Rejected again!

This is the real, lived experience of being a writer. You have a manuscript and you send it out. You wait ages only to get a form email of ‘no’. It’s a polite email, but a no nonetheless.

I get it. There are more manuscripts than can be published and publishers need to sell books.

A collection of dark, difficult trauma-based poetry isn’t exactly going to set the book seller’s world on fire. Even a literary collection that is crafted and contributing something important to the voice of Australian poetry still won’t make the cut if that collection doesn’t seem saleable. And trauma is difficult to sell.

Try living with it…

Still, I did what all writers do when the no you were really hoping was going to be a yes comes in. I found a fellow writer and we had a pity-party Rejected Writer’s Party.

Over dinner and a late night talking, we lamented, we abused, we laughed, we sighed…

It is really hard to get published.

I see why people turn to self-publishing.

My gut tells me ‘not yet’. You see, if a publisher thinks they can’t sell my book, what hope have I got? I can’t even ask a waitress to bring me a forgotten knife and fork.

So, what do you do when you get rejected?

You cry about it for a few minutes, maybe even swear a little (if that is your jam), you break your diet, you drive hours to connect with someone you are missing, and you get back on the horse.

I’m not saying that it will happen quickly. For me, this time, it took three days. Last time, weeks. The time before that, months. Before that and before that? I forget.

You get better at handling the no. You get faster at understanding it isn’t you, it isn’t the work, it is the publishing industry. If I had twenty-thousand book-tok followers, I could probably get published on the mere suggestion that I might like to write. But I don’t. I have a collection of poetry that deals with an important, silent issue—child abuse.

How do you sell that? People don’t even want to admit that it is still happening and that not talking about it is part of the problem.

I get it. I really do.

Maybe my next Rejected Writer’s Party will be a bigger affair. Any takers?