Donal Ryan had 30 rejections before a publisher accepted his first novel, The Spinning Heart, which has been longlisted for the Booker Prize.
How was it finally chosen? An intern at Lilliput Press in Dublin took it out of the slush pile, loved it, and recommended it to the publisher, Anthony Farrell.
MediaBistro.com reported Ryan's comments at the Dublin Book Festival site, and they reflect an unusual attitude toward form rejections, which most writers resent:
"I had around thirty rejections in the bag before Daniel Caffrey from the The Lilliput Press rang me one evening and everything changed. They were mostly what I think of as out of hand rejections, though, so weren’t quite as wounding as someone saying, look, we’ve read your book, it’s not good. Form rejections hurt a little bit less, I think. It’s less personal."
Naturally any rejection is unwelcome, but they're an inevitable part of the process and we need to come up with a strategy for coping with them. The moral of the story, of course, is that persistence pays.
(For guidance on writing your book, get a copy of my book, Your Writing Coach, published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)
