Man turns rejection into career

[Pix]

I found this interesting, and I thought some of the aspiring authors here might want to see this, too:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/04/opinion/gr...index.html

What really bothered him about his mystery novel being turned down by every publisher to whom he sent it was not just that the various editors claimed not to like it -- but that they hadn't bothered to give it a thorough reading.

How did he know that?

He was a highly creative young writer; to set his manuscript apart from all the others that authors send in, he had thought up a gimmick. He had put a little seal on the last few pages of the manuscript -- the pages that were the payoff to his story. It was intended to be a clever enticement; when the editors at the publishing houses got to the end, they would remove the little seal to read the climax of the book.

But when every publisher sent the manuscript back to him, with letters telling him why they didn't want his story, he noticed something:

The seals on the last few pages had not been broken. Not on any of the manuscripts.

No one at the publishing houses had read the book all the way through, or even flipped to the end to see how Ross had wrapped up the story.

"Rather depressing," he told me the other day.

That's when he got the idea to send Kosinski's prize-winning book in without Kosinski's name on it. He wanted to see if even a proven bestseller, without a well-known byline, would get a fair shake.

He found out.

The repeated rejection of that book, he said, didn't depress him the way the rejections of the mystery novel had: "With the Kosinski book, it wasn't my work they were rejecting -- it was his." (J.K. Rowling, in her younger days, probably could have identified with all of this. Her first Harry Potter manuscript was rejected by a number of publishers -- some reports say it was as many as a dozen -- before one house decided to take a chance on it.)

I asked Chuck Ross: When the news of his Kosinski ploy got out and was widely publicized back in the '70s, did any of the publishers and agents salute his ingenuity, and offer to take another look at his own mystery novel?

"No."

Did they encourage him to send them future work?

"No."

But, despite that, Ross triumphed. "I'm an optimistic guy," he said. "I wake up on the sunny side of the bed."

In short, after those initial rejections -- both of his mystery novel and of the retyped Kosinski book -- he has managed to make a lifelong career out of the written word. Along the way, he got married and has four children.

"I have no regrets at all," he said.

He never did have a book published; he's certain that the mystery novel he wrote in the '70s is stored in a box or trunk somewhere -- "I don't throw things away" -- but he hasn't seen it in years.

It doesn't matter. He wanted to find a good life as a writer, and he did.

I might add more later. Personally, I plan to put all my stuff online for free reading (and have in the case of some fanfics), but if I were to get published then I'd look into self-publishing...there's a really good blog post of someone who's gone both routes, IIRC, and gives the pros & cons to both...and I'd prefer self-publishing that allowed me to retain creative control rather than have it made into another formulaic McStory off the assembly line where even fanfic is sometimes more creative, entertaining, and better thought out than that. Or that's how it looks to me.

I may share more later, I mainly wanted to share this now as I'd otherwise forget all about it...:redface: