What Rejection Means and How To Deal With It.
Ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again, Fail again. Fail better.
It was submitted to 12 twelve publishing houses and all rejected it. In 1995 J.K. Rowling finished writing her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone after years of dedicated writing and was now looking forward to publishing. A year later after the 12 rejections, she had a green light from one editor, Barry Cunningham, from Bloomsbury, a publishing house in London. Quiet funny enough, the only reason why the editor decided to publish the book was that Bloomsbury’s chairman gave the first two chapters to his daughter to review it, and she demanded for the rest of the chapters. They agreed to publish but she was later advised by the editor to get a job since she had little chance of making money with children’s books. After six to seven years of struggles, her work finally paid off with the first 1000 copies of the story in print, and to be followed by several awards afterward. In 2004, Forbes named her the first person to become a billionaire writing books. The rest as we know is history.
What is rejection?
Webster's dictionary defines rejection as “ to refuse to accept, consider, submit to, or take for some purpose or use”. Your dream to be a writer started with a gush of passion, your adrenaline got pumped and you were in the right mind and state to start. The first paragraph wasn’t easy but you overcame the hurdle and pushed a few paragraphs and now you have a full page staring at you. Highly elated as you are, you put your editing skills to work and came out with great content or so you think. Hopeful and determined you made the submission, and after waiting for days the response came “ Hi, thanks for the submission, however, this piece doesn’t quite fit our publication” and the next one says the same. After a couple of rejections from the publishers, you gave up. The hard truth is that writers get rejected many times.
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho published his first book in 1982, but it failed to make any substantial impact. He subsequently contributed to the Practical Manual of Vampirism in 1986, although he later tried to take it off the shelves since he considered it “of bad quality”. In that same year, he made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Composeta, and that lead to the writing of “The Pilgrimage”. He had still not struck gold yet in his writing career, nevertheless, he was still passionate even though that lead to his habit of procrastinating. He requested a sign from God that if he saw a white feather that day then it means God was giving him a sign to write a book.
He surely had the sign and that day he started writing. The next year he wrote “The Alchemist” and published it with a small Brazillian company making an initial print of 900 copies. The result was not as great as he expected so he decided to stop reprinting. Moving on to a much bigger publishing house, with his next book “Brida”, The Alchemist all of a sudden took off. After such a staggering success, HarperCollins decided to publish the book in 1994, and since then The Alchemist has become an International Bestseller. The rest is history since The Alchemist has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.
Facing rejection repeatedly.
In life not just in writing we will all face countless rejections, but that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Every human has to get used to rejection, you’ll have to build a strong resistance to combat any consistent rejections like how our immune system builds defense mechanisms against diseases. If all you do is coil back into your safety corner, to avoid any embarrassment of failure whatsoever then you won’t find success. I keep writing, even though I get rejected several times. If this print makes it to your eyes then it wasn’t rejected. Nevertheless what you don’t know is that it might have been rejected by many other publishers. The best thing to do is not give up as Samuel Beckett said “ Ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again, Fail again. Fail better.’” And He continues to say “You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.”
Keep writing, keep dreaming and stop sitting on your ideas and talking yourself out of them. The world needs your ideas, so don’t let rejection stop you. Thank you.
