For those of you who have had your work accepted by an agent - or even a publisher - you can look at these lists with amused interest.
For those of us who haven't, who have received SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO many rejection slips (or e-mails) or to whom agents / publishers haven't even bothered replying, who are considering tossing in the towel and being "sensible" and "realistic" about accepting the fact that this writing thingie just isn't for us, I think that these 2 lists should restore some hope:
A list of 14 books, each of which was rejected AT LEAST 15 times. Some of them many, many more times than that. (One of my favourite 99 books of all time was rejected 121 times! [Every time that I re-read it, I consider declaring that it's in my top 36.] The editor who finally published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance said of Pirsig's book, "It forced me to decide what I was in publishing for."):
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/literature/14-best-selling-books-repeatedly-rejected-by-publishers.htm
And - on another web-site, "an extenstive collection of the some of the biggest errors of judgement in publishing history":
http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/
This 2nd list includes the following:
“Hopelessly bogged down and unreadable.” The 1968 letter from an editor did not deter the author, Ursula K. Le Guin, as her book The Left Hand of Darkness goes on to become just the first of her many best-sellers, and is now regularly voted as the second best fantasy novel of all time, next to The Lord of the Rings.
Bit sloppy with their research there: The Left Hand of Darkness is regularly voted the 2nd best SCIENCE FICTION novel of all time, after Dune by Frank Herbert (which appears in the 1st list: rejected by 23 publishers). TLHOD also happens to be MY 2nd favourite sci-fi novel, but 1st is Woman On The Edge Of Time by Marge Piercy. Even if you HATE sci-fi (and would probably hate Dune), read these 2 books!
[Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy is regularly voted the 2nd best work of fantasy of all time, next to - yes - Lord Of The Rings. And Ursula K. Le Guin is voted the # AUTHOR in both catagories. Earthsea wipes the floor with Harry Potter AND Lord Of The Rings.]
NEVER lose your dream!
Cheers Jimmy. An incentive for us all to keep going. Never give up.
great stuff. I think if you've criticized your own work enough and improved it enough before you try publishing it, the only person who can say if it worth publishing or not is you.
publisher agents read many books and 'think' they know what's good and what's bad.
a writer should have read twice the number of the 'good books' those agents ever read and most importantly he writes the stuff people going to read so he is the one who really knows what is good and what is bad.
So if you wrote something and see it is a strong enough read and can make and keep yourself interested in it as a reader then there is no reason you should stop trying to publish it only because a publisher rejected you.
I myself had a 90 page essay of mine on Nietzsche's Die Umwertung aller Werte that I wanted to publish here and not only it got rejected by some but it got banned in the end because it was about a different view on morality.
Now I know rejection is just a part of this (I have zero chance in my country but rejection is in everywhere) and some publishers are just after certain kinds of books maybe like twilight and fifty shades of grey to publish and make money off them. Just like there are records in the music world that will support Justin Bieber kind of singers and you can't expect them to support Therion. Or some of them have agents who just fail to have a good judgement.
So if you really know you are good write what you have to write and do not give up, because when it is published a strong work will always attract attention.
Excuse me, Adrian, but you have just posted the entire contents of one of the web-pages that I offered links to in my opening post. Although this saves other users from copying-and-pasting that link into their computer's URL bar and clicking "enter", you have committed several blunders:
a) You have ignored my first added comment, viz.
"p.s. Add your favourite quote [re: agents / publishers making incredible boo-boos] from these 2 sites (or any other source). It's time WE had a laugh at THEIR expense."
(Unless - of course - your favourite quote is the whole blimmin' article.)
b) You haven't taken the trouble to reduce the spaces between paragraphs from 3 or 4 empty lines to just one, so that your comment is about 2·4km long... a trifle irritating to scroll down, I find.
c) If you felt the need to be helpful in this way, why didn't you choose the other link (which has its information spread over 15 web-pages), copy-and-paste the few pertinent paragraphs on each of those pages into one comment box, and saved other users a LOT of clicking?