Rejections come with traditional publishing. Since you can't
get a publisher without an agent, you have two opportunities to be rejected.
Actually, you should consider yourself lucky if you vault the agent hurdle, but
I can tell you from experience that securing a big time agent does not provide
a ticket to Wonderland. Publisher rejections still come, but they are no longer
form letters.
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A personal touch sometimes makes rejection worse, especially
when there’s nothing you can do about it. For example, one publisher said there
was not enough physical action in Tempest at Dawn, my novelization of the Constitutional Convention. I had already
added a horse race, steamship demonstration, rowdy tavern arguments, and even a
house traveling down a Philadelphia street. The conflict came from the debates,
not fist fights. Since publication, Tempest at Dawn has remained one of the top
selling books on the Constitutional Convention. So … keep plugging away. Publishers don’t know
everything. To prove it, here are some rejections sent to aspirating
writers who went on to become bestselling authors.
