You Will Get Rejected

On "Impossible" Dreams and the Road to Becoming a Published Author

This week I was invited, then disinvited, to sit on a panel called “Landing the ‘Impossible’ Book Deal.” The explanation for the disinvitation was that the organizers only wanted panelists from publishers who pay an advance. The person who’d invited me let me know they’d decided to focus the panel on traditional publishing, as it turned out. “What is left of it,” she lamented.

I was gracious in my acceptance of this revocation because what are you gonna do? It stung a little, but I’m no stranger to rejection. She Writes Press, my hybrid imprint, will be 13 years old next month, and you could say it was born of rejection. That’s because I’d spent the previous 13 years in traditional publishing, steeped in rejection.

When you’re an acquiring editor for a publishing house that offers advances, or if you’re an agent, you’re really in the business of rejection. You do far more rejecting than accepting. Rejection underlies the business of book publishing, and if you’re a writer, you have to get good at taking it. We don’t talk too much about the experience of being the rejector, however, and how hard this is for editors and agents—especially when we come across a book we love, a book that should be in the world, a book we know has a readership, but which can’t or won’t be supported by the traditional world of publishing for any number of reasons, some inane and confusing, and some legitimate.

Also, what’s hidden completely from authors is what happens when an editor actually wants a book that gets rejected from their own house. Although it’s a bigger rejection for the author, agents and editors feel the bite of it, too, when projects they love don’t make it. I left traditional publishing because of all this. It’s not that the rejection of books and authors I wanted was too much to bear, but rather that I called bullshit on it. The core story of my leaving traditional publishing was the premise of my TEDx talk, but the short version is that I was pushed to reject a book that was meaningful and important, a book that should have been published, only to have the next book I brought to acquisitions, a much less meaningful and important book, be embraced by the marketing department because of the author’s connections (and as far as I could see, that was all that sold it). It was the proverbial straw, and I’ve never looked back.

---

In the early days of She Writes Press, I was often the lone voice for author-subsidized publishing. It wasn’t always an easy sell. I’ve been on the writers’ conference circuit since my traditional days, and it took some organizers a long time to see that hybrid publishing should even be represented. In the mid-2010s, I sat on a panel at the San Francisco Writers Conference among my traditional peers feeling very much like the odd woman out. The then-organizer was telling the writers in the room that they were there to get a book deal! When I pointed out that they really had to have an author platform to get a traditional deal, he shot me down—pretty aggressively and very publicly. I hastened to add, “That’s been my experience.” He apologized later, and I realized what I’d done wrong. I’d countered the dream he was selling.  

This many years later, I’ve keynoted the San Francisco Writers Conference, and like many writers’ conferences, they embrace hybrid all the way. Most people who are connected to the industry, who’ve lived through the evolution of the past decade-plus, see that alternative paths to publishing support authors and authors’ dreams. As a hybrid-published author myself, I can attest to my books opening doors, and to no one caring who my publisher is. It’s the quality of the book and the message or story that matters.

---

It turns out I have strong feelings about selling the dream of traditional publishing. From having been in the trenches, I can tell you that there’s no magic bullet. There’s no path you can follow, no specific author platform you can build, that will guarantee an agent or editor’s interest in you. You can follow the steps—build an audience; publish stories, essays, articles prolifically; foster your connections—but none of this is easy, and there’s no prescription for how a person arrives. Even if and when you seem to arrive, you might still be rejected based on the soft stuff no one will say out loud: it’s not your moment; you are not what they’re looking for; you don’t “fit”—now or maybe ever.

I’m on the other side of all that and have been for a long time because I refused an acquisitions process based on author brand and celebrity over substance. I’m no longer in the minority, either. The ranks have grown over the years, tremendously. Aspiring authors understand that traditional publishing is a confusing labyrinth of subjectivity and obfuscation. I go to a lot of writers’ conferences, still. I look out into those rooms at all the eager faces of the conference-goers and know that one in one hundred, if that, will land a traditional deal. I guess this is what puts the “impossible” into the equation, but how unhelpful, then, not to give authors choices and education.

Rejection is a given in this industry, and there is value in trying for the “impossible” deal. Aspiring authors can learn a lot in going through the process of trying to sell their manuscripts. They can refine their projects and toughen up a bit. They might get some advice that changes their entire outlook or direction. Heck, they might even get a deal. But if you’re an aspiring author with no website, no social media, no following/existing audience, no credits to your name—in essence, no platform—then I’m here to gently tell you that it will be impossible to land that traditional deal.

In my TEDx talk I have a line: “Sometimes you have to let go of one dream to make room for a new dream.” I think about this all the time when I talk to writers and authors because it’s a process. And there are a lot of people out there, however well-intentioned, selling “the dream.” The dream is a commodity. The dream fills rooms. But talk to any author you think is living the dream and they’ll tell you, it wasn’t just theirs for the taking. Their path was undoubtedly filled with rejection, and effort, and still and will forever involve consistently showing up and doing the work.

To me, the real dream is saying yes to yourself on your own terms. Open your own doors. Don’t wait for impossible.