Rejecting a Best Seller

djf881 said:

Here's a Time Magazine Q&A where Meyer, years after the publication of "Twilight," brings up her query rejections apropos of nothing:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1834663,00.html



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Apropos of nothing? Are we reading the same words in that interview. The mention of rejection is extremely appropriate. The question could not be answered properly without mention of the rejections. It sounds more like you're resentful of quick success.

I'm a huge Rowling fan, and I watch/read every interview I can find. I've never heard her mention being resentful. In fact, she always sounds the opposite. I'm not as big a Meyer fan, but I am a Meyer supporter. I've never heard her complain, either. Good for both of them. I'm glad both are writing books millions love, and I'm glad neither had to go through years of rejection.

As for why both talk about their rejections so much, it's probably because every third question either is asked seems to be about the rejections. They just answer the questions. How Many Rejections Did You Get Before Selling A Novel, is of interest to most new writers, and to most who do interviews. It's a question that's going to come up time and time again. It's also information those who may be considering writing should know.

Meyer and Rowling seem to understand this.

And it isn't their fault that they had the talent, determination, and work ethic to write a bestselling book first time out. Well, maybe it is their fault. Not nearly enough attention is paid to the road a writer travels before becoming successful, often before even starting to write.

There's often a huge difference between the roads the successful and the failures travel during the first twenty-five years of life.

I wish people would stop gauging the number of rejections as some magical detail. It's a rejection, and nothing else. I still don't get it what's the big deal about the number of rejections that a famous author got. He got published, that's what counts.

99 no's will never equal 1 yes. Because 1 YES is all that it takes.

And I admire Rowling a lot. She's always been very humble and very open when it came to the Harry Potter world and her life in general.

djf881 said:

She has historically liked to talk about her unremarkable number of rejections a lot. Stephanie Meyer does too.

Maybe they're trying to rub it in the faces of the people who rejected them. Maybe they aren't resentful, and they just find it commercially valuable to try to paint themselves as underdogs. Maybe they think they're acting humble. Maybe they think they're being inspiring. Maybe they're so legitimately besotted with their own greatness that they continue to be incredulous that anyone could ever say "no" to them. I don't know why people do things. I just attribute whatever motivations fit the facts.

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More than likely it's just selection bias. Most times you hear from them, it's in an interview. The question about rejections gets posed, so they answer it. If they don't, they sound stuck-up. Once the hundredth journalist publishes an article on them, it sounds like the author is obsessing about their number of rejections when they'd most likely happily never talk about the subject again.

Jamesaritchie said:

Actually, I know one editor who got fired for being right too often. He kept telling the acquisition board that this would be a big seller, and that book would be a big seller, and each time they decided not to publish the books, which went on to become bestsellers.

The one thing that can be worse than being wrong is being right when your boss is wrong.

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Surely that would be unfair dismissal?

djf881 said:

Here's a Time Magazine Q&A where Meyer, years after the publication of "Twilight," brings up her query rejections apropos of nothing:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1834663,00.html



This article is the first Google hit for "Stephanie Meyer rejection." You have to get to page three before you find my blog post about how she shot me down when I asked her to the prom.

I apparently understated her hardship. Her 15 queries yielded only one offer of representation.

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That sounds more like encouragement for anyone thinking of having a go at their own novel than lamenting her rejections. The vibe I get from her comments is 'If I did it, anyone can'.

djf881:
Harry Potter was rejected by a handful of publishers before Bloomsbury bought it. She makes a big deal out of her rejections because she's resentful that she got any.

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It was rejected by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury bought it in 1996. At that time Bloomsbury were a tiny publisher and having spoken to some of the guys at the Christopher Little Agency, my understanding is that Barry Cunningham was pretty much their last hope when it came to finding a deal because the UK children's market at that period was so small.

I've never read, heard or seen an interview with Rowling where she makes a big deal of those rejections on the grounds that she "resented" them. If you've got a source for that, I'd be interested to see it. If it's just your impression from what you've read/seen/watched then I disagree with your interpretation but have nothing else to say.

waylander:
My understanding is that at least some of the rejections were becasue JKR wanted a deal for all 7 books and the publishers didn't want to be tied to that many books

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My info from the guys at Christopher Little is that it was rejected because the idea of a wizarding boarding school was seen as old fashioned. Certainly while they were hoping for a 2 or 3 book deal it wasn't a case of author/agent holding out because there was nothing for them to hold out for.

As it was, I believe that Bloomsbury offered an initial 3 book deal with an option on the remaining 4. There was then a big will they/won't they when it came to securing the final 4 books - certainly it affected the Bloomsbury stock price at the time the purchase was made.

MM

JimmyB27 said:

Surely that would be unfair dismissal?


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You must not be from around here. In most states, there is no such thing as unfair dismissal, unless it's race, religion, or gender based. Other than this, you can fire anyone for any reason. My state is a "right to hire, right to fire" state. This means you can be fired the moment your employer gets tired of looking at you. No cause needed.

Eddyz Aquila said:

I wish people would stop gauging the number of rejections as some magical detail. It's a rejection, and nothing else. I still don't get it what's the big deal about the number of rejections that a famous author got. He got published, that's what counts.

99 no's will never equal 1 yes. Because 1 YES is all that it takes.

And I admire Rowling a lot. She's always been very humble and very open when it came to the Harry Potter world and her life in general.

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Number of rejections isn't magical, but it is telling. It does take only one yes, but but my experience is that the more you hear no, the less likely it is you'll ever get a yes for that piece of writing.

I suspect most new writers really want to hear something like, "It was a terrible struggle, and I received more than one hundred rejections before someone finally said yes."

This is a very, very, very rare event. And even when it does happen, if it happens, there always a sound and solid reason why it took so long.

More important, there's a sound and solid reason why it doesn't take very long, and figuring out why writers who sell usually get accepted fast is the best way to shorten your own road.

There are always exceptions, but even the exceptions have a cause behind them. It isn't luck. A fast yes comes for a reason, and a long string of nothing but no, no, no happens for a reason.

I can't remember where, but I read that the average number of rejections before getting an offer is 40. Those of you in the know, is that a fair statement?

Victoria said:

I can't remember where, but I read that the average number of rejections before getting an offer is 40. Those of you in the know, is that a fair statement?

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I think I got more like 20 on my book that got me my agent (counting query, partial, and full Rs) but I'd queried three books before that and racked up lots with those too. For editors, you're obviously subbing to far fewer, so 40 would be ridiculous.

The largest number of rejections from publishers prior to an acceptance that I know of, in recent years, was Tibor Fischer's debut novel Under the Frog, with fifty-six. It went on to win the Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Eddyz Aquila said:

I wish people would stop gauging the number of rejections as some magical detail. It's a rejection, and nothing else. I still don't get it what's the big deal about the number of rejections that a famous author got. He got published, that's what counts.

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This.

Some people start submitting as soon as they have a finished book, with little regard to whether it's actually of publishable quality. These people are going to rack up a lot of rejections before they write a publishable manuscript (assuming they ever do).

Others aim to master their craft first, and don't submit until they have something good enough to catch an agent's or editor's eye (or like JKR, they revise hard between rejections). Result - relatively few rejections.

Others still get lucky with a premise that is highly commercial (e.g. Meyer), or happen to submit to exactly the right person early in the process.

It's always a combination of luck, talent and perseverance, but usually in wildly differing proportions!

My question is how would anyone know? From what I have read, the editors/agents get huge numbers of submissions and they or their assistants are the only ones to know which ones they reject.

Rejection happens. To all of us at some stage.

Kristen Nelson did a blog post about it a year or two ago, about how it feels when you pass on a book and it later becomes a bestseller, and her attitude was 'it happens' a book can be amazing, but just not the right fit for that agency or publisher, and if you had takent eh book on, there's no guarentee that you would have gotten the same result. a lot of success is about timing, placement, the right people behind you at the right time.

There have been lots of posts about famous authors getting rejected, and the two examples of Meyer and Rowling both show a very small amount of rejections and queries in total.

Jamesaritchie said:

I'm not as big a Meyer fan, but I am a Meyer supporter. I've never heard her complain, either.

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You've obviously never seen her spit the dummy over a book being leaked online when she handed out a number of copies of a half-written draft.

a-vee said:

2. people are drawn to everything magical

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Everything except Paul Daniels.

JimmyB27 said:

Everything except Paul Daniels.

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Don't you like him?

Does anyone?

You were supposed to say "Not a lot."

a-vee:
There you go. Mistaken judgment. Turning down a swan for looking like an ugly ducking, not knowing what swans are made of

Had they stopped FOR ONE MINUTE to think, they would have realized that

1. fairy tales have been popular throughout history, in every country

2. people are drawn to everything magical

3. children/people love stories of poorly treated orphans who turn out to be something special

4. this author has an especially vivid and unusual imagination

Conclusion: this might sell more than 500 copies.

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You're forgetting that all this was happening in the 1990s. Back then, boarding school fiction was generally associated with Enid Blyton (a popular children's fiction writer whose novels came out in the 1940s and 1950s) and the children's fiction market as a whole was small and certainly nowhere near what it was today. An initial run of 500 books was actually very sensible at the time because it took into account the potential market and the financial implications of returns from stores. An initial 500 book run also does not preclude a publisher from doing subsequent runs if demand is higher than anticipated.

William Goldman famously said of Hollywood that nobody knows anything. The same is true of publishing. There simply isn't a scientific test out there to determine if the next book on your desk is going to be a massive seller, which is why people get it wrong.

JimmyB27:
Does anyone?

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The lovely Debbie McGee?

MM

a-vee:
Yes, but the fact that there were so few should have made them see the need for it.

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Erm ... no. Unfortunately the publishing world doesn't work that way.

Take Twilight as an example. Before Twilight, vampire novels did exist in the YA market and romances existed in the YA market. When Twilight proved to be a massive hit and a bestseller, every publisher wanted to push vampire novels and paranormal romance into stores to satisfy the fact that people wanted more books like Twilight. Acquiring editors had those type of books on its wish list and in some cases re-released books on their backlists that were similar and likely to appeal to the target readership.

Ditto what happened with The Da Vinci Code, which suddenly saw everyone dust off backlist conspiracy books and look to grab similar new work in that genre.

More recently The Hunger Games has seen a surge of interest in dystopian YA.

No one knows what's going to be a hit until there is a hit and they know to put more books out that are similar to it. Until then, publishers can only work on sales figures that already exist because that's the only hard evidence out there that they can use to extrapolate future potential sales of any given book.

The market is not determined by absences, it is determined by what is already exists.

The best thing you can do is go and read MERCHANTS OF CULTURE by John B Thompson. It's a review of the publishing industry in the US and UK that looks at this problem among others to explain why the industry is in the state its in. It includes the dilemma that publishers frequently have presented to them by bean counters, i.e. the maths say that it only makes sense for publishers to put out bestsellers but no one can tell what those are.

a-vee:
I think they are pretty good at judging what sells, but pretend not to know so others won't catch up

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Uh-huh ...

MM

Plus, may I say, I reject tons of bestsellers as a reader, so why shouldn't agents and editors let a few slip them by? As MM says above, once something hits big, the industry knows that it can put out a certain number of similar books before the market gets overloaded with that trend. But knowing exactly what will hit big in the first place? It can happen, but a lot of the reasoning why seems to happen in retrospect.

ChaosTitan said:

Maybe they talk about their rejections because reporters continue to ask them about that aspect of their career.

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Agreed. It also occurs to me they may mention the rejections as a way showing humility in the face of overwhelming success. Deprecation of that kind is an accepted, even required, social grace in most circles.

I also see it as a kindness to aspiring authors to let them know even the super-successful got rejections.



ETA: Sorry! Missed that the topic continued on two pages after the post I answered. Would delete it, but that'd be even worse.

Jamesaritchie said:

You must not be from around here. In most states, there is no such thing as unfair dismissal, unless it's race, religion, or gender based. Other than this, you can fire anyone for any reason. My state is a "right to hire, right to fire" state. This means you can be fired the moment your employer gets tired of looking at you. No cause needed.

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See, here we have law about hiring and firing.

You can't just fire someone, other than through gross misconduct or negligence.

Generally you have to give two verbal and written warnings before you can send someone packing.

I know that I have personally been in the sitiuation where it's easier for me to promote someone out of my sector than it is to fire them.

You can be sued for so much here, and unfair dismissal is the biggest of them all.

Choosing which books to publish and which books to reject is a precarious thing. There are no absolutes on which ones are going to do well, and which ones are going to tank. Editors can only guess based on previous statistics of what will sell and what won't.