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  • Writer's pictureJoy Sephton

Top 20 famous rejected authors - to fire you up


There are tons of articles on the web that discuss this, but, in those dark moments, I find it’s always an inspiring topic to come back to.

Where possible, the images are of the first edition covers.

1. LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables was rejected five times before publication. More than fifty million copies have been sold to date, in more than twenty languages, and the setting, Prince Edward Island in Canada, has become a major tourist destination.


2. After Beatrice Potter’s first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was rejected by six publishers, she decided to self-publish two hundred and fifty copies. The book has to date sold more than forty-five million copies.


3. Agatha Christie (who along with William Shakespeare has sold an estimated record-breaking four billion books) was rejected six times over five years before her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published. Her protagonist, detective Hercule Poirot, merited a full front page obituary in the Times newspaper when she killed him off fifty-five years later. Interestingly in 1930, Agatha Christie said she found Poirot "insufferable", and by 1960 she felt he was a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep". She kept him alive so long because the public loved him.


4. JK Rowling says that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected by “loads” of literary agents. It was then rejected by twelve publishers after agent Christopher Little accepted it.


5. Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl was written in Dutch and titled Het Achterhuis - literally "the back house". It was rejected fifteen times before being accepted for publication. It has since been translated into over seventy languages and has sold more than thirty million copies.


6. Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull was rejected eighteen times, one publisher saying that a book about a seagull was "ridiculous". Since being published it has sold more than forty-four million copies.


7. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was rejected twenty times before being accepted by Faber and Faber. It became required reading at many schools and universities, and Stephen King says he was "heavily influenced" by the book.


8. James Joyce’s Dubliners was rejected twenty-two times. The first run only sold three hundred and seventy-nine copies, of which one hundred and twenty were bought by Joyce himself.


9. Frank Herbert’s first book, Dune, was rejected twenty-three times. Today, it is one of the world's best-selling works of science fiction.


10. Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife was rejected twenty-five times before being accepted by a publisher. Its eventual success earned Niffenegger a $5 million advance for her second book, Her Fearful Symmetry.


11. Dr Seuss’ first book And to Think that I saw it on Mulberry Street was rejected twenty-seven times and, on the very day it was finally accepted, he had decided to burn it. Today, just in the USA, over 11,000 Dr Seuss books are sold every day.


12. John Grisham’s first book, A Time to Kill, was rejected twenty-eight times until eventually five thousand copies were printed. He filled his car with the books and drove around handing them out to libraries for free. His book sales have now reached over $400 million.


13. Stephen King’s debut novel, Carrie, was rejected thirty times and went on to sell a million copies in its first year.


14. James Patterson’s first book, The Thomas Berryman Number, was rejected thirty-one times. Patterson went on to head the Forbes list of highest-paid authors for three years in a row, only ceding his place to JK Rowling in 2017.


15. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind was rejected thirty-eight times. It went on to win her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, and has sold more than thirty thousand million copies.


16. Robert M Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected one hundred and twenty-one times. It has long been considered a counter-culture classic.


17. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hanson’s Chicken Soup for the Soul was rejected one hundred and forty-four times before being published in 1993. There are now more than two hundred and fifty titles in the series and Canfield's wise advice for writers is to "reject rejection". This is not a first edition cover, but is from a reprint of the original book.


18. Alex Haley’s Roots was rejected two hundred times but has now sold more than eight million copies. It earned its author a Pulitzer Prize special award in 1977.


19. Louis L’Amour started out his career with two hundered rejection letters before his first title, Westward the Tide, was published. He wrote more than one hundred books and four hundred short stories in his lifetime, and his sales are now in excess of $330 million. He is considered one of the most prolific published writers in the world.


20. Finally, my hero, Jack London (Call of the Wild, White Fang and many others) had his work rejected over six hundred times. He kept every one of his rejection letters but he didn't let them get to him. In just sixteen years he wrote and published more than fifty fiction and nonfiction books, hundreds of short stories, numerous articles, and several plays.


I hope you feel inspired now? I do!

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