Sunday, January 25, 2009

Some Memorable Rejections

The roving reporter for Promo 101 Virtual Blog Tours - Terry L White - sent this to me this morning and I had a feeling other authors and struggle writers would appreciate the irony in these rejection statistics -

CELEBRATION OF REJECTION
From the pages of, How to Get a Literary Agent by Michael Larsen

1. 112 Books for Louis L’Amour though he received rejections. He received 200 rejections before he sold his first novel. During the last forty years Bantam has shipped nearly three hundred million of his one hundred twelve books, making him their biggest-selling author.

2. 600+ rejection slips wall paper Jack London’s home.

3. 774 rejection slips for John Creasy who went on to publish under 13 pseudonyms 564 books

4. 14 rejected Pearl S Buck finally published The Good Earth

5. 20 rejections didn’t stop Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s publication and you know how famous it became, written by Richard Bach

6. 40 rejections before she sold her first book didn’t stop Mary Higgins Clark

7. 200 rejections Roots by Alex Haley was published.

8. 15 publishers and 30 agents rejected John Grisham’s A Time to Kill before it was finally published.

9. 375 publishers rejected naked in Deccan over seven years before the Baltimore Sun deemed it a classic.

10. Dr Seuss – 24 in his file of rejections before his first books was published

11. 8 years after the novel Steps won the National Book Award, Jerzy Kosinski allowed it to be send out again with a name change to 13 agents and 14 publishers – all of them rejected it, including Random House, which originally published it. Proves the plight of new writers trying to get recognition or a publishing contract.

12. The New Yorker rejected a short story by Saul Bellow after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

13. A three-inch stack of rejection letters before Terry L. White published a book.

14. About 40 rejections from various targeted agents before Nikki Leigh switched gears and applied directly to the publishers.


To visit Terry - she posts daily about the current virtual tours that we're doing. You can visit her here - http://authorsontour.blogspot.com/

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