Book Rejection Quotes

I wrote books to entertain. I'm not trying to teach anything! If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

I have disassociated myself from that book.

I wrote 'Time Stops at Shamli' in 1956, shortly after 'The Room on the Roof' was published, and I couldn't find anyone to publish it.

"Eight Days of Luke" was refused by another confused publisher on the grounds that children shouldn't strike matches. When my agent pointed out that David in the book was twelve years old, the publisher said that he was striking matches to summon the devil, then, and this couldn't be allowed.

Now, I'll tell you something that might interest you. Casino Royale was the first Bond book that Ian Fleming ever wrote. And he couldn't get anybody to touch it, to publish it - he couldn't do anything about it at all. Nobody wanted to know.

I'd written my first novel for adults, which was called Basic Eight and was set in a high school, and we were having a devil of a time selling it. It ended up in the hands of an editor of a children's publishing house, for which it was entirely inappropriate. She said, "Well, we can't publish this, but I think you should write something for children," which I thought was a really terrible idea.

I didn't write professionally at first. It took me nine years to get anything published. At the beginning I mostly wrote picture books, which were rejected by every children's book publisher in America. The first book of mine to be accepted for publication was ELLA ENCHANTED, and not one but two publishers wanted it. That day, April 17, 1996, was one of the happiest in my life.

'A Wrinkle in Time' was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it.

I skip the introduction. If the book goes in the trash, I want it to go because of my thoughts on it, not because of some Asshole's thoughts who wrote the introduction.

As for collaboration - I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It's not that the books are bad; editors won't even read them.

Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.

My first four books were not published because nobody wanted them. They were adult books, not kids' books.

Bantam Press. And they commissioned me to write it. And when that was completed, they sold it to Harper and Row. And then I put it out to every movie studio in town. And they all turned it down.

When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - "hoping that I like the book as much as he does" - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.

I was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one would want to publish my book.

Speak to any editor and ask them what they turned down, and they'll have long lists of books.

If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.

I tend to turn down books originally published as e-books. As for selling books directly to e-book publishers, I would do so only if all traditional publishers had turned them down.

Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published.

The expectation was that 'True Confessions' would be my first published book, but that didn't happen. After it was rejected by every publisher in New York and Canada, I shoved it in a closet and went on to write and publish my next three books.