How many rejections did the help get

Well, more like I was a little less giddy this time, but I kept my chin up. Next book? I wanted to write this book. That was a hard weekend. I spent it in pajamas, slothing around that racetrack of self-pity—you know the one, from sofa to chair to bed to refrigerator, starting over again on the sofa. Call it tenacity, call it resolve or call it what my husband calls it: stubbornness. After rejection number 40, I started lying to my friends about what I did on the weekends. They were amazed by how many times a person could repaint her apartment.

The truth was, I was embarrassed for my friends and family to know I was still working on the same story, the one nobody apparently wanted to read. Still not enough to inspire you? Here are a few more great articles worth checking out on writers that persevered through and how to best deal with rejection:. Take the WD challenge by humorously rejecting a hit in words or fewer. Send your letter to wdsubmissions fwmedia. Yours could appear in a future issue!

Submitted pieces may be edited for space or clarity. So far we've had readers reject Dr. Suess , JK Rowling and more. Who will you reject? For the November PAD Chapbook Challenge, poets are tasked with writing a poem a day in the month of November before assembling a chapbook manuscript in the month of December.

Today's prompt is to write a luck poem. The Writer's Digest team has witnessed many writing mistakes over the years, so this series helps identify them for other writers along with correction strategies. Margaret Mitchell gets 38 rejections from publishers before finding one to publish her novel Gone With The Wind.

It sells 30 million copies. With a further 15 rejections, there remained little hope her personal thoughts would see the light of day.

Eventually, Doubleday , bring the translation to the world, and The Diary of Anne Frank sells 25 million. The novel did sell: 25 million copies worldwide. His publishers Doubleday reject the first pages. So the author Peter Benchley starts from scratch and Jaws sells 20 million.

The 21st takes it on and sells 20 million: one for each rejection. Three years of rejection letters are kept in a bag under her bed. The bag becomes so heavy that she is unable to lift it. But Meg Cabot does not dwell on the failure. Instead she keeps sending her manuscript out. It gets taken on and The Princess Diaries sells 15 million copies.

It wins the Newbery Medal and becomes an international best-seller. Random House takes a chance on it. It sells 7 million copies in the US alone. They believe it is a classic. Upon publication, the world agrees. Translated into over 33 languages and adapted into a movie, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger sells 7 million copies.

To deal with publisher rejections, Hugh Prather decides to write a book about them in his early struggles and Notes To Myself sells 5 million. To prove how hard it is for new writers to break in, Jerzy Kosinski uses a pen name to submit his bestseller Steps to 13 literary agents and 14 publishers.

All of them reject it, including Random House , who had published it. But letter number 61 was the one that accepted me. Three weeks later we sold the book to Amy Einhorn Books.

They love the book so much that their recommendation secures a publishing deal with Orion. She was rejected by seven more publishers until Louisiana State University Press published 2, copies of A Confederacy of Dunces in In , Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

It has since sold nearly two million copies and been translated into almost 20 languages. If you are a persistent writer, you can expect your abilities to improve with time.

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. Just keep looking for the right address. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. Try rejecting this!

Because the rejection slips will arrive. And, if the books are published, then you can pretty much guarantee that bad reviews will be as well. But since coming out in February, her story about the complicated relationships between African-American domestic servants and the white women who employed them in pre-civil rights Mississippi has spent over 30 weeks on the New York Times ' best-seller list.

Stockett talked to TIME about growing up in Mississippi and what it's like being a white woman from the South writing from the perspective of African-American maids. Why did you decide to write The Help? I started writing it the day after Sept. I was living in New York City. We didn't have any phone service and we didn't have any mail.

Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed. So I started writing in the voice of Demetrie, the maid I had growing up. She later became the character of Aibileen [in The Help ]. I sent the story to my mother and she was sort of like, "Hmm, that's good. She was older, soft-spoken, and she started showing some attitude.

That's [how another character] Minny came to be. After a while longer, I decided to make it a book. You spent five years trying to get a literary agent.

How many rejection letters did you get? I have a record of 45 rejections, but there was one despondent summer where I blasted out about 15 letters without keeping records.