What We Talk About When We Talk About Rejection
‘There were 3 or 4 rejection letters that said this will win a major award… this will win the Booker and that’s why I talk about rejection because I think sometimes we think rejection is about the quality of the work but sometimes it’s about the fit.’ Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain
When it comes to the business of writing, failure, rejection and criticism are an inherent part of the deal. It is the flip side to every success for writers, agents and publishers. There can be no success without (at least a bit of) failure. This may sound defeatist or cynical but, viewed from the right perspective, every rejection is an opportunity to learn, to craft, to aim higher on the next attempt. Rejection is baked in to every part of the book publishing process: right from a book’s inception to its first one-star review on The Online Retailer Who Will Not Be Named. Learning to accept it, and perhaps even appreciate or embrace it, will make for a happier writing life. So, how do you do that, exactly?
The first way is to understand that rejections are almost never about the quality of your work. As Douglas Stuart says in an interview on the Write-Off podcast, rejection can be because of fit. An agent or editor is usually balancing a very long to-do list and a packed schedule of books, so usually No means: I’m sorry I love this, but I don’t have the time to fit this into my publishing schedule. Sometimes it means: I’m not the right person for this project so please keep looking for the right fit. Sometimes it means: I think you’re on to something but this needs more work.
Second, it also helps to know that you’re not alone in an experience. And when it comes to rejection, no one is more steeped in it on a day-to-day basis than literary agents. We’re either writing rejection letters or receiving them and this experience has shown us that rejection is something to cherish: it means you are trying; it means you are moving and growing and working boldly.
So what follows is the view from the other side of the desk. This is how agents and editors experience, process and learn from rejection.
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You’ve spent long hours at your laptop (or typewriter/notebook if you happen to be extremely old-school) thinking, crafting, editing and re-editing your book, and it’s time to start querying. We know it’s a daunting step and that rejections, if (when) they follow, however polite, can feel personal and deeply disheartening. We know this very well because, as agents, we deal with rejections on a regular basis ourselves.
Rejection for Agents
Agents face rejection on two fronts: from prospective authors and from book editors.
When we open your submission and are enchanted by your sample – quickly requesting a full manuscript and cancelling our evening plans so that we can devour your book – we may find that we’re not the only agent to feel that way and sometimes end up in a competition (called a ‘beauty contest’ in the industry) with several other agents to represent you. We will have a call or meet you in person and present our vision for your book and your career, believing that we could be the best-placed person to champion you and your writing in the industry. We will cross our fingers and hope that you want to work with us. Sometimes we’re lucky, but sometimes we face the disappointment of rejection when you decide to go with another agent. There are lots of great agents out there! We have to brush ourselves off, wish you well, and try very hard not to take it personally – as it is almost never personal.
Say, however, we are lucky and you accept our offer of representation. Then, the hard work of preparing your book for submission to editors begins. We edit and shape your book. We spend hours talking to editors, scouts and relevant team members to draw up the best editor submission list for your book and then write a compelling pitch letter that not only does justice to your book but helps to position it in the current market. As an agent, one of our top priorities, other than getting you the best deal, is finding you the best editor. There’s a scene in the French comedy Call My Agent where the ballsy Top Agent tells someone what an agent does: ‘We let fly little arrows, we create marriages…’. While we aren’t literally arranging your marriage, we are passionate about finding you the right editor for your long-term writing career. This takes a lot of time. When we hit send on those submission emails, we care about you and your book passionately and are 100% invested in seeing it succeed. From that point, even in a best-case scenario where your book attracts an exciting 15-way auction, there are likely to have been another 8 rejections from editors, for a variety of reasons. And those rejections always sit on a spectrum from disappointing to crushing, though part of the job of course is to be able to digest them, learn, and keep working for the best outcome for our authors.
Literary agent extraordinaire Jo Unwin of Jo Unwin Literary Agency says: ‘Whenever a book I’m passionate about is turned down by a publisher I try to remember that when I go into a bookshop, stocked with several thousand books, I might just buy one or two, (oh ok sometimes three), so in a sense at that moment I’m ‘rejecting’ literally thousands. Writing, agenting and publishing are all about finding the right connections, so I try not to see a rejection as such, but rather a failure on my part to find the right connection... yet.’
Rejection for editors
Editors have to deal with rejection all the time. If an agent submits a manuscript to them that they fall in love with, they must then do the hard graft of getting that submission through their own in-house processes at an acquisitions meeting. They then try to create a compelling offer, and usually have a meeting with the author and the agent where they sell their own vision for publishing the book. And through that process they are likely to be competing with editors at other publishers who also love the book, and are frantically doing the same thing to attract that author to their list. Only one of those editors can be successful and secure the author and their book, and I know from speaking to editor friends that, though they will be cheering that author on from the sidelines, they are deeply disappointed not to get to work with them.
Editors also need to navigate the internal processes at their publishing house that means that some books get more internal resources than others and this might feel like a rejection of sorts when their book is not given that additional in-house focus. And of course, if they are an acquiring editor – did they overpay for a book? Did the book earn its advance out? Was a book on their list a critical or commercial success?
Laura Barber, esteemed Associate Publishing Director of Granta, says of the process: ‘I guess I'd say that all editors have had their own experience of professional rejection: the heart-break when a book you love doesn’t make it through the Acquisitions meeting; the disappointment when you lose out to another editor in an auction; and, even worse, the grief that comes when an author leaves you for another house... so writing rejection letters is definitely, for me at least, the hardest part of the job. Anyone who has had the inspiration, courage and tenacity to sit down and write something has made themselves vulnerable and wants more than anything for their work to find its readers, so your human instinct is to want to be able to help someone realise that dream.
Perhaps knowing why an editor isn't offering on your work isn't much consolation, but I always try to be clear about the reasons behind a pass. Sometimes it's simply an instinctive feeling that I am not quite in tune with the rhythm or tone of the writing, which means I wouldn't be the best person to work with the author on it; but often it comes down to factors unrelated to the project itself: perhaps there is already a book on a similar subject on the list or the timing isn't right. And sometimes, just occasionally, if a submission comes close, if the writing stays with you, if you mention it to a colleague who loves it... a rejection can turn into an offer later on. And perhaps there is also comfort to be found in knowing that even bestselling authors often have a stack of rejections under their belts before the perfect offer comes along.’