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Agatha Christie got 500 rejections, and then went on to sell more books than anyone else on the planet, with the exception of Shakespeare.
J.K. Rowling got 12 rejections, before making a billion dollars out of Harry Potter, and breaking all sorts of ridiculous records in terms of books sales.
Dr. Seuss got a rejection letter than went like this, “Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.” Of course, he didn’t give up.
“I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” — this is how the youngest writer ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature was rejected.
“We feel that we don’t know the central character well enough.”- this is what Sallinger got for The Catcher in the Rye, which is probably famous just because the narrator has such a clear and interesting voice.
For any aspiring writer, a rejection letter, regardless of the provenience of said letter, is one of the most dreaded of objects. In this line of work, getting rejected is considered a sort of literary murder — people are knowingly destroying something you’ve spent time on, and a lot of it. But the thing is everyone got rejected, more or less. I can think of very few instances when writers found publishers/agents from the first try. Or the second, or the tenth.
