Last week on Twitter, an aspiring author friend threw out this question:
How many rejections is enough? When is it time to hang the manuscript up?
She got quite a few answers, and they ran the gamut from now to never.
But the one the answer that stopped me was:
when you’ve queried the pubs/agents you’re interested in working with/respect & the answer is always no, it’s time
Yeah . . . no. Here’s why that doesn’t work for me.
1) Think of the stories told over the years by authors who suffered dozens of rejections before selling their work. They believed in that work. They continued to submit until they found an editor who believed, too. In genre romance, we often forget the multitude of opportunities presented by small presses who might not be on our initial radar. A bit of research and voila! We’ve found an editor we never knew about who’s highly respected and who we would love to write for.
2) Agents sell and editors buy, but authors don’t write for either. We write for readers. Agents and editors facilitate getting our stories into readers’ hands, but there are other options. A number of authors give away freebie ebooks on their blogs, building a readership, and getting ahead in the promo game. Some of these authors have snagged the attention of agents and editors by making their writing available online. This wouldn’t have happened if they’d put the project away.
3) Giving up on a project before WE are ready is giving up on ourselves. I wrote a post at GenReality last year about a project I love. It’s made the rounds and there seems to be one element most editors don’t like. I can now take that information and rework the idea into something with more marketability. But as much as I love this project? I know there will be readers who share my love of this sort of story and will want to read it. I’m not going to put it away just because it hasn’t yet hit with any of the editors who’ve read and rejected. Somewhere out there is one who’ll read and buy.
4) Limiting ourselves to agents we know and respect leaves out the ones we’re unaware of. A friend of mine recently went on an agent hunt, and she found highly respected agents I’d never heard of. Agencies who rep huge names. Who have made huge deals. Others who aren’t as “out there” because they’re busy behind the scenes of some illustrious careers. There’s no need to short change our projects because we haven’t yet come in contact with “the one” who’ll be the perfect publishing partner.
5) Continuing to submit can result in contacts we can then parlay into something else. The project mentioned above? One of the editors who rejected it asked if I might be interested in writing an offshoot, taking it in a different direction. If I’d given up after submitting to my dream editors, this other opportunity would never have come along.
Bottom line. Don’t make the project about agents and editors. Make it about yourself as the author creator. I’ve let things go after one or two rejections because I knew it was time. Other things will make the rounds until there are no more rounds to make because I believe in them – and in my ability to tell those stories – that strongly.
* photo courtesy of vramak under a Flickr Creative Commons License
