Reframing rejection

As I write this I'm about to self-publish my second Panthera novel, Death Song.  When I and a couple of writer friends set Up Pentangle Press last year we'd run out of patience with the publishing world.

All of us have been writing for over twenty years, we've attended writers' circles, writing festivals, and hawked our work before editors and agents at one to one appointments for years.  We'd run out of of patience with the publishing industry and it's total indifference to our work.

Recently I came across several websites devoted to literary rejections, and boy, were these an eye-opener!  They had long, long, lists of authors whose books are classics today who suffered far more rejections that I have done.  Imagine suffering 800 rejections before you sold a thing!  And in previous ages those authors didn't have a cheap and easy self-publishing alternative.  The gatekeepers really were the gatekeepers then.

Reading those websites totally changed my feeling about rejections.  I realised that it had always been as tough as it is today, something I hadn't really taken on board before.  And it changed my mind about rejections.  Having racked up over 200, I had begun to feel embarrassed about my failure to break through.  Despite all the good feedback I've had over the years I began to wonder if I was deluding myself that I could write.  But these websites have totally changed my mindset.  

They've shown me that my struggle to get published is perfectly normal.  In fact, I'm not failing often enough.  Brendan Deneen, writing on the Galley Cat website, talks of patience being the key.  He had to wait from age 18 to age 41 to sell his first book.  He said that rejection should be a badge of honour, because it proves you're getting work out there.  And he made the point that we need to be constantly writing new stuff.  He suggests we should be writing one new novel a year.

Self-publishing Panthera : Death Spiral was good for me.  I had people I sold the book to coming up to me and telling me how much they enjoyed it.  And putting reviews on Amazon to back that up. It road-tested my work, and now I'm ready to re-enter the mainstream publishing fray.

I've been writing two new novels a year for the last five years.  And I haven't even sent some of those novels out.  At times my skin has been just too thin to cope with rejections. But my new resolution is to reframe rejection, to see it as Brendan's badge of honour, and to collect more medals.