The Rejection Game

A New Angle On Failure

This quote is from “Art & Fear” by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

This is true of pretty much anything you want to learn. Writing, art, cooking, music, sport, sewing, language skills, whatever. The more you do it, the better you will be. For some reason, we don’t apply this to success. We don’t say ‘the more times you try and succeed, the more times you will succeed’. Maybe because it’s really awkward to say.

Speaking from personal experience, when you try and create a new recipe from scratch, the first attempt almost always fails. You must make the same dish over and over, in slightly different ways, binning the results in between, before you get what you were trying to create.

That is exactly what you must do when it comes to querying publishers and agents.

When it comes to writing, it’s not just about writing all the time to get better. You also must pitch all the time to get better. But that is very scary, because it’s very binary. Someone says ‘no’ or they say ‘yes’ and if we think of the ‘no’ as a very negative, painful thing, we avoid it. Sometimes we even think we’re doing something wrong.

After all, the people we aspire to be like got ‘yes’. Or they wouldn’t be published. But they also got lots of ‘no’.

To trick your brain into looking at rejections differently, you must think of them differently. Imagine rejections are XP and you need to get a certain amount to level up. 100, to be exact. This is the rejection game.

You must fail 100 times before you succeed.

100 is an arbitrary number. I think humans like it because we have ten fingers and it takes ten people to make 100 fingers. If we had cartoon hands, we’d like the number 64 a lot more.

So maybe you must gather 70 rejections or maybe you must gather 400 rejections. 100 rejections is a great goal to start with, either way. Your goal is to imagine that when you hit 100 rejections you will magically be handed success. Rejections are objects of power you are trying to collect, not obstacles you have to climb over.

If your goal is just to have a short story published, it may only take 20 rejections. But if your goal is to be a best seller, you’re looking up around the 900 mark, because there is going to be dozens of publications, perhaps even hundreds if you sell a lot of shorts, between you and that goal.

So, don’t resist getting rejections, get as many of them as you can. You are a hungry, hungry hippo and they are delicious marbles.

Which brings us to rule 2 of the rejection game.

They must be different failures each time.

Let’s say you send out a query, synopsis and blurb to a publisher and three months later you get a rejection. Firstly, three months is pretty quick, so that’s nice. Secondly, if you send out the same query letter, synopsis and chapter to the next publisher, it’s the same failure. So, when you are tallying your 100 failures, both submissions count as one failure. If you send it to 50 publishers without editing, it’s still one failure, not 50.

Get your goddamn shit together and learn from your mistakes. Improve between submissions. Get feedback, do research, take a workshop, re-write, whatever.

They must be real failures, not failures you imagined.

Sometimes when someone is freaking out about something, I ask them to describe the worst possible outcome in as much detail as they can. People usually find this quite easy. Unless they are too ashamed to admit it, then they sort of faff around.

Ninety percent of anxiety is directed at things that will never happen. Ninety percent of your anxiety is wasted energy. Anxiety is a function to stop us killing ourselves. Like if your five-year-old climbs up onto the roof with a superhero cape, that anxiety has a function. You tell them to get down, your heart is in your mouth, you probably saved them a broken leg. Good job, anxiety.

The job of anxiety is to protect us and the people around us from dangerous situations. But getting a story rejected ISN’T DANGEROUS. Despite what you have heard, it’s not a Jumanji situation, where you open a rejection and a tiger leaps of out of your computer screen and chases your family around the house.

It’s just a step in the path to success. One you feel unfounded anxiety about. It’s not saying ‘you’ll never be published’ its saying ‘you have to work a bit harder’. And you must be okay with that to make it in publishing.

Sometimes we imagine rejection so vividly, it feels like it’s already happened. We’ve convinced ourselves it’s real. But it’s not. I’ve had this conversation with people over and over:

Them: “I keep getting rejected.”

Me: “How many rejections have you had this month?”

Them: “I didn’t submit anything this month.”

Me: “What is your tally this year then?”

Them: “I don’t know exactly.”

Me: “Twenty, thirty?”

Them: “I haven’t really submitted anything this year.”

Me: “What is the last rejection you remember getting?”

Them: I submitted a short story to X.”

Me: “The one I gave feedback on four years ago?”

Them: “Yeah, I’d submitted that before I got feedback from you. It got rejected.”

One rejection in four years is not ‘keep getting rejected’ territory. You must submit things and be rejected, before you can be rejected. This is basic stuff, but so many people are stuck in this loop of reliving one or two rejections over and over like they have rejection PTSD.

Win The Rejection Game!

If you only get ten rejections a year, it’s going to take you TEN YEARS to get to 100.

If it takes 100 rejections to succeed, then you need to get your goddamn ass into gear.

Write shit, submit it, edit it before you submit it again. Repeat. Tally your rejections. You’re aiming for 100. Ready, set, go.

You can be rejected multiple times a day if you follow me on twitter! Maybe. Depends what you ask me, I suppose. If I reject you for a date it doesn’t count toward your writing rejection tally. Maybe you have a dating rejection tally. I don’t know your life. Follow me on twitter anyway.

How Publishing Works In 2017

How Publishing Works: A basic guide for people who have no idea, are just starting out or who need a link to give one of the former two.

I have written one of these before, but the industry has changed since then. So this is my official late 2017 guide. So, let begin at the beginning and work our way through until the end. There are going to be some hard truths in here, but that is because there are a lot of predators looking for naïve writers to prey on. Don’t be one of those.

Do I have to write the novel first?

Yes, in most cases, you have to write the novel first. Very rarely some legitimate and niche publishers will buy on spec, with sample chapters and a synopsis. Carina Press, an imprint of Harlequin, does it occasionally. However this is mostly for established authors and even if you are a new author, if you are offered a contract for an unfinished manuscript, you would probably be better rejecting the offer. You are going to underestimate how much work and time it requires and the stress of trying to complete it will kill you.

Once you have written a complete manuscript and edited it until you can’t possibly make it any better yourself, I strongly advise you find an online or in-person writers group and seek critique. It’s a good idea to go to a few meetings first and see what sort of critique they give each other first. You are looking for a group that is both supportive, and constructive. If all they do is praise one and other, you’re not going to learn anything or improve.

Your first novel probably won’t sell.

By all means, try. However, to be honest, your first novel is probably terrible and it’s better to take everything you learned writing it and do it again. Sometimes it will take 3-12 novels before you write something that’s really up to scratch.

What I am saying is, it’s going to take a long time, probably a number of years, before you can really get started in a writing career. If you aren’t willing to take that time, spare yourself the pain and effort and find a different career. Keep writing as a hobby.

You don’t need a publisher, but it’s a really good idea.

Self publishing is a valid and fantastic option for some people. However 99% of people who attempt self publishing never make more than $500 from it. Ever. In their entire career. You need  three things to be successful in self publishing:

1. You need to be able to write to the same quality as popular published authors.

2. You need to be skilled in business and marketing—if you don’t already have a degree or career in this, you probably don’t have what it takes.

3. Luck.

Most people who are successful with self publishing are people who were already published traditionally for a number of years first. The reason is they already have 1) high quality writing skills, 2) a fan base of people who want to buy their books and 3) a good idea of how the industry works.

If you have whacky ideas that traditional publishers won’t touch, my advice is to write some more mainstream stuff first. Get that published traditionally, get 5-10 years experience that way, then bring out those whacky books again and self publish them when you know what you’re doing.

I do know a few authors who have self published without experience, slowly and painfully built their readership, then been offered traditional publishing contracts. They all jumped on them like starving dogs. Why? Because self publishing is REALLY HARD WORK and requires more than full time hours a week to make successful and those authors just desperately wanted time to sleep and write instead of promoting and editing and doing all the other fantastic things publishers do.

The simple truth is, in most cases, if publishers don’t want your book, it’s because it not very good.

Good Publishers VS Scammers

I already said there are a lot of people out there, making a living scamming writers. There are so many scams, with new ones cropping up all the time, it would be impossible for me to cover them all. So I will talk about some of them more popular ones and tell you how proper, non scammy publishing is done.

Firstly, a traditional, legitimate publisher won’t contact you. Not unless you are selling thousands of books and making headlines in major papers. So if you have self published and someone contacts you claiming to be a publisher or a book marketer, they are probably a scam. Legitimate publishers and talented PR agencies have too many clients already to go looking for new ones.

If you want to find a traditional publisher, you look them up, go to their website and find their submission guidelines and follow them to the letter. It will usually take 2-12 months before you hear back from them. Publishing is a slow business. Rejections can come very fast though, sometimes within an hour. You will need a query letter, a partial and a complete and edited manuscript ready before you approach publishers.

The best way to tell if a publisher is legitimate, is to look at what books they are publishing. (If you suspect they are a scam, double check on Amazon that they are the listed publisher.) If you haven’t heard of any of their authors or if their covers look unprofessional, it’s a bad sign. It’s not worth working with those people. When choosing which publishers to submit to, I suggest looking in the bookstore for books similar to yours and checking who published them. However I strongly advise you familiarise yourself with publishers, who is publishing what, and keep up to date with industry news. There are hundreds of fantastic resources online.

Stay away from publishers who ask you for money. Money flows to the author. Some publishers hold competitions which have a good reputation. It may be worth entering those if you are certain it is a legitimate and respected competition. But a competition is not the same as querying a publisher. A competition is not the usual way you would approach a publisher. And legitimate publishers won’t ask you to pay a reading fee, editing fee or ask you to pay for your own cover art, etc.

There is a scam that is quite popular where someone offers $10-$500 for your book. They then retain the copyright of the book and you receive no royalties. They are usually romance/erotica titles or nonfiction, how to books. Technically this is not a ‘scam’ as they aren’t lying to you. However it’s not how publishing works. If you get millions of dollars from a traditional publisher, you still retain the copyright. They just have the right to publish the book on your behalf and take a share of the money. If someone buys the copyright (at a tiny fraction of the value, mind you) they package it, put their name on it and keep making money off it forever and you have no say in what happens to it. You sold your copyright.

Sometimes, ghost writers and writers for specific franchises will sell the copyright. They will usually get paid a lot of money, or continue to receive royalties, even if their name is no longer on the work. These are special cases and you can’t build a career as a ghostwriter, in the sense that no one will know your name.

Familiarise yourself with publishing contracts from mainstream publishing houses and don’t sign anything that gives away rights you should be keeping.

Self Publishing Notes

Now, while I said money should always flow to the author, this is not true if you self publish. Because if you self publish, you are no longer an author. You are a publisher. Which means you have dozens of costs up front before you see a dime of money.

You need to pay for a professional editor, you need to pay for professional cover design, you need to pay for professional formatting and you need to pay for promotion. If you want physical books as well as e-books, you’ll need to pay for printing too.

All of these are expensive, and none of them you can afford to skimp on. These are all ‘you get what you pay for’ skills. Don’t even consider asking someone to ‘do the work now and get paid when the money comes in’. You’re self publishing. They know the money is never going to come in. They’re not going to take the chance you’re one of the 0.1% who make any money off it. Because even if you are one of the 0.1% that make money off it, you aren’t going to start making that money for a year or so, and they have bills now.

Do You Need An Agent?

Short answer? It depends. If you’re really struggling to understand contract jargon, yes you need an agent. You don’t have to sign with an agent to use them, however. There are agents out there who will negotiate your contract on your behalf for an hourly rate. It’s expensive—think good lawyer expensive.

Some bigger publishers will only consider manuscripts that are brought to them by an agent. So if you want to get in the door at really big places, then yes, you need an agent.

Agents can also help you with your career plan and give you good advice. Publishers are always in it to make as much money as possible. They are not your friend. Even if you have a fantastic relationship with your editor at a publishing house, they are not on your side when it comes to the best interests of you and the publisher. They are always going to pick the publisher. And that is fine, that’s their job.

I love my editors. They are fantastic people. I trust their judgement and I work very close with them. But I know they are not going to argue with their boss to get me higher royalties or suggest I go to a different publisher if the head of the department has stuck me on the backburner. IT’S NOT THEIR JOB TO DO THAT. An agent however, will.

In Summary:

1. Complete a manuscript.

2. Edit it.

3. Get feedback from peers (not family or friends). Apply feedback.

4. Decide if you need an agent.

5. Research where to submit.

6. Query legitimate agents and publishers following the guidelines on the website. This will require some combination of: a query letter, a partial and a complete manuscript.

7. Go back to step one and repeat in correct order until you are published.