Jillian Medoff's experience would have to be deserving of 'classic' status as a turning of a sink hole to success story!
There are so many tales of woe ranging from "The dog ate my manuscript" to having your book accepted only to have the publisher go bankrupt, to finding there was a story uncannily like yours out there, released same time as yours but with a big budget campaign to support it and the ultimate ARRGH! The publisher turns out to be scammy. Everyone has their own personal horror story. So this blog from Query Tracker on Jillian Medoff's turn around is the sort of thing we creatives need - a virtual shot in the arm!
The history of literature has numbers of these 'turn around stories'. "Lord of the Rings" was rejected many, many time before finding a home.
"Harry Potter" was passed over by 12 publishers.
"Lord of the Flies" got 21 rejections before William Golding found an editor who 'got' his book!
Jerzy Kosinski's extraordinary experiment with his own bestseller, "Steps" is a frightening reality check and at the same time a jab with a cattle prod reminder to 'persist, persist, persist' and never give up!
The wonderful and the terrible thing about the arts is that it is so sensitive to the whims of personal taste. This means that what is good may not immediately be recognised as such and what is bad may become popular. BUT it also means you are in there with a chance because someone, somewhere is sure to LOVE your work! It Tolkien, Golding, Nabokov and Rowling, to name a few, had given up, our literature would be so very much the poorer!
Read more extraordinary stories of how authors turned 'NO!" in to "YE$" on One Hundred Famous Rejections. Read and be encouraged!
Great sites to warn the unseasoned of what to look out for on the road to publication include -
http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/ and http://pred-ed.com/
Thursday, October 25, 2012
QueryTracker Blog: Jillian Medoff: From Flattened to Fabulous
QueryTracker Blog: Jillian Medoff: From Flattened to Fabulous: By Sarah Pinneo | @SarahPinneo If you stick around the Query Tracker community long enough, you’ll hear many a story of dogged persist...
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