Rejection Letter #3 for ‘Thirty Seconds Before Midnight’

I have just received the third rejection for ‘Thirty Seconds Before Midnight’ (that leaves three remaining out there, none with acknowledged receipt). It reads:

“Thank you for writing to us regarding your work. We are afraid that, despite its qualities, we do not feel sufficiently enthusiastic to offer to represent your work.

We apologise for the impersonal nature of this letter and regret that we cannot enter into any correspondence about your submission.

We wish you better luck in finding representation elsewhere.”

It’s tempting to try and elicit clues from these responses as to what actually happened to the submission when it arrived. The first rejection I had was returned with a synopsis which was very tatty around the edges as if it had been carried around in a notebook. This one looks unmarked/uncrumpled apart from the covering letter (not sure why this was returned). That said, it is twenty-two days since it was posted, and the postcard acknowledgement of receipt arrived soon after. So, who knows. It doesn’t really matter since it has been rejected and that’s the end of that query.

The second rejection arrived last Friday and later that evening I was out with old friends and family who were very sympathetic and yet I found myself surprisingly unbothered by it. I was wondering why this was and realised I have a kind of personal philosophy of rejection, very much formed by my experiences in my IT selling career.

When I announced I was going to be putting all of my efforts into becoming a professional writer and leaving the IT sales arena for a while/forever if I can achieve my goals, there were some surprised faces. Many people were unable to make a connection between the two professions. My response was that to be a good sales person you need excellent verbal and written communication skills, and most importantly the ability to listen and comprehend what you are told. Additionally, you need to have the imagination to create a solution and to empathise with the client’s situation – ‘standing in their shoes’. A writer and reader has all of these things. I’ve always said that the reason I enjoy reading so much is because it enables me to live a thousand other lives I can’t in the only, short one I have (as far as we know!) – to experience things I wouldn’t have the opportunity to do (and might not actually want to!) in real life, in my mind.

Another great thing about the job that I did was the huge variety of people I met and businesses I worked with over the years. It’s given me tonnes of material and life experience and was great fun on a day to day basis. I’ve worked with hundreds of customers over the years – retailers, life sciences and pharmaceutical companies, cake makers, financial services organisations, lift manufacturers, utilities and telecommunications providers, media and entertainment, travel, transportation, distribution – the list is endless!

And another thing you have to have, or grow, when you are selling is a thick skin. New jobs nearly always start from a blank page. A salesperson has to build their own empire. And when you are empire building the empire doesn’t come to you. In one of my jobs I was working from home for a US NASDAQ quoted company who had asked me to start selling their strategic contracts management product into the UK and Europe. We already had an established customer base for the tactical credit control product in the UK but these weren’t the right targets for the new solution.

I took a FTSE 250 list from the Internet and looked up the companies’ phone numbers. I would ring switch and ask to speak with the contracts manager or procurement manager. I would start calling at 8am in my pajamas, stop for a shower about 11am, lunch at 1pm and finish about 6pm. During that time I would make about 90 dials of which between 10-20 would connect, I would have perhaps 4 or 5 meaningful conversations with another human being and convert perhaps 2 of these into appointments (the goal of cold calling). What I often found was that those 2 appointments were booked by 10am. 2 appointments per day from cold calling is a very good strike rate, so it was tempting to say, “Well that’s it, I’ve done all I can today. May as well take the rest of the day off.” The thing is though, even though I knew I would call for the rest of the day and not make any more progress, I felt like there was a quota of ‘no’s I had to get through before I would get back around to the ‘yes’s. So I carried on. And the next morning, I’d get another couple of appointments but I would be convinced that if I’d left off the previous morning without getting through all the afternoon’s rejections, then they wouldn’t have happened.

I feel like this about this getting published. There will be a lot of ‘no’s. And I have to get through them to get to my ‘Yes’(s). There is a slew of material out there about authors’ struggles to be published, lists of famous and successful authors’ who initially received great numbers of rejections (last week I read that John Grisham was rejected 28 times) and I may well do another post on my next rejection that summarises all of these.

The statistician in me would love to have the data on how many writers suffer how many rejections before gaining representation. My suspicion is that more writers have more rejections and very few have very few. I’ve drawn a little imaginary chart below to show you what I mean:

Rates of Writer Success in Landing an Agent

What this says is that another couple of qualities prevalent in successful sales staff would be useful here: persistence and tenacity. Both of which I have in spades.

I quite like the fat ‘Never’ part of the pie. It made me think about 2 things: firstly there are some authors who gain representation without going through the process of application to agents etc. They are few and far between but tend to be networked – see Zadie Smith who fresh out of Oxbridge had her unfinished novel, ‘White Teeth’ picked up by a friend in publishing. And I’ll be reviewing a book on this website soon where the author, when I asked him how he landed his agent, said:

“I got my agent through a friend – how does one paddy get anywhere…Another paddy helps them – this was BB, whose first novel was published around the same time as my memoir. She was introduced to IM at a party – how she came to be at the party I’m not sure. She’d worked in Fleet Street – was PJ’s researcher on the Red Top, then worked for MP (I think) and MS (definitely). So maybe that was how she came to be at the party… IM worked for Reuters – now he works for writers…”

Networking – also an important asset for a sales person. I am well networked… in IT. More work to do in the writing/publishing world. And the second thing is that in that ‘Never’ slice of the pie are those that give up. Not an option.

Getting published is a process, and getting an agent is only a start – that’s not a guarantee of making it into print. There are many, many books written on the subject, and many ways to do it. The first thing to do is to write the book (check) and the second I believe, as has always been my working philosophy, is to make every day count. Keep activity levels high. Know the market and the players in it. Keep knocking on doors until one opens.