Examples of And You Thought It Would Fail in Literature.
- Ted Geisel - better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss - tried twenty-seven times, unsuccessfully, to sell his first children's book. You probably know it as And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. And he almost Gave Up Too Soon. He was so frustrated after the 27th time, he decided to go burn the manuscript when by pure chance, he ran into an old friend... who had just happened to become a publisher.
- Animal Farm was turned down by a publisher who told George Orwell in the rejection slip, "It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA." The slip in question was from The Dial Press of New York. To quote Christopher Hitchens in response: "And this, in the land of Disney..."
- As hard as it is to believe, one publisher rejected Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, claiming in the rejection slip, "The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above 'curiosity' level." (The name of this publisher has been lost, and more than likely, he kept quiet about it.)
- The Berenstain Bears almost didn't become a series. After their first book the Big Honey Hunt was completed in 1962, publishing editor, Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss), actually warned Stan and Jan Berenstain against doing any more books with the bears; he argued that the market was already saturated with too many bear characters like the Three Bears, Yogi Bear, Maurice Sendak's Little Bear, etc. The Berenstains initially agreed and came up with another book about a penguin titled Nothing Ever Happens At The South Pole. Ted changed his mind though when he learned that Honey Hunt was selling well according to his field agents and even had the initial print run raised. He asked the Berenstains for another bear book and the rest is history. The aforementioned penguin book was published around 2012, not long after Jan Berenstain's death.
- In case you need proof that most publishers thought Stephen King's Carrie would fail, King has saved all the rejection letters he got while trying to sell it. One of them said, "We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell." Even King himself had no faith in the story―at first. After writing a few pages of the opening scene, he felt that Carrie would have to be much longer than he'd envisioned (which meant no magazine would buy it), he wasn't emotionally invested in the story or characters, and he didn't know enough about teenage girls to write about them convincingly. So he crumpled up what he'd written and threw it away, only to be presented with the papers later by his wife Tabitha, who'd found them in the trash, smoothed them out and read them. She'd been intrigued by what Steve had written and wanted him to continue. After King made it big with Carrie, and followed it up with 'Salem's Lot, then followed that up with The Shining, his editor and close friend advised him that if he wasn't careful, he was going to get classed as a horror writer, and horror writers never experienced long term success...
- Anthony Burgess wrote his first novel, A Clockwork Orange, as a form of therapy in an emotionally turbulent period in his life. He figured that once published it would be quickly forgotten, and he would turn his attention to his next book. Clockwork Orange propelled Burgess to international fame instead.
- First editions of The Colour of Magic, the first Discworld novel, are quite rare because no one really thought it would sell and the publishing run was therefore rather low.
- A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected as being pointless by multiple publishers. After the author committed suicide, his mother found a smeared copy of the manuscript, and tried to get publishers interested for the next 11 years. Finally, she browbeat an established author into reading it, and he was so impressed, he used his influence to get it published. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize the next year.
- Neil Gaiman started writing Coraline in 1991, until his publisher told him it was brilliant but that horror aimed at young children simply wasn't publishablenote ; it wasn't until 2002 that it was published and proved popular, getting a graphic novel adaptation and an animated adaptation.Gaiman: And before people start laughing at him, in 1991 he was absolutely right.
- Jim Butcher didn't think much of his first attempt of The Dresden Files series. Many of his peers and writing teachers had tried to beat bad writing habits out of him, and so to spite them, he sat down and wrote the most cliched, formulaic story he could think of involving an Occult Detective in an Urban Fantasy setting just so show that he could. He shopped it around to publishers a bit halfheartedly, not really thinking much of it and looking towards his next project now that he'd gotten it out of his system, and was rather surprised when he found a publisher willing to take it on and commission sequels.
- Frank Herbert's Dune was rejected 20 times before being published — by Chilton, of the DIY car service manuals fame. It proved to be massively influential on the sci-fi genre and has received multiple adaptations.
- According to the intro in the book Freakonomics, the publishers of the book hated the name and wanted to change it, but the writers Steven and Stephen disagreed and insisted that the name stay. The book has since inspired a sequel, a blog, a radio show, and a consulting company. So successful was the book, that the publishing company begrudgingly let the sequel book be called "Super Freakonomics".
- Because people tend to remember the movie Gone with the Wind, it's easy for many to forget that Margaret Mitchell's book, which inspired it, was rejected over thirty times. It was an immediate bestseller and is the second-most read and bought book in the United States (the Bible is number one), and is the most successful novel in the US.
- Harry Potter. Publishers were afraid children wouldn't read such long books. Literary critics pigeonholed the first book as lame 1990s juvenile fantasy, destined to be forgotten. Not only did the series become some of the best-selling books in history, but it also got film adaptations, and is still seeing some new merchandise and materials to this day.
- Even the publishing house that finally accepted Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone wasn't going to at first. They saw no market or promise in the book. The editor charged with reading the manuscript took the first chapter home, didn't want to read it, and gave it to his eight-year-old daughter... who read the entire chapter at breakneck speed and began immediately pestering her father non-stop for the rest of the book so she could find out more about "the little boy." The editor went back to work and told his bosses that they just might have something here...
- Even better, when Philosopher's Stone had its first printing, J. K. Rowling sat for a story with the book critic for a small local paper. At the end of the interview, she gave the critic a signed copy of the book as a gift. On the way back to the office, the critic tossed the book in a trash bin, thinking it was worthless. To be clear, the critic threw away a signed, first edition printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone... copies of which have sold for over eighty thousand dollars.
- Alex Aster has stated that Lightlark was repeatedly rejected by publishers (according to Aster, sixteen publishers turned her down), who felt that it wouldn't do well because the market was already saturated with similar books. Aster stated her agent eventually dropped her as a client because she kept wanting to work on Lightlark rather than focusing on other books. Aster started promoting the book on TikTok in 2021, causing it to gain a massive following that finally got the attention of publisher Abrams Books. Lightlark became a bestseller, including reaching No.1 on The New York Times Bestseller List, and Universal bought the adaptation rights for a hefty sum before it was even published. That being said, Lightlark's initial success did have a damper put on it due to the controversy surrounding its marketing and release, which ended up overshadowing the book itself in some circles.
- Astrid Lindgren was rejected by one publisher, Bonniers. But she finally was accepted by another publisher, Rabén & Sjögren, and she would (mostly) remain faithful to them for the rest of her career. And it was a good career too, as she became one of Sweden's most-loved writers of children's literature.
- The original novel of MASH was rejected by over a dozen publishers, which was a record for the agency selling it. It eventually spawned a movie, numerous sequel novels and a TV series that ran for eleven years (and whose final episode was the highest rated show ever broadcast at that time).
- Simona Ahrnstedt was determined to bring the Romance Novel to the Swedish literary scene. But it wasn't easy for her to find a publisher for her debut novel, Överenskommelser, and critics continued to ignore her. While she maybe isn't a household name, she's got a steady fanbase, she has published four more novels and has proved that there is a market for Swedish Romance.
- Paris in the Twentieth Century. One of the reasons it was initially rejected for publication was that Jules Verne's predictions about the far-off future of 1960 were considered wildly implausible. He got a few things wrong, but the gist of the novel is either clearly correct (horseless carriages!) or correct if you're cynical (Corrupt Corporate Executives run the world!).
- Nathaniel Hawthorne did not expect The Scarlet Letter to be popular. It proved a big hit when it first came out and is now considered classic of American literature.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events: Daniel Handler thought the series was an awful idea, and when his editor said she liked it, he thought she was drunk.
- Beatrix Potter at first had absolutely no luck finding an editor who liked The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Eventually, she used her family's wealth to publish it privately, and after some moderate success on this limited distribution, an editor was convinced that it would sell and, well, it certainly did.
- J. R. R. Tolkien tried several times throughout his life to sell one version or another of what eventually became The Silmarillion, but gave up after many rejections, finally concluding that the work was best viewed as a personal hobby, inventing a setting in which to place his invented languages but of little interest to the greater public. Finally completed by his son Christopher and published posthumously, it never achieved the same heights as The Lord of the Rings (which incorporated a great deal of it into its backstory, making its status as a sequel to The Hobbit something of a Dolled-Up Installment), but it turned out to be of great enough interest to Tolkien fans to enjoy the sort of popularity that would make many a lesser fantasy writer envious, and enough interest remained for Christopher Tolkien to publish his father's notes in a more complete form as first Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth and then the multi-volume The History of Middle-earth, and then The Silmarillion's "Great Tales" (The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin) as their own novel-length books. Not even the Christopher Tolkien's own death has stopped fans from going over JRRT's writings if The Fall of Númenor and The Nature Of Middle Earth are any indication.
- Some believed that The Twilight Saga - a teen-oriented book series with lots of Purple Prose and a hefty page-count - would never catch on. Then again, the style of books that it was a part of ("Sexy vampire dudes seducing Hollywood Homely women and getting away with it", nowadays called Vampire or Gothic Romance) had been on-and-off popular for about forty years, so it might have been the case of Twilight being published at just the right time.
- The Marquise of Sévigné
wrote "Racine would pass like the coffee", expressing her belief both would not have success. - Mary Higgins Clark's agent thought the manuscript for Where Are the Children? was great, but two publishers they submitted it to turned it down because they worried the subject matter - involving child murder and children being kidnapped by a sexual predator - would be too dark and off-putting to women readers. The author stated in a foreword in the 1998 edition that although there were no graphic scenes of child abuse in the book, the subject was still regarded as highly taboo in the 1970s, so some publishers balked at even a hint of such topics. Publisher Simon & Schuster did take a chance on it and the novel proved to be a bestseller, remaining one of Higgins Clark's most popular books for decades afterwards (it also received a movie adaptation).
- A Wrinkle in Time was rejected at least 26 times before Madeleine L'Engle found a publisher. Reasons for rejection included the fact that it was a sci-fi story with a female protagonist and its frank depiction of evil being inappropriate for children. It went on to become a beloved novel with multiple sequels.
