What to do While You Are Getting Rejected

What it takes to get your book published despite repeated rejections

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

Writing a book is part one. Part two involves selling your book.

Part two is what I’d like to write about today.

Publishing was my dream as soon as I decided to write a novel. Why bother writing an entire book if I didn’t plan on selling it to a publisher? I’ve always been destination orientated. I have to set big goals and work to attain them.

I used to write stories, of course, just to see if I could, and one day, my husband asked me what I planned to do with all those stories. I didn’t have an answer, probably because I didn’t believe I could get them published back then. I didn’t think of myself as a real writer. Who was I to ever get noticed by a publisher? I thought of authors as gifted, brilliant people, which I was not.

When I admitted that it would be cool to try to publish them, but I didn’t know how, my husband gave me the gift of a publishing workshop. I learned during that three-hour class that publishing was a business. There were rules on how to contact publishers, and if I could produce a product that the publishers were interested in selling, they would buy my manuscript.

That’s when I started to write with the intention of getting published.

Learning to write a good book took many years. But eventually, I got to a point where I knew that I could write an entire novel and that it was actually well written. I had accomplished my first goal. I thought this was the hard part, and I laugh today at how naïve I was.

Finishing a book was only the beginning. The harder journey was about to begin.

The truth is that you can write an amazing book and still not sell it to a publisher. Every author, even today’s best-selling authors, has been rejected repeatedly.

Agents turn down manuscripts and refuse to represent new authors unless they have a platform or somehow catch their attention with just the right story at just the right time.

Editors at publishing houses do the same, and most will not even look at a manuscript unless an agent represents it.