Why it pays to anticipate rejection

To sell a project, you first have to think through why the gatekeepers might say no. Here's how to do that.

Photo by Annelies Geneyn on Unsplash

The other day, I was deleting old files from my Google drive and I came across a spreadsheet of rejections from 2018. My then-agent had used it to keep track of which editor at which Big 5 house had turned down my book—and a lot had turned it down, so she’d made careful notes, including a column that listed the reason for the rejection.

It was fun to revisit these reasons. I enjoyed casting my eye down the list and remembering, for instance, the expressions of interest from a highly placed editor that later abruptly ended with a one-line email after another, more senior editor vetoed my project as not “aphoristically pleasing” enough. Whatever “aphoristically pleasing” means.

This was a fun exercise only because my book DID sell, eventually. Back in 2018, looking at that spreadsheet was like sticking an oyster fork in a toaster. But to see it again with the charge gone out of it?

It just made me realize, all over again, how difficult it is to understand the process of book acquisitions before you’ve lived it.

There are so many reasons publishers may reject your book. Oh my god, so many. Some reasons might include:

• Your platform being too small according to their eyes.

• Your subject not having enough of a preexisting audience.

• Comparable titles not performing well.

• The weather last Tuesday.

• Or delays this morning on the G train.

In other words, there are factors you can control and factors you can’t. The way to approach this very tough process is to get in front of the first kind of factors—any potential objections that it’s possible for you to address ahead of time, before you’re slumped over your MacBook, crying about one-line emails.

Here’s a practical example. Say you’re trying to sell a nonfiction project and you don’t have a huge platform. You might do yourself a favor and refrain from comping your book against one by someone WITH a huge platform, lest some editor be moved to focus on Shea Serrano’s Twitter following vs. your Twitter following. Or the fact that Lindy West writes for the New York Times and you don’t. Ask me how I learned.

In the case of that comment about my project not being “aphoristically pleasing,” I ended up putting a paragraph in my proposal addressing the issue (“Though we don’t typically think of Poe as an inspirational, much less quotable, author…”). Probably, in a tiny way, it helped me inch closer to a sale.

This practice of thinking through objections applies to selling writing projects as well as selling other kinds of projects.

Any time you need a third-party (or 20 third-parties) to give the green light, you want to be thinking through objections. The term “thinking through objections,” not coincidentally, comes from people who work in sales and so are always trying to close more deals.

If you’re trying to get a job, you think through the hiring manager’s objections. If you’re trying to raise venture capital, or get the money to make a film, you think through the potential investors’ objections. Why should anyone risk their cash with you? What could go wrong? Why might they say no? Above all, what’s in it for them? What return can they expect on their time and capital?

If you’re trying to get your book acquired, you think through why an editor might pass on it. You also think through why all the other layers of management above them might say no. Few acquiring editors are so powerful that they don’t have to get approval from editorial committees, sales and marketing departments, and all their various bosses and managers. So, before an editor can buy your book, they have meetings to get input from other editors. They run the numbers on copies to print and marketing resources to allocate. The PR people chime in with promotion ideas. The sales team weighs in on the sales potential. And so on.

If any one of those parties isn’t convinced, your book may not get bought.

And for obvious reasons, it’s a lot easier to get a “no” than a “yes.” Only one tiny factor may be needed to get a “no.” Meanwhile 839 factors need to come together to get a “yes.”

Pardon me for belaboring the point. I do it because, often, writers have a mistaken impression about the traditional-publication process—I certainly had one myself. We tend to think getting an agent is the hard part. It is hard! It’s just not the hardest part, usually. Getting a deal is so much harder. There’s another gauntlet past the initial gauntlet.

Maybe it sounds galaxy-brained, but I think this is true of so much of life: There’s always some tougher gauntlet past the initial gauntlet. Even as you’re wrestling with challenge #1, some harder, beefier challenge is lurking in the wings, ready to put you in the Stone Cold Stunner. For example:

• Do you remember how you felt earlier this month, as the new year dawned? If you’re like me, your feeling was: Um what I have already run this pandemic gauntlet for two years and now you’re telling me I’ve got to run it again for at least a year and also pretty much indefinitely????

• Or you might spend years wanting a baby, only to find that once you’ve had that baby, you face a much tougher decision about whether to try to have a second baby. Should you add more wonderfully chunky baby thighs to your life, or would you ultimately prefer to forego them because you know it’ll mean another two years without sleep?

• Or you might discover that, once you’ve reached the top of some Personal Everest, you immediately latch on to another crazy quest. And do you even want to undertake it, knowing what you know about what it’ll cost in terms of time and life-energy and everything else? Or do you do the sane thing and close your eyes and hum some Bach and pretend the mountain’s not there?

Yet even to contemplate the gauntlet-past-the-gauntlet is edifying. It shows you’ve learned something, even if the knowledge is also kind of a problem.

It’s not always fun. Yet an awareness of all this makes you a better thinker, a slightly wiser person, a more effective salesman. You start to incorporate such items in your mental map of tough processes, and suddenly, instead of imagining some project as requiring just two easy steps, like:

1. Your dream

2. Joyous moment it’s fulfilled

Your mental map looks more like:

1. Your dream

2. Years-long process of getting in position to achieve the dream

3. Phase in which you fully understand your project isn’t viable and you bore all your friends on the point

4. Deciding to pursue it anyway

5. The need to get buy-in from some big decision-maker (like an agent)

6. Whatever gauntlet exists past the first gauntlet, i.e. the phase in which you need to get buy-in from three dozen more decision-makers

7. Years of waiting before a project gets made/published/comes out

8. Joyous moment your dream is fulfilled

9. Inevitable queasy realization that your fulfilled dream has not made you a completely whole, healthy person so you move on to yet another GD thing

This is a more accurate map of the process, I’m convinced. I don’t like it!!! I don’t like the term “mental maps” either. Yet here I am using it unironically because this stuff is all too real, and you know, most creative careers are made at least marginally more successful when the creator develops a good grasp of sales processes and marketplaces as well as a keener understanding of how these things have worked historically.

Poe’s career is such a primo instructive example that I devoted a whole section of the book to his experiences moving from poetry to short stories to editor jobs to trying to launch his own magazine. Reading literary biographies just in general will help you develop better mental maps—it’s the great unsung benefit of the category. More about this, and our friend Poe, in this essay I wrote for CrimeReads.

A good link

For more on thinking through objections, here’s an article about why to do it and the crucial insights you can gain. The fact that salesmen pushing airplane parts and drugs for rare diseases understand what it is to “tailor a pitch” makes me wonder why writers and artists don’t talk about this stuff more.

Where is our sales shoptalk?

Why is it so rare?

Why do we pretend like it’s not a huge element of a career and thus a really, really important set of skills to develop, and honestly kind of the case that, for better or for worse, sales skills > talent?

I don’t know! But the absence of such talk seems vaguely sinister, like a truth so dark an elaborate conspiracy has evolved to hide it, only you know there’s no conspiracy, so what gives?

If you’ve got a theory, I hope you’ll sound off in the comments. As always, thank you for reading, and all best,

Cat