A brief history of getting it spectacularly wrong
If you've ever had a manuscript rejected — or you're sitting there right now, staring at your finished novel and wondering whether anyone will ever want to read it — I have some stories that might make you feel slightly better about the whole situation.
Because here's the thing about the publishing industry: it has an absolutely magnificent track record of looking at future bestsellers and saying "no thanks." Not occasionally. Not as a rare misstep. Routinely.
The books I'm about to tell you about have collectively sold well over a billion copies. They've been turned into films, television series, and cultural phenomena. They've won Nobel Prizes and shaped entire genres. And every single one of them was rejected by publishers who presumably went on to have very quiet conversations with themselves in the years that followed.
Harry Potter and the twelve rejection letters
You knew this one was coming. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was rejected by twelve publishers before Bloomsbury finally picked it up in 1997. Twelve. That's twelve separate editorial teams who read about a boy wizard attending a magical school and thought, "Nah, this isn't for us."
The manuscript only got its chance because Bloomsbury's chairman, Nigel Newton, gave the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter Alice. She read it, demanded the rest, and wouldn't shut up about it. An eight-year-old girl made the call that twelve professional publishing houses couldn't.
Even then, Bloomsbury hedged their bets. The first print run was five hundred copies. Five hundred. The series has since sold over 600 million copies worldwide and generated a multi-billion-pound franchise. Somewhere, there are twelve publishers who have done the maths on what that would have meant for their bottom line, and I suspect at least a few of them need to sit down when they think about it.
Carrie and the kitchen bin
Before Stephen King became Stephen King — before the seventy-odd novels, the films, the cultural omnipresence — he was a struggling English teacher living in a trailer with his wife Tabitha, collecting rejection slips like some people collect stamps.
Carrie, his first published novel, was rejected thirty times. Thirty. By the time the thirtieth rejection arrived, King had had enough. He threw the manuscript in the bin. Literally screwed it up and lobbed it in the kitchen bin. His wife fished it out, smoothed the pages, read it, and told him to finish it.
He did. Doubleday published it in 1974. The paperback rights sold for $400,000 — a staggering sum at the time, especially for a bloke who'd been living on a teacher's salary and whatever he could scrape together from selling short stories to men's magazines. King has since sold over 350 million books. Tabitha King, meanwhile, deserves some kind of award for the most consequential act of bin-rummaging in literary history.
Lord of the Flies: "Rubbish and dull"
William Golding's Lord of the Flies was rejected by over twenty publishers. One reader at Faber & Faber — the publisher that eventually did accept it — initially dismissed the manuscript as "absurd … rubbish & dull."
Rubbish and dull. A book that has since become one of the most widely studied novels in the English-speaking world. A book that's been on school reading lists for seven decades. A book whose author went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
To be fair to the anonymous reader, we've all been wrong about things. I once confidently told someone that Bitcoin was a fad. But calling Lord of the Flies "rubbish and dull" while sitting in the actual publishing house that would go on to publish it — that's a special kind of wrong. The kind you probably don't put on your CV.
Dune: published by a car manual company
Frank Herbert's Dune is arguably the most important science fiction novel ever written. It's certainly one of the most influential. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. It's been adapted into films by David Lynch and Denis Villeneuve. It's sold around 20 million copies.
It was also rejected by more than twenty publishers. When someone finally agreed to publish it, it wasn't a literary imprint or a science fiction specialist. It was Chilton Books. Chilton, for those unfamiliar, was primarily known for publishing automotive repair manuals.
Let that sink in for a moment. One of the greatest works of speculative fiction in the English language — a sprawling epic about politics, religion, ecology, and giant sandworms — was published by the people who brought you How to Fix Your Ford Cortina. Every major publishing house in America passed on it, and the car manual people said yes.
I find this enormously comforting, in a bleak sort of way.
A Wrinkle in Time: twenty-six no's and a Newbery Medal
Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time was rejected twenty-six times over a period of two years. Publishers found it too difficult for children and too childish for adults — that wonderful publishing catch-22 where your book falls between two stools and nobody wants to catch it.
When Farrar, Straus and Giroux finally published it in 1962, it won the Newbery Medal the following year — the most prestigious award in American children's literature. It's gone on to sell over eight million copies and has been in continuous print for more than sixty years. Twenty-six publishers looked at a future Newbery Medal winner and decided it wasn't worth the risk.
The mythical rejections
While we're on the subject, it's worth mentioning that not every famous rejection story is entirely true. Publishing loves a good myth almost as much as it loves a good manuscript.
You'll often see claims that Gone with the Wind was rejected thirty-eight times. Margaret Mitchell herself said otherwise. According to Mitchell, she never formally submitted the manuscript at all. A Macmillan editor named Harold Latham heard about the book while visiting Atlanta, tracked down Mitchell's messy, incomplete draft, and bought it. The thirty-eight rejections? Made up. Probably by someone who thought the real story wasn't dramatic enough.
It's a reminder that the publishing industry is full of stories that are too good to fact-check — which, ironically, is exactly the kind of thing a publisher should be wary of.
What this actually tells us
There's a temptation to turn these stories into a neat motivational poster. "Keep going! Even J.K. Rowling was rejected!" And yes, persistence matters. Obviously it does. But I think there's a more interesting takeaway here, particularly if you're an indie author.
These stories don't just show that great books get rejected. They show that the entire traditional publishing model — the one where a small number of people in London and New York decide what the reading public is allowed to buy — is fundamentally a guessing game. Always has been. Smart, experienced, well-meaning editors get it wrong all the time. Not because they're bad at their jobs, but because predicting what millions of readers will love is essentially impossible.
The difference now is that you don't need anyone's permission. If you've written a book you believe in, you can publish it yourself. You can put it in front of readers and let them decide. You don't need to collect thirty rejection slips and hope that number thirty-one is the charm. You don't need an eight-year-old girl to rescue your manuscript from a slush pile.
Which isn't to say that self-publishing is easy, or that every self-published book deserves an audience. It isn't, and they don't. But the gatekeeping model that rejected Harry Potter twelve times and called Lord of the Flies "rubbish and dull"? You're no longer at its mercy. And there's something rather wonderful about that.