternative would help, because very often rejection letters flat out contradict each other. Proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there are still waaaay too many people involved in publishing. Once we get a computer that can calculate all the market factors in and do the actual manuscript acquiring, then maybe this industry will be properly run.
This is not only a brutal business, it is a wildly subjective business. And half the methods and means of tracking the all-mighty sales figures are anything but state of the art. Pawing through tea leaves might be just as effective. Maybe more so. That’s because the publishing biz only got serious about tracking numbers relatively recently. This used to be a gentleman’s game, but that was before my time. And since I’m no gentleman, probably just as well. But one cannot help but regret that kinder and gentler era of publishing when there were enough editors to go around, and a genre writer might actually have more than two or three books (with a three-month shelf life) to prove herself.
Usually when I see these despondent letters from frustrated writers I can sort of read between the lines. Writers are very good at kidding themselves about how fabulous their own work is, but fifteen glowing rejection letters are still fifteen glowing rejection letters, and presumably the book is good but not commercial.
And perhaps the mistake is that it is being pitched to major houses where commercial counts.
The times they are a changin’, and in order to survive in this business (by which I mean, stay sane enough to keep producing books), you’ve got to be able to roll with the punches. When one door closes, you’ve got to pick the lock of the next one. Failing that, you’ve got to be prepared to kick the door in. There is no waiting for another door to swing open–and even if there were, there’s already a crowd gathered in front of it.
These days it’s all about Plan B.
So the question this morning is, how many rejections did you swallow before you got your a) agent and/or b) first book sold?
And if the current contract goes south, do you have a Plan B?
