How to deal with ‘thanks, but no thanks’

How to deal with ‘thanks, but no thanks’

The touchy topic of rejection slips surfaced last week when JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, released on Twitter some slips she had received from publishers. Her stated objective was to encourage aspiring authors not to give up after receiving rejections.

Authors tend to be a rather sensitive lot and being told by some faceless person that your work is not up to standard can really hurt. Isaac Asimov once wrote: “Rejection slips, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul — if not quite inventions of the devil — but there is no way around them."

The rejection letters Rowling made public were not for the Harry Potter books, but The Cuckoo’s Calling, a novel she wrote under the pen name Robert Galbraith, the publishers unaware that Rowling was the author. One of the letters advised her to take up a writing course.

The author’s initial Harry Potter book was also rejected by a dozen publishing houses who thought the adventures of the boy wizard would never catch on. More than 400 million copies of the Potter series have been sold.

Rowling is not the first prominent writer to have work rejected out of hand. Just about every notable author has received a missive which begins with “we regret to inform you…”. Even Snoopy in the Peanuts comic strip receives them regularly.

Light, slight and trite

It took Agatha Christie five years before her first novel was accepted. Mind you, thriller writer Ruth Rendell once commented: “To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.”

Popular author Mary Higgins Clark, who has had 50 novels published, experienced 40 rejection slips before her first book came out. One publisher dismissed her work as “light, slight and trite". Some rejections are quite blunt. In a reply to British sci-fi writer JG Ballard the publisher snorted: “The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.”

Stephen King was so frustrated after his first book Carrie was rejected 30 times, he threw it into the trash. His wife rescued it and urged him to keep trying. “The nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips," King had complained.

Pigs don’t sell

Some famous books almost never made it. Margaret Mitchell’s classic Gone With the Wind was rejected 38 times and that went on to become the most popular ever book in America … apart from the Bible.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm, was initially rejected on the hilarious grounds that it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the United States". No wonder Orwell wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London, “There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher’s daughter.”

William Goldman’s Lord of the Flies was dismissed by one publisher as "absurd, uninteresting, rubbish and dull".

Not so Flash

One of the most memorable rejections concerned an article submitted to the San Francisco Examiner by Rudyard Kipling. He was told “you just don’t know how to use the English language".

George MacDonald Fraser’s terrific best-selling Flashman series nearly didn’t get off the ground either. Fraser went through more than a dozen publishers, who felt his first book was simply “not good enough”. Meanwhile after writing The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John Le Carre was greeted by “he hasn’t got any future".

Rejecting rejection

Writers react in different ways to receiving rejection slips. Many screw the offending letter up and throw it in the wastepaper basket with some force. But others almost treasure them.

American Lee Pennington received so many rejection slips he papered all four walls of his bedroom with them. Not sure I could do that — talk about a daily reminder of failure. In a similar vein, Joanne Harris had so many rejections of her ultimately successful novel Chocolat she crafted them into a sculpture.

Probably the best response came from Winston Churchill. Upon receiving a rejection letter, Churchill replied with his own letter to the publisher: “Dear sir, I am in the smallest room in the house. I have your letter before me. Soon it will be behind me.”

Occasionally established authors feel confident enough to put publishers in their place. After receiving a response to his manuscript of Travels with My Aunt which read: "Terrific book, but we’ll need to change the title”, Graham Greene replied in a telegram: “No need to change the title, easier to change publishers.” The title wasn’t changed.

Unsound advice

The world of music also has many examples of musicians who eventually become famous being rejected out of hand in their early days. Even Elvis Presely was told by a band leader: “You’ll never make it as a singer.”

The most famous incident was in 1962 when a Decca executive rejected a British pop group, commenting: “We don’t like their sound, and anyway guitar music is on the way out." He was only dismissing the Beatles.

A year later, when the Rolling Stones performed at the BBC, a producer had a serious talk with manager Andrew Loog Oldham. He gave him the following sound advice: “The band is OK, but I would get rid of the vile singer with the tyre-tread lips.”

Last weekend that “vile singer”, at the age of 72, performed in front of an adoring 300,000-plus crowd in Havana.


Contact PostScript via email at oldcrutch@hotmail.com.

Roger Crutchley

Bangkok Post columnist

A long time popular Bangkok Post columnist. In 1994 he won the Ayumongkol Literary Award. For many years he was Sports Editor at the Bangkok Post.

Email : oldcrutch@gmail.com

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