I’ve read numerous stories from well known authors about their journey to becoming published. I put so much time and effort into my craft, I couldn’t help but feel discouraged and wonder what I was doing wrong when I received rejection letter after rejection letter. Reading their stories encouraged me.
The one common theme in all of their stories was perseverance. The agent that worked with me on my book, always ended her critiques with don’t give up. Perseverance is the one characteristic that all successful writers have.
If you have a high quality, marketable piece of work, persevere and you will eventually find an agent and get published. Kathryn Stockett wrote The Help over a five year period of time, then had three and a half years worth of rejections. 60 in all. It was agent 61 who took her on. The book spent 100 weeks on the best seller list. Not sure if you are familiar with the book but you probably have heard of the movie based on this book.
Other notable Authors who suffered rejection:
- Richard Adam’s Watership Down 17 rejections
- Frank Herbert’s Dune 20+ rejections
- JK Rowlings’ Harry Potter 12+ rejections
- Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook 24 rejections.
I hope you are getting the picture. Revise, edit, do what you have to do to make your story great and don’t give up.
-Jan R
Writing your first novel-Things you should know 
I understand and agree, but there are thousands of submissions for every book published. Even if your book is high quality, best seller material, you need to connect with the right agent. And when you compete against hundreds and hundreds of other high quality, best seller material, it’s the luck of the draw – and the agent. Never give up.
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