FAMOUS REJECTIONS
G'day folks,
I have raised this subject before, but I thought this article by Preetam Kaushick was worth posting. Thank you, Preetam.
"Although some writers might
beg to differ, we need to realize that publishers are humans too. With that in
mind, let us look at a few examples of how publishers really got it wrong as
they rejected the work of people who turned out to be some of the most famous
authors of our times.
1) F. Scott Fitzgerald – Fitzgerald is considered one of the geniuses of modern American literature and his masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby”, is currently ranked number two in the Top 100 novels of the last century, according to Modern Library. But, in 1925, L.P. Hartley of The Saturday Review clearly disagreed. In his rejection, he wrote, “Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.”
2) Gertrude Stein – Before Gertrude Stein became one of the most influential authors of the first quarter of the last century; before she wrote the classic “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”, she had to face a grossly mocking rejection letter from publisher Arthur Fifield wherein he wrote “… I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.”
3) Yann Martel – Before its movie adaptation won all those awards, “Life of Pi” won the Booker Prize. It was published by Knopf Canada. However, five big names in publishing rejected it before Derek Johns from Knopf picked it up. One of those five publishers was Simon Prosser from Penguin. After the book won the award, he later said “Taste is very subjective.”
4) Chuck Palahniuk – When an author’s first published novel is the hugely acclaimed “Fight Club”, you tend to wonder what his rejected work would be like. “Invisible Monsters” pre-dates Palahniuk’s first novel, but his publisher, WW Norton, initially rejected it, calling it “disturbing content”, before releasing it in 1999. Luckily for us, he did not pay any heed to such feedback.
5) George Orwell – Orwell’s is an unusual case of rejection. More than the quality of his work, it was the times around which it was written that brought him most of the flak. Ironically, it was another writer, the famous T.S. Eliot, who rejected Orwell’s classic, “Animal Farm”, because he didn’t agree with the view point, saying, “…which I take to be generally Trotskyite.”
6) Jack Kerouac – Some authors were rejected simply because what they wrote challenged almost everything society believed at that point of time. A classic example is that of Kerouac’s offbeat masterpiece, “On The Road”. Knopf was the culprit this time. One of the reviewers over at Knopf remarked, “I don’t dig this at all.” The book is now considered a bible for people who challenge the mainstream.
8) Edgar Allan Poe – Poe is without any doubt the grandfather of the horror fiction genre. Without him, there wouldn’t be a Stephen King, or for that matter, a Tim Burton. Sadly, he was so broke from having publishers reject his short stories, that he was forced to join the army. J & J Harpers famously rejected his collection before realizing their folly and finally publishing it. We know it today as the acclaimed “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”.
9) Mary Shelley – A big challenge for authors is to get a book published that is later considered a pioneer in the genre. No publisher would want to take such a risk. This explains why publishers like Percy Bysshe, Charles Ollier and John Murray rejected the gothic horror epic “Frankenstein”.
10) J.K. Rowling – Forget getting rejected by publishers – try getting rejected by your own agent. That is what Rowling went through while she was getting rejected left and right by publishers. Christopher Little, who later became her agent and pitched her work to Bloomsbury, her eventual publisher, rejected “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” because he believed there was no money in children’s fantasy. Today, the Harry Potter franchise has earned more than $25 billion.
FAMOUS SELF-PUBLISHED BOOKS:
Remembrance of things Past, by Marcel Proust
Ulysses, by James Joyce
The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter
The Wealthy Barber, by David Chilton
The Bridges of Madison County
What Color is Your Parachute
In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. (and his student E. B. White)
The Joy of Cooking
When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple
Life’s Little Instruction Book
Robert’s Rules of Order
OTHER FAMOUS AUTHORS WHO SELF-PUBLISHED
Deepak Chopra
Gertrude Stein
Zane Grey
Upton Sinclair
Carl Sandburg
Ezra Pound
Mark Twain
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Stephen Crane
Bernard Shaw
Anais Nin
Thomas Paine
Virginia Wolff
e.e. Cummings
Edgar Allen Poe
Rudyard Kipling
Henry David Thoreau
Benjamin Franklin
Walt Whitman
Alexandre Dumas
William E.B. DuBois
Beatrix Potter
REJECTED BY PUBLISHERS
Kathryn Sockett – The Help – 60 times
Pearl S. Buck – The Good Earth – 14 times
Norman Mailer – The Naked and the Dead – 12 times
Patrick Dennis- Auntie Mame – 15 times
George Orwell – Animal Farm
Richard Bach – Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 20 times
Joseph Heller - Catch-22 – 22 times (!)
Mary Higgins Clark – first short story – 40 times
Alex Haley – before Roots – 200 rejections
Robert Persig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – 121 times
John Grisham – A Time to Kill – 15 publishers and 30 agents (he ended up publishing it himself)
Chicken Soup for the Soul – 33 times
Dr. Seuss – 24 times
Louis L’Amour – 200 rejections
Jack London – 600 before his first story
John Creasy – 774 rejections before selling his first story. He went on to write 564 books, using fourteen names.
Jerzy Kosinski – 13 agents and 14 publishers rejected his best-selling novel when he submitted it under a different name, including Random House, which had originally published it.
Diary of Anne Frank
During his entire lifetime, Herman Melville’s timeless classic, Moby Dick, sold only 3,715 copies.
Think about this!
1) F. Scott Fitzgerald – Fitzgerald is considered one of the geniuses of modern American literature and his masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby”, is currently ranked number two in the Top 100 novels of the last century, according to Modern Library. But, in 1925, L.P. Hartley of The Saturday Review clearly disagreed. In his rejection, he wrote, “Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.”
2) Gertrude Stein – Before Gertrude Stein became one of the most influential authors of the first quarter of the last century; before she wrote the classic “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”, she had to face a grossly mocking rejection letter from publisher Arthur Fifield wherein he wrote “… I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.”
3) Yann Martel – Before its movie adaptation won all those awards, “Life of Pi” won the Booker Prize. It was published by Knopf Canada. However, five big names in publishing rejected it before Derek Johns from Knopf picked it up. One of those five publishers was Simon Prosser from Penguin. After the book won the award, he later said “Taste is very subjective.”
4) Chuck Palahniuk – When an author’s first published novel is the hugely acclaimed “Fight Club”, you tend to wonder what his rejected work would be like. “Invisible Monsters” pre-dates Palahniuk’s first novel, but his publisher, WW Norton, initially rejected it, calling it “disturbing content”, before releasing it in 1999. Luckily for us, he did not pay any heed to such feedback.
5) George Orwell – Orwell’s is an unusual case of rejection. More than the quality of his work, it was the times around which it was written that brought him most of the flak. Ironically, it was another writer, the famous T.S. Eliot, who rejected Orwell’s classic, “Animal Farm”, because he didn’t agree with the view point, saying, “…which I take to be generally Trotskyite.”
6) Jack Kerouac – Some authors were rejected simply because what they wrote challenged almost everything society believed at that point of time. A classic example is that of Kerouac’s offbeat masterpiece, “On The Road”. Knopf was the culprit this time. One of the reviewers over at Knopf remarked, “I don’t dig this at all.” The book is now considered a bible for people who challenge the mainstream.
7) Rudyard Kipling –
Young adults all over the world have studied Kipling in their English class.
This makes the following comment by The San Francisco Examiner extremely
hilarious – “I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the
English language.“
8) Edgar Allan Poe – Poe is without any doubt the grandfather of the horror fiction genre. Without him, there wouldn’t be a Stephen King, or for that matter, a Tim Burton. Sadly, he was so broke from having publishers reject his short stories, that he was forced to join the army. J & J Harpers famously rejected his collection before realizing their folly and finally publishing it. We know it today as the acclaimed “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”.
9) Mary Shelley – A big challenge for authors is to get a book published that is later considered a pioneer in the genre. No publisher would want to take such a risk. This explains why publishers like Percy Bysshe, Charles Ollier and John Murray rejected the gothic horror epic “Frankenstein”.
10) J.K. Rowling – Forget getting rejected by publishers – try getting rejected by your own agent. That is what Rowling went through while she was getting rejected left and right by publishers. Christopher Little, who later became her agent and pitched her work to Bloomsbury, her eventual publisher, rejected “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” because he believed there was no money in children’s fantasy. Today, the Harry Potter franchise has earned more than $25 billion.
With a list that
includes these names, it is obvious that for writers, often the key lies in not
changing their work, but just the people who claim to be experts. It worked out
for 2003 Man Booker Prize winner D.B.C. Pierre when he met Clare Conville after
half the publishers he approached had rejected “Vernon God Little”, while the other half were
yet to get back to him. Conville thought otherwise. The rest is history.
Writers, never give up."
And, not only but also, check out this list of notables who were also treated roughly:
Remembrance of things Past, by Marcel Proust
Ulysses, by James Joyce
The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter
The Wealthy Barber, by David Chilton
The Bridges of Madison County
What Color is Your Parachute
In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. (and his student E. B. White)
The Joy of Cooking
When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple
Life’s Little Instruction Book
Robert’s Rules of Order
OTHER FAMOUS AUTHORS WHO SELF-PUBLISHED
Deepak Chopra
Gertrude Stein
Zane Grey
Upton Sinclair
Carl Sandburg
Ezra Pound
Mark Twain
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Stephen Crane
Bernard Shaw
Anais Nin
Thomas Paine
Virginia Wolff
e.e. Cummings
Edgar Allen Poe
Rudyard Kipling
Henry David Thoreau
Benjamin Franklin
Walt Whitman
Alexandre Dumas
William E.B. DuBois
Beatrix Potter
Kathryn Sockett – The Help – 60 times
Pearl S. Buck – The Good Earth – 14 times
Norman Mailer – The Naked and the Dead – 12 times
Patrick Dennis- Auntie Mame – 15 times
George Orwell – Animal Farm
Richard Bach – Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 20 times
Joseph Heller - Catch-22 – 22 times (!)
Mary Higgins Clark – first short story – 40 times
Alex Haley – before Roots – 200 rejections
Robert Persig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – 121 times
John Grisham – A Time to Kill – 15 publishers and 30 agents (he ended up publishing it himself)
Chicken Soup for the Soul – 33 times
Dr. Seuss – 24 times
Louis L’Amour – 200 rejections
Jack London – 600 before his first story
John Creasy – 774 rejections before selling his first story. He went on to write 564 books, using fourteen names.
Jerzy Kosinski – 13 agents and 14 publishers rejected his best-selling novel when he submitted it under a different name, including Random House, which had originally published it.
Diary of Anne Frank
During his entire lifetime, Herman Melville’s timeless classic, Moby Dick, sold only 3,715 copies.
Clancy's comment: And ... you can add my name to the list. I have had hundreds of rejections ... But I am still writing. Does that say something about me?
Think about this!
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