This week a very polite Transition Year student emailed me. He’s writing a piece for the Irish Indo on rejection and asked had my work ever been rejected. Well the answer is yes, of course! Most writers if not all have had to deal with some sort of rejection. It’s part of the writing game. So you’d better get used to it.
Here’s what I told him:

My first book, KIds Can Cook was rejected six times before it was finally published by Children’s Press. Every time the postman knocked on the door and handed my manuscript back to me in a self-addressed jiffy bag, my heart sank. But I was determined, so I kept sending it out to different publishers. I was twenty-five at the time, and I knew had a good hook and hadn’t been done before, so I just kept trying. As Beckett once said ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

Eventually it was picked up and published and became a very successful book. The experience taught me three things: 1/ to write what you love and are passionate about 2/ to do your market research (esp if you want to write popular fiction or non fiction) …