Publish Your Rejections in This Book

I've been corresponding with this dude who is writing a book about rejections entitled, Other People's Rejection Letters.  Random House will be publishing it. Below is the guy's notice and call for submissions.  I urge you to send him your most important, embarrassing, interesting, humiliating, glamorous rejections.  It will make you happy to be published at long last by Random House. Most certainly, I'm sending him some of mine.

Project Description

Last year, I published a book called Other People's Love Letters (Oprah's magazine said it was "addictive," Esquire described it as "painfully entertaining," a woman on barnesandnoble.com called it "crap"). Now, I'm working on a similar book about rejection letters featuring reproductions of all kinds of rejection letters... and I'm hoping you might have one or two (tucked back there in the closet) that you'd be willing to share.

Whether typed form letters or handwritten in a fit of rage, whether sent by
text message or scrawled in crayon, any kind of rejection is fair game: You
didn't get the job or the loan or the membership; you're not the right fit
for our dentistry school; you're my son but I never want to see you again;
your restaurant failed its health inspection; your parole has been denied;
we had a good time together but you cheated on me so this is goodbye.

Don't worry, I can digitally black-out any names so that you won't be
identifiable; if you or your company has sent out rejection letters that
you'd consider sharing, I'll digitally remove the recipient's name from the
letter.

The book's premise is that nearly everyone, no matter their age, upbringing,
intelligence, or ability, has been rejected somewhere along the road,
sometimes brutally. While each letter may have stung the person who received
it, taken together they have the potential to soothe. And entertain.

If you have questions, email me (1000rejectionletters@gmail.com). If the rejection is an email, you can send it to that address. If you have a letter, you can either send it to me or scan it (600 dpi, por favor) and then email it.

Sincerely,

Bill Shapiro
Email: 1000rejectionletters@gmail.com

In the meantime, happy Thanksgiving to you and yours (and to Rosemary Ahern, who should come back to the industry and publish me....please).  I'll be offline until Monday because I've got stuff to do, including stuffing the bird, whom my family has named Tina, which ultimately I think is a mistake.  Anonymous is better, IMHO.

Your Ideas Are Distasteful

My friend, a writer, was recently telling me about the time his query letter was sent back with the three middle paragraphs circled and the word "Yuck!!!" written in the margin.  If he weren't a good friend I might be tempted to think this couldn't be true.  Who would be so callous? Sadly, he won't allow me to name the agent of rejection in this instance. I suppose it doesn't matter, could be any of them.

My Heart Swears Often

"I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'" --Saul Bellow

Dude, I've had to say that a hell of a lot of times, and in more than just my heart of hearts.  But still it's comforting to hear, isn't it?

Isn't It All Just Fear, Fear, Fear?

Here's an interesting rejection from an anonymous editor to an anonymous writer that arrived via email today:

Dear Writer: 

Lots of explaining, positing. Needed more violence/slug/portals/fear/death/fear/fear/fear.

What's urgent? What needs to be told? Are you starting as close to the end as possible? What moves?  No thank you.

Best,
[Editor on Ritalin]

It's like someone's version of an MFA in less than 7 sentences!  (The unfortunate "no thank you" doesn't count.) 

Even Joe the Plumber Has A Book Deal

For all those on this blog who think that ridiculously big book deals by unlikely people who can't write helps everyone.  Try to justify this.  By the way, JTP got $250,000.00.  That's exactly $250,000.00 more than you and me.  At least maybe we're getting closer to something literary because this dude was a total fiction, a symbol used by the politicians to represent....er, something, or other.  

The theory that noble publishers put out crap like this so that they can make money to fund literary fiction and other worthy pursuits of art is just bunk, if you ask me.  They put out crap like this so they can make money.  Oh, and, also, so that they can put out more crap.

Then again maybe it's not worth it anyway.  Not that it really matters, apparently.

Who Doesn't Love a Good Hand-Job Story?

A letter arrived via carrier pigeon from your friend and mine, "Sassy Pants". It goes like this:

"Dear LROD

The Warren Adler Writing Contest. Have you heard of it?

Well, last summer, I entered his funny story contest, and of course I didn't win. But you see in this contest five finalist are chosen (all of them being NOT YOU) and you vote for the "people's choice award" that winner is the runner-up, while Adler has already chosen the 1st place winner from the five finalists. So, I got to read the top 5 stories, none of them were funny, the winning story was entitled the 'Italian Motzah Ball' for god's sakes. Now, I'll admit that my story was a bit crass (there was a hand-job in it!) and Warren Adler is 81 years old, but I know it was significantly better than all of the finalists.

You can read the horrendous stories here for yourself

Anyway, let's cut to the chase.

"We have strived to put originality as the gold standard of our choices. By its nature our judgment is purely subjective. Our advice to those who have submitted is to stay with it. Not being among our top five is by no means a rejection. Thank you so much for submitting your work. We look forward to hearing from you again when we launch our next contest. Our motivation in creating our contests is to enhance and promote the art of the short story form and to encourage other writers to embrace it."

--Thanks, A Venting, Sassy P.

Here's a question for all the grammar nerds out there: Have they strived or have they striven?  English is so alarmingly irregular, isn't it?  I love that.

That's A Lot of Math

Some numbers from the mailbox last night:

W,R: You ask whether any of the advances in the palin-seinfeld-silverman crop of celeb books'll earn out. There's a (hypothetical but educated) breakdown of the finances in the seinfeld deal here. He talks about some of the other financial stuff in the deal too, but I'll quote the part dealing specifically with whether the advance'll earn out:

"So let's say, using Moonrat's numbers, that Jerry Seinfeld's Book is published in hardcover in mid-2009 at $24.95, with a 15% flat royalty rate. (The latter won't be true, but it helps to simplify things, and will get us into the right ballpark.) And let's say that Jerry Seinfeld's Book sells a million copies, which is what the book by his missuz, Jessica (Deceptively Delicious) sold last year. I'm assuming a large part of the interest in Deceptively was because she was Mrs. Seinfeld.

Seinfeld will do a lot of media to promote a new book; he can get on any late-night or morning show pretty much by asking, and on nearly anything else almost as easily. (Publishers kill for authors with that kind of platform.)

With those assumptions, we've got $3,724,500 in earned royalties for the hardcover. That's a nice pile of change, but it's only about half of the rumored advance.

But, wait! We're assuming this is a hard-soft deal. (Hardcover-only deals have mostly gone the way of the dodo; you're not going to see them from a big New York house, if you see them anywhere.) So let's say there's a trade paperback of Jerry Seinfeld's Book in mid-2010, priced at $15.00 and with a 15% flat royalty rate as well (we're assuming the publisher throws this in -- it's pretty generous -- to help make the deal with Seinfeld and his agent), which sells about two million copies.

That's an additional $4,500,000 in earned royalties for the paperback, pushing the total earned to $8,224,500. (And that's actually above the numbers quoted -- probably because I'm using very rosy sales assumptions, but so will the publishers running P&Ls to justify buying this.)

And there will be a mass-market edition as well: let's assume that comes along in mid-2011, priced at $8.99, with a flat 10% royalty rate. I'm assuming that mass-market distribution hasn't completely collapsed by then -- which may be an unwarranted assumption -- so let's let that chill our numbers a bit, and only assume another million copies sold.

That will be another $899,000 in earned royalties, for a total of $9,123,500.

Voila! Jerry Seinfeld's Book more than earns out, in three editions. Using more pessimistic assumptions -- for a book at this level, most publishers do several P&L scenarios -- with sales at only about two-thirds of what I originally estimated, it would still earn over six million."

Anyway you might wanna have a look at the rest. You'll find it interesting. And by "interesting," I mean disgusting.

In fact I do find it interesting/disgusting.  Thanks for the opportunity to feel both.

Aw, Come On, Now!

Sarah Palin has reportedly been offered $7M for "her book" by Random House.  At least, so says Radar, Fishbowl LA, and subsequently skeptical Galley Cat; therefore, it must be true. (p.s. there's lipstick under that muzzle.) I guess anyone who didn't poke his eyes out first would have seen this ass-deal coming a mile away. BTW, Sarah Silverman's as-of-yet unwritten book hooked an offer of $2.5 M according to the NY Observer, and don't forget that tremendous literary hero, Jerry Seinfeld, whose book is going for $7M to $8M.  Will any of those advances pay out?  Seriously, only in America would comedians and illiterate politicians be taken more seriously than literary novelists.

Excuse me, now, while I go f*ck myself.

Talk Softly and Carry A Big Degree (Or Don't)

An interesting note came in via the cybermailbox recently:

Hey W,R:  I just was reading an interview with the editor of a new online/print pub called Sotto Voce. Apparently the editorial selection process is totally blind; all identifying information about the writer -- name, previous pubs, education -- is stripped from the ms during the review process, and only after a piece has been selected for publication do the editors find out who wrote it.

A quote that left me feeling kind of smug, considering the incessant speculation on your blog and elsewhere that an MFA credential magically opens publishing doors:

"Ironically, I received an e-mail from a disgruntled contributor (he was rejected for the first issue) who said that "[Sotto Voce] only recognize[s] three letters of the alphabet. MFA." I set him straight, but I had to laugh at his misconception. Any skewing of our contributor pool in favor of those who have formal education in writing or art demonstrates one thing: that formal education will make you a better writer, poet, or artist. Of course, there are the few-and-far-between natural geniuses but, in general, those who devote their time and energy towards learning their craft will be better at it."

Here's the interview:
And here's the new zine:

A caveat: I haven't read any of the fiction in Sotto Voce, and I see that the blog interviewer is a contributor in the first issue; relations between editor and contributor might be cozier than the editor admits. But since there is no such thing as the imaginary cookie-cutter "MFA style" some of your posters are paranoid enough to perceive (it is impossible), I believe the editor when she says she goes for accomplished art.

Anyway, I thought you might be interested. You know I love Literary Rejections On Display and have great respect for you and the grace with which you conduct yourself, particularly with the meanies who show up periodically.

This note does bring up an interesting question, though. Are editors with MFA's more likely to publish the kind of writing they learned and learned to value in graduate school? Perhaps some lit eds will come around and set us straight on the question. 

Picture This

Or perhaps you prefer video commentary on rejection?

• Cats and literary rejection
• Girl in hat literary rejection in several parts, including rejection excuses.
• Sad ad man novelist.
• The naked underdog of the literary world gets turned down by Random House and does many, many other things.

Long Live The Queen!

Props to the unstoppable Rejection Queen; she is at rejection #39 and counting.  We all prefer to think of ourselves as pre-published, but you clearly are our leader.  We bow down, sister queen. We bow down low.

Program Your Novel, Program Yourself

Galley Cat reports on a program called Write or Die that just might help you.  THe program is from Dr. Wicked's Writing Lab, and you can take it for a test spin here.  Or watch the YouTube video about it.

Some Rejection Lists for You

Oh, the many lists people keep concerning rejection.  Lists to avoid it and lists to deal with it.

Here are few for your viewing pleasure:

• How to Survive Literary Rejection Letters:  This one is from eHow. Tagline: How to do just about everything.  Nice!
• Five Fiction Mistakes that Spell Rejection: This is from writing-world.com
• Ten Things About Literary Rejection: This is from Whatever, which is a sweet site
• Christian Writer offers "Seven Ways to Alienate Agents and Influence Rejection".
• A popular post Slushkiller over at Making Light from 2004 is still pretty interesting
• And don't forget this from spacejock.com!

Rejectology

A new science is born: the study of rejection!  It appears that two dudes (James Payne and Dr. Esim Erdim Payne) presented An Analysis of Rejection Letters from Literary Agents at the Fourth International Conference on the Book, held at Emerson College, Boston, a couple of years ago.

Here's what the abstract said:

"The rejection letters were received within an 18 week period. Of the 314, 111 were form letters, 101 were personalized form letters, 43 were real letters, 7 were helpful letters, and 52 were notes written on top of the submission cover letter. The purpose is to graphically show the frequency and type of rejection letters so novice authors won't be shocked, get depressed, or take a rejection personally. A rotation submission system is suggested for novice authors to help reduce the expense and minimize the time and effort involved."

Why Even Try?

In the meantime, Nick Denton is forecasting media doom.  So, really, what's the difference?