Suppose four publishers have rejected the manuscript for your thriller about love, war, and global warming. Your intuition and the bad feeling in the pit of your stomach might say that the rejections by all those publishing experts mean your manuscript is no good. But is your intuition correct?... Could it be that publishing success is so unpredictable that even if our novel is destined for the best-seller list, numerous publishers could miss the point and send those letters that say thanks but no thanks? ...
John Grisham's manuscript for A Time To Kill was rejected by twenty-six publishers... J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter manuscript was rejected by nine...
John Kennedy Toole lost hope of ever getting his novel published and committed suicide. His mother persevered, however, and eleven years later
A confederacy of Dunces
was published; it won the Pulitzer for Fiction and has sold nearly 2 million copies.
From "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow. Shared by
a friend unhappy with recent reviewing experience.