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How to Avoid the Rejection Blues
by Maggie Thom
Being rejected is the one thing that all authors try to avoid. In fact I think a lot of us try to make sure it doesn’t happen in our lives. It’s never fun and we always take it personally, which is the biggest thing that authors have to learn – not to take what happens personally.
When you make that decision to take your manuscript – that baby that you created, nurtured, built up, tore down, cried over, grit your teeth over, lost sleep thinking about, ran it around in your thoughts day in and day out, stuffed your face with food because the stress was too much – and send it out to an agent or publisher, than the odds are that you are going to face some sort of rejection. Someone at some point is going to let you know that it isn’t for them. Only it doesn’t always come across that nice.
It’s not fun. And it’s not nice but it is a reality. The truth though is that you can make it much easier on yourself and how you feel about it. I know with the first rejection letter I got, many years ago, I was sure that there had to be some mistake. They couldn’t have read or understood what my book was about. And then it shot me back into that place of ‘you can’t write and now you have proof’. After that the next few I got were easier to take. The key is use the rejection letters to learn from and to keep working towards being published.
Here are some ways that I managed the rejections blues:
1. I’d cry and I’d swear I was never going to write another thing.
2. I’d walk away from it and forget about it for a while.
3. I’d tell myself the person was Gollum and didn’t recognize that they’d had their precious in their hands but had let it go.
4. I’d reminded myself that many other famous authors (Stephen King, JK Rowling, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, to name but a few) were rejected time and again but they persisted and look where they are now.
5. That this is what I love to do so I have a choice of staying in my 60 hour plus management job the rest of my life or I can continue to work at becoming a published author.
6. I’d go for a run, walk, hike do something physical and out in nature.
7. I would move onto the next project and start writing it.
8. I’d send out the next query.
I’d really get to the point where I realized I could focus on the rejection or I could learn from it and move on. Acknowledge that you got rejected and then figure out how you can move forward and make this happen for you.
How do you deal with rejection blues?
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Genre – Suspense
Rating – PG13
More details about the author & the book
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