I wrote a book that I, personally, absolutely loved and felt like it represented everything about me as a person and as a writer. I submitted the hell out of that manuscript. After 68 rejections (too personal, too raw, too dark, too taboo, etc.), I just put the manuscript away and worked on other books. Two years later, I submitted an essay to a contest. The editor loved my essay (which won!), and emailed me asking if I had a manuscript. The one I was working on at that time wasn’t ready yet. I remembered the first book I wrote—the one I loved, the one that defined who I was when I wrote it. I thought, “What the hell? Why not send it?”. I sent it. She loved it. Nine months later it was published. I had found the right editor at the right time and presented to her the right manuscript, and behold! Most of the time that is how publication works. So submit away and keep submitting post-rejection! Your work is always one submission away from acceptance.

797 is a model of Boeing airplane. It is also the number of rejections that I’ve received over the past five years. During that time I’ve submitted my writing for publication 1,380 times. That’s a lot of Nos, a lot of Unfortunatelys, a lot of We appreciate the chance to read your work, howevers. And that’s okay. Rejection is a part of publication. Of course, even after we accept that, it doesn’t mean that rejections don’t hurt our feelings—especially if we’re totally in love with the publisher that we submitted to. Fortunately, rejection is not a death sentence and doesn’t have to be a confidence cut-down or a personal attack on the writer’s self-worth. Rejection is merely someone saying, “Not quite, but keep trying.” In many cases, the only problem is that the submission is simply not right for that press or publication.

I have been keeping track of the submission process and statistics from the results through the past five years. 

Total Submissions: 1,380

Acceptances: 121 (9%) (4 of which were books)

Rejections: 797 (57%)

Withdraws: 430 (31%)

Still under consideration: 32 (3%)

Only about 10% of my total submissions were accepted. There is no “normal” or “average” here as every genre or market is a bit different, but it seemed relevant to share here because writers tend to get so distraught after a few rejections and give up. Having a larger set of data over a longer period of time offers a much greater opportunity for creating perspective.

I’ve edited for a number of journals and magazines, and I have always hated sending rejections. It’s never a fun thing to do, especially if you really love the piece and believe in it, but you just published something exactly like it, or the story is good but the writing’s not, or vice versa, or if it’s an awesome piece but just doesn’t fit within the scope of what the journal or publisher promotes and represents. There are as many reasons as to why a piece is rejected as there are the number of pieces rejected.

This can seem devastating. Or discouraging. Or just flat-out shitty. So what, as writers, can we do to survive the rejections and keep our writing and self-confidence alive?

·   Do not try to argue your piece into publication. The manuscript itself is your argument. If you submitted and got rejected, don’t be personally offended by the rejection and feel like you have to fight for your manuscript or argue with the editor or publisher that they really have to publish this! If the publisher said no, it’s because s/he is saying no to the work you presented, not to you personally. If you think the publisher maybe didn’t get what you were trying to do in your piece and so you feel like you need to argue with her/him to get your point across, then what you really need to do is revise the way that you present your manuscript. The cover letter and work itself should make your best argument.

·   You are not your work. Yes, you might write really personal pieces and it can feel like your writing is yourself, but writing is a craft. Writing is a job. Do you define yourself solely on the job that you have? You are more than a job. You are a writer—but the actual writing is not you.

·   Say you wrote a kickass zine about how to knit cell phone cases using recycled materials. That’s great! But if there are dozens of other zines about how to knit computer cases using recycled materials, then your zine may not be needed or appreciated as much. It doesn’t mean your work sucks, it just means fate didn’t help you out on that one, and so off to another outlet or project you shall go to see if they, too, not only love your zine, but are looking for something along the lines of what you have to offer.

·   Rejection means that someone is reading. Regardless of what the response to your writing is, isn’t it kinda neat that someone is reading and considering your work in the first place? Writing is a lonely field, so even a rejection is a connection.

·   Multiple rejections are encouragement to work more on your piece. Even though you might love your writing, it may keep getting rejected all over the place. That just means that there’s probably something about it that’s not quite working or you are not reaching the right outlet. Set it aside. Work on something else for a bit. Come back to it. Rejection is feedback. Listen to it.

·   The fact that you’re even submitting—hell, that you’re even writing—is pretty fantastic! Remember that.

·   Also remember that you won’t ever get anything published if you don’t submit it. Post-rejection, revise if needed and keep submitting! To come full-circle: rejection is a part of the publication process, just like submitting, just like waiting, just like writing. Keep at it. Always.

Chelsey Clammer is a creative nonfiction writer in Minneapolis building a diverse and prolific body of work while utilizing the power of spreadsheets and metrics.

In 2007 while Microcosm was at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, a couple approached our table during the last hour minutes of the final day. They pawed around through our displays for a few minutes and then, looking concerned, before finally asking “Hard times, huh?”

It took me a few minutes to figure out if I was more confused or offended at that assessment. How could they know. Ironically, 2006 had been Microcosm’s most successful year to date and sales had grown 20-50% each year. They offered me $1 for an $8 paperback and I declined. They explained that they were looking for a publisher for their own book but clearly we were in not qualified.

I stewed on their words and then steamed on how it was insulting. Before long I realized that the problem was that they had no appreciation for our grassroots approach or the economy of not having an elaborate stage-show of a booth. From talking to them, success was implied by Porsches and diamond rings, fancy displays and prestigious awards. Microcosm had always been focused on saving time and money by ignoring award submissions, finding event displays in the trash, and investing the savings into our mission and staff salaries. But it takes a certain kind of person to understand interpret that, let alone appreciate it.

It’s our inherent punk rock nature that communicates these values to a peer. But this experience at the book fair was the first time that someone vocally interpreted it to me as an outward sign of failure or cutbacks.

Within a few hours my pride was restored as I realized that this was what I wanted to project. This is who are we are in a genuine sense and what the world should know about this. Of course not everyone will understand but then again we aren’t Penguin Random House. And that is true for every reason.

Looking for the latest episode? Click here!

In 2012, Microcosm founder and CEO Joe Biel started writing blog posts. Biel wanted to share 25 years of experience and how Microcosm sold millions of books to leave a trail of bread crumbs for others to have similar success. Biel has also written a book about the topic, A People’s Guide to Publishing.

Joe and Microcosm’s marketing director Elly now make the weekly People’s Guide to Publishing People’s Guide to Publishing podcast. You can listen to it on your preferred app, or watch the video version as a vlogcast.

Got questions about the publishing industry or need help troubleshooting your own process? Submit your question to podcast at microcosmpublishing dot com, and we’ll try to address it on an upcoming episode.

Find the series of blog posts that started it all here:

An overview

What a Publisher Does

Paralleling the Dinosaurs

Title Development

For authors: How to Pitch Your Book to a Publisher

Data About Your Book’s Details (MetaData)

Profit & Loss Statement

Am I Stealing Your Art?

The Economic Case for Traditional Format Offset Printing

Distribution Question (with infographic)

The Print Run

Working with The Printer

Formatting for Print

How to Pack Books for Shipping

Social Media for Authors

Self-Promotion for Authors

Organizing a book tour

This is the eighth post in our ongoing Business of Publishing series by Joe Biel, author of A People’s Guide to Publishing. This edition tackles one of our most popular questions: “How many copies of my book should I print?” 

Many, many books have proven unprofitable because their initial print run was too low or too high. Often times not being able to manage this complex predictive math causes many small publishers to collapse under the weight of planning ahead with their own bestsellers.

So let’s look at a healthy way to be smart and plan ahead.

The longtime conventional wisdom is that a third of a book’s lifetime sales occur before its publication date. Another third happen over the next year and the final third happens gradually over the rest of the book’s lifetime. While this belief is becoming increasingly difficult to predict in a changing book-selling climate, the wisdom underpinning it still makes sense: math is your friend. 

The wisdom is that for an independent book to make sense to publish, there should be at least 5,000 people who would want to read it that you can identify who they are and how to reach out to them. Of course, that does not mean that every initial print run should be at least 5,000. Indeed, some of our books are as few as 3,000 or even 2,000. It’s not that we doubt that we might sell 5,000 copies in the book’s lifetime. It’s that in some cases two printings of 3,000 costs about the same as one printing of 5,000 and it’s healthy to be a little wary. 

The average book store sells one copy of the average book during the average year. When you consider that the vast majority of sales are bestsellers, you realize that most books sell even fewer copies than that. What this means is that simply publishing a book does not mean that it will sell or that book stores will want it. You have to make people interested.

Back to pre-sales: 

If you have a trade distributor printing three times as many copies as you have preorders make senses. But if you don’t have a working relationship with a distributor, using a technology like Kickstarter to sell a few hundred or even thousand copies of the book before its release serves a much more important purpose than predicting print run or even raising money. It spreads the buzz about your book through word of mouth and can result in some publicity spots. Planning out blogs and magazines to pitch the book to during your campaign to light a time-sensitive fire can really help your chances of publicity and thus sales. 

But Kickstarter or direct orders on your own website do not demonstrate demand or future sales for a book as they are often reaching a completely different audience. If your book isn’t represented by a trade distributor,mbegin to slowly reach out to bookstores once you have physical books to show to the buyers. Build a relationship. 

We printed 3,000 copies each of, I believe, Microcosm’s first ten books. When I tell people this they respond that it seems bold, lucky, or outrageous that we have sold all 30,000 of those books and that most have seen multiple reprints. But my point is the opposite: Many of those proved much more expensive than they should have been because it’s much cheaper to add 1,000 or 2,000 additional copies to a print run than it is to print the correct number the first time around.

I lacked the understanding of how to predict the difference in sales from one book to another (as well as the quality of results from Google in 2015). Consider the size of the audience. You won’t sell a book to every person interested in it simply because you won’t reach them all or some of them don’t have time to read it or they think they know everything already or they don’t have the money or they simply never run into it at their favorite book store. But look at who is out there and how you can reach them. How much competition is there? Draw up a plan. Then realistically think of how many of those people would buy the book. 

The number one mistake I witness firsthand is people making print runs that are much too small—100 or 500 copies. When they inevitably run out of them, they just need to print more. The amount of time and effort that goes into making a book is the same no matter what your print run is so it’s in your best interest to figure out what that ideal number is. I’d suggest starting in the neighborhood of 2,000-3,000 copies. It sounds like a lot but you’ll need the extras for reviewers and samples. It’s better to err on the side of giving a book to someone who could create a positive influence for it than to be forced into stinginess by a lack of copies. Besides, generosity creates more of the same. 

For reprints, a good rule of thumb is to look at your sales history, see what the patterns are. Is it selling faster? Is it slowing down? Are there busier times of year than others? Plan a two-year supply and find a good place to store them. Sometimes sales completely taper off and you’ll have a lifetime supply. But at least you won’t have to face the question of how many copies of that book to print ever again.