How do you cope with rejection?
I know that Bradbury was rejected about 800 times. I know the famous JK Rowling story. Yet the question is lurking in my mind, becoming stronger and clearer with each rejection: what if?
What if I am really not that good, what if I am simply an acute case of the graphomania disease, and nobody will ever be interested in anything I have to say. What if I am wasting my time, my money, my family's patience on nothing, nothing at all?
I cannot stop writing. I do not seek fame or wealth, I seek an audience. I want my books to be read. Almost each and every beta reader (not personal acquaintance) told me I am good. But how would I really know if I am any good? If I have this right to ask unknown people to spent some hours of their lives with my books?
EDIT: All the answers were very insightful and very helpful. Thank you. I am going to accept @Liquid's answer just because it was the first and it was there when I needed it most.
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Several thoughts to consider:
There is no reason to expect an agent's opinion to be a better assessment of your writing than a beta reader's opinion.
Agents are business people. They pay their mortgages by finding the manuscripts that will sell, and then selling them for the best price they can. The manuscripts that will sell are those that the public is currently interested in.
Within a week of the college admissions scandal breaking, agents were wish listing a book about college admissions scandals. See? It's a market.
A 10% request rate on queries is a good rate.
But I know people who had a zero percent request rate on agent queries and then landed a big independent publisher. So again, agents are just people, and they receive a dozen or more queries each and every day. They have to wade through all of that knowing that reading a full manuscript will take days of their time, at which point another fifty queries will have piled up in their inbox.
As an assessment of your manuscript, agent rejections are almost meaningless in this context.
And, a ten percent rate is a good rate. Five percent might be closer to the average.
If what you want is to build an audience, do it.
Put yourself out there--find your audience and love them. There are a thousand ways to find readers. Websites and social media, of course. Buying ads. Friends and family. Running a blog, promotional deals.
In the end, all you know is that some people will enjoy what you write, and others won't.
This is true for everyone. I've tried to read Steven King--I don't get it. He's a good writer, but he does zip for me. Not a huge fan of HP either.
My favorite authors are niche--I fall into their worlds like they were built just for me. It is a subjective thing, and it'll be true for all of us as writers, too.
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I'm going to focus on one single point: self-doubt. I suffer from self-doubt a lot, so I have come across a strategy to control it.
What if I am really not that good, what if I am simply an acute case of the graphomania disease, and nobody will ever be interested in anything I have to say.
Writing a good book involves several different areas: there's the plot, the characters, the writing style, the rhythm, etc.
You can have a book with a great plot that handles tension brilliantly, but the writing is at the level of a middle school student and the characters are 'meh'. Or you can have a tale with riveting characters that lead the reader to ignore the constant plotholes.
If you're doubting your skills, get your work(s) and analyse it/them area by area. Grade them as terrible - bad - passable - good - excellent. If most of your grades fall on 'good' pat yourself on the shoulder. While 'excellent' is great, it is not important for this exercise. If you identify anything as passable or worse, try to immediately diagnose why.
Do this exercise twice, at least one month apart. Do it first on a day when you feel confident, and the second time on a day when you feel down. Compare the two results. If your 'good' became 'terrible', jot down a note and make it visible: do not trust my gut feelings on bad days - they'd say Da Vinci was mediocre.
Now, whenever you think your work isn't good enough, read the note and tell yourself you're better than what that hateful little voice says.
But perhaps you'll still doubt.
The next step will require a bit of a thicker skin, but it may be just what you need. Find one editor, or agent, or literature teacher. Ask them (or pay them, as it'll be more likely to happen) to analyse your work at a professional level. Ask for a detailed analysis and give them the exact elements you want analysed. For each single one, they must point strengths and weaknesses.
The idea is to have someone who does not know you and who will treat you as a student with an assignment to be graded, but that must then be told exactly was is good and bad with said assignment in order to improve. By giving them the points to analyse, you make sure you don't end up with an impressionist 'good in general'. If the person must focus on detailed aspects (narratorial voice, character dialogue, character development, etc), they'll be more likely to identify the strengths of the text even if they dislike the story in general for personal reasons.
Perhaps they'll tell you you have a fatal weakness that could shatter your self-confidence. It's far more likely that you'll end up with an impartial list of strengths that out-weigh the weaknesses. Moreover, having any eventual weaknesses pointed out, will guide you into improving.
I did this with the two opening chapters of a story. The literature teacher was coldly contundent, but I came out with my confidence incredibly strengthened. The strengths I had identified myself, were the ones she indentified. Same thing for the weaknesses. It proved that my analysis was not inflated by personal bias and I could trust it. It gave strength to my belief that I could not pay any attention to self-doubt on a bad day.
Moreover, the weaknesses pointed out were minor and fixable. Her conclusion was that it was a solid novel opening in every way and that I was likely to find more trouble finding a publishing house due to my inability to sell my work, than from the work itself. She even joked the work might sell itself better if I kept my mouth shut.
So, if self-doubt is dragging you down, consider this approach. You really only have to do it once. When an impartial person who works with fiction confirms that your work is solid, that your assessment was valid and on the spot, that the reasons for rejection lie elsewhere (perhaps you simply chose a genre that isn't trendy... or you're a really bad salesperson), then you'll feel more confident.
As a final word: remember that publishing houses want quick money coming in. If you have an unconventional work - no matter how genius it may be - they'll set you aside as too risky to invest in. It's all in the marketing.
Good luck and stand strong.
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I can't say I cope well with rejection.
That said, I query in small batches, so I can revise my query (and sample pages) as I go, if rejected.
I have books and online resources for how to write query letters (and how to write books), I will revisit them and double-check to see if I have missed anything, made mistakes, left anything out or can think of anyway to revise what I have and make it better. That's harder for first pages, I probably go through thirty edits of my opening scene, or first 30 pages if it is short.
On top of that, I try to keep some detachment. It is one book. I can write another. If I am going to be a professional author, I will have to write one a year. If this one doesn't sell, hopefully I have learned enough writing it to make the next one sell.
I expect rejection letters. I expect it to hurt if my book flops. But in the end, I write because I love to write and if I can't turn it into a business, then so what?
People everywhere have hobbies they don't monetize. My brother in law builds and flies big remote controlled aircraft, he spends thousands of dollars on it every year. He has no intention of ever quitting his job to do it full time. People play penny poker, my wife volunteers at her church and the animal shelter for free, my nephew goes to play pool every week. None of them are doing it with the intent of going pro or getting rich.
I saw Stephen King in a live interview on TV many years ago; the interviewer asked him what advice he had for people that want to write. His response was, "So write!"
But he went on to say, he thinks most people don't want to write, they want to have written, they want the money, and being interviewed on TV and talked about in the book review section. But he didn't think that kind of success was possible for people that didn't love writing for its own sake without any promise of reward, because it took years of writing without any other reward in order to get good enough to sell something.
So if you want to be a writer, write for the love of writing. Submit and collect your rejections. They only mean you are not good enough yet. Read other books analytically to see how they do it, emulate them, read books on writing, try to follow them, and keep writing, and keep submitting, and try to learn from what you have done before. Even if you never sell a thing, at least you entertained yourself doing something you loved doing, just like all those other people with hobbies that make them happy without making them a dime.
That is the mindset I try to adopt. Rejection is bitter medicine. I think of it as medicine. And I remember that isn't the only reason I write; acceptance would be wonderful, but failing to get it does not make my writing a waste of my time. I keep submitting, but put "acceptance" on the back burner in my priorities, and I don't let rejection ruin my fun.
Response to OP:
Google(formatting a literary query letter), there will be about 30 links on the first page, from many different sources, on how to write a good query letter, and also on the proper format. I know it seems like Googling one thing to get another, but it works.
I suggest reading several, because they are not all the same! Some even conflict. Don't worry about that, it means you have options; different agents like to see different things.
In particular, I recall searching for one that doesn't demand a bio for a first-time writer, basically the answer to that question is just leave it out. Don't say anything about your previous writing or lack thereof either way; use the extra line or two for your pitch. Agents know if you had experience that might sway them, you would have included it. The same goes for your profession or other real-world expertise: If it is unrelated to your credibility in writing this story, it won't matter to the agent, so replace that "bio" info with something that might matter.
And be very attentive to details in your query letter. Agents look for an excuse to reject, any weakness. I've read one that says she has put a query aside for somebody saying they "have written a fiction novel". Likewise other misspellings or grammar errors they don't want peppering a book.
Using more than a page or cheating on the margins; verboten. Don't self-deprecate, don't engage in self-puffery (how great you are). Don't play coy, don't try to bribe (offer a bigger commission; people try it) or coerce or threaten (this opportunity will be gone soon, act now!).
This is business; the meat of the query letter is basically a description of ACT I, without any spoilers. (I refer to the three act structure; 3AS).
That's the tease in a nutshell; in the 3AS, ACT I sets up the MC's normal world, introduces the "inciting event", it grows into a life-disrupting problem and she has to deal with it: That is what the book is about. And you have to figure out how to describe that in about half a page and make it entertaining, because to the agent this pitch is an example of your writing skill. Plan for about twenty drafts. It doesn't hurt to put two weeks just into writing your half-page pitch in the query letter.
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I'll give my two cents, as someone who feels the same struggles.
You'll never get completely over the fear of rejection, or of not being good enough. I say this because even accomplished authors reported the same fear. Brandon Sanderson said, in an episode of the podcast Writing Excuses, something along the likes of "Yes, the last book was a success, but will they like the next one?".
But how would I really know if I am any good?
I'm used - as you are - to get very positive feedbacks about my writing skills. And I asked a lot of people, in a lot of different times of my life, for different pieces. People usually say I'm good. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if I don't believe it myself.
The point is that you cannot trust completely external validation. It's nice and gratifying, but it can make you fall into a strange feedback loop, were you keep longing for more and more instant gratification of your skills. Being able to publish a book is not an index of success either, since (arguably) some published authors could have a far better writing style, some plots are flawed, some characters are shallow ... and yet they get published anyway.
My point is that while external validation and publishing achievements are surely important, they'll lose value if you don't believe in your own skills.
I'm not saying that you should be arrogant and think that you are the best writer out there - you probably aren't. But you shouldn't let self-doubt block you from writing either.
Again, it's fine to have moments of doubt, but don't let those dominate your (writing) life.
I cannot stop writing.
Well, if that's true, you're in luck. Chances are you'll be writing anyway, so no need to worry. It's your time, it's up to you how you want to use it.
If I have this right to ask unknown people to spent some hours of their lives with my books?
You can ask. It's in their right to say yes or no. Again, nothing bad with that.
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