Should Writers Talk About Their Rejections?

Most writers I know have blogs, Twitters, or some other kind of public forum onto which they can vent all of their feelings and thoughts about the publishing world. (This is probably because most of the writers I know, I've met online. But I digress.) They'll talk about frustrations with their own WIPs, characters from pop culture that annoy them, weird people they meet in real life, email woes, and more. It's nice to have a support system there to tell us that we're not crazy, and to remind us that we're not going through this alone.

But when it comes time to query your novel, how public should you be about the process - particularly your rejection ratio?

I have seen many writers discussing their rejection stats very publicly. To me, that always seemed counterproductive. I've heard repeatedly that pretty much the first thing an agent will do when they think they might be interested in representing you is Google your name. What if they do, and they find a blog or Twitter feed full of rejection stats? Even if the mention seems harmless - maybe something as simple as a running total in your sidebar - it could be potentially damaging, and color the opinion of the agent who was about to fall in love with your work.

I think sometimes we forget that the querying process is about professional communication. During the discussion about the queries hashtag and its various benefits and drawbacks, I read on another blog a commenter who said, in no other industry would it be acceptable to pull actual quotes from business cover letters (which are personal communications) and post them in a public forum, regardless of intent. I thought that was an excellent point, and I think it can be applied in this case, as well. If you were applying for a job in a traditional - but highly competitive - field, would you want to attach your name to the number of people who had turned you down? Absolutely not! You would want the HR managers at AwesomeCompany to think that every company you were interviewing with was champing at the bit to offer you the position. And I think the same rule should apply here - keep quiet about your rejections, and let the writing speak for itself.

I'm not alone in my opinion on the matter. I've heard agents say that's not a smart idea (both in real life and on Twitter), but when I turned to the Internet to try to find some evidence/quotes for a reader, I came up short. Being a journalist by trade, I didn't think that was right. So I contacted Weronika Janczuk, literary agent with D4EO Literary, and asked if she would mind sharing her opinion on the subject. Because she is seriously awesome (I mean, really, really awesome), she graciously agreed. I think she worded it perfectly, so here's verbatim what she had to say:

I think this is one of those odd reverse-psychology things.

If I saw, for example, that someone had a 75% request rate based on the query and the sample pages, I would totally want to read that submission and, if I loved it, try to get in the race for the writer.

If I saw that the request rate was 5%, I would immediately go into reading the submission with a 'this will probably be terrible' mentality, and it will be harder for the writer to amuse me.

Of course, there are always those stories about writers getting 100 rejections before they find the agent and go on to be bestsellers, so a simple statistic wouldn't keep me from falling in love with a story if I did, in fact, love it.

My suggestion is for writers to not share the details. I'm not an agent who's going to go through a potential client's blog entirely, but I will skim a few posts and the one thing that could really turn me off is a really snarky/negative attitude. Anything else is okay (for me), but that means nothing when other agents may feel turned off by the sharing of such details.

I totally think it's okay for writers to share after they sign with an agent, and I think it's totally okay for writers to be like 'Been querying for three weeks, one partial request, hoping,' but a really detailed breakdown can be kind of unnerving and off-putting.

I think Weronika's last paragraph brings up a great point - I love those post-signing stories, where we hear all about how many queries it took. Things like that keep me going, and I know they keep my writer-friends going as well. And once you've signed, there's absolutely nothing damaging about admitting that it took you 50 rejections to get there - in fact, it might just help encourage a fellow writer who is close to calling it quits.


But until you actually sign on with an agent, it's probably best to keep your rejection talk to a minimum. If you need to let off some steam, email your crit partners, or get a group of writing friends together for coffee and trash the agents who rejected you in the privacy of your own home. If you don't have anyone to vent to, there are a ton of great communities out there that you can dive into to find some people (just remember that everything you say on forums can probably be attached to your name, too, so keep it professional. Mostly I'm suggesting that you find friends/support groups here and then take it to a private chat or email if you want to complain about anything. Also I've only used about half of these so I can't speak to the level of awesome/not awesome):

• Absolute Write
• NaNoWriMo Forums
• YAlitchat 
• SCBWI (especially your local chapters/crit groups!)
• Writer's Digest forums

If all of those fail (though I honestly can't imagine that they would), just join in the conversation on blogger or Twitter! I've made great writing friends that way, and come my time to query, I know they'll be there to listen to me if I need them. But of course, I'll keep it all out of public view. (When I manage to snag an agent, though, I promise to let all you lovely readers know.)

Special thanks to Weronika Janczuk for answering my email so quickly!    

Maybe Eyjafjallajökull Should Think About a Pen Name...

This week, my Twitter feed has been ablaze with comments about the unpronounceability (that is totally a word, I just made it up) of the Icelandic volcano's name. Some people just refer to it as "that volcano in Iceland," others actually took the time to spell it (and most of them got it correct), but almost everyone took a jab at how difficult it was to spell or pronounce.

Which, of course, reminded me of something related to writing (because everything comes back to writing). I have a writer-friend named Lisa Grace. Only her name isn't actually Lisa Grace. To be perfectly honest with you, I can't remember what her real last name is, even though she told me once. But I remember when she did tell me, everyone at the table (myself included) completely understood why she chose to use "Grace" as her professional last name - there was no way that I could have spelled her last name correctly if I had to do a Google, Amazon, or library search for her. She was especially worried about this because she her YA book, Angel in the Shadows, had recently been published, and she wanted to make sure that teens could search for her name if they wanted to find her. And Lisa Grace is a lot easier to remember than Lisa Eyjafjallajökull (you like what I did there?)

Ever since I met Lisa, I thought the name Lisa Grace fit her, and "Lisa Grace" stuck in my head. Even Laura Lippman, her conference leader at the Eckerd College Writer's Conference, which Lisa and I attended together (and is a seriously amazing conference...seriously), told Lisa that she couldn't help but call her "Lisa Grace" - two names, not one, because they just naturally went together. How's that for marketing?

I have other friends that chose pen names because their last names were complicated. I have female friends who are choosing to write under their maiden names, even though they're married, because their maiden names are either easier to remember or easier to spell, which isn't exactly a pen name but it's on topic. (Conversely, I'm choosing to write under my married name because it's more unique. Though I know I will spend the rest of my life correcting people's pronunciation of it, and that's OK - it's easy to spell and short. Plus when you Google me I'm the only thing that comes up, which is totally awesome.) I have one friend who is writing under her maiden name because her married name is a very specific ethnic name, and she isn't a member of that ethnic group, and she doesn't want to have to think about that down the road.

There are other, more strategic reasons you might choose a pen name. I once heard about an MG fantasy writer who chose a pen name that began with "R" so that he would be shelved next to Rick Riordan and J.K. Rowling - a move suggested by his agent when he was considering a pen name anyway. Speaking of J.K. Rowling, we all know how she was encouraged to use the ambiguous J.K. instead of Joanne to help appeal to male readers. And some writers might use pen names to protect the privacy of their friends, family, or selves (apparently I totally don't care about that).

Don't get me wrong - I'm not advocating pen names as the only way to go here. I'm not using one, and have never even considered it. But I definitely see that there are circumstances when they make sense, and maybe that Icelandic volcano should think about switching. We could call it simply VOLCANO. It would be amazing.

So, writer-friends...how do you feel about pen names? Will you use one? Why or why not? And reader-friends...how do you feel when you find out that someone is using a pen name? Excited that you're in on the secret? Or a little perplexed?

Extra credit:

• Amazing pictures from the volcano
• The First Novels' Club Donna Gambale explores pen names, too!
• Hey, so does Nathan Bransford! (See, we don't worry about original ideas in our blog posts, yet we stress over them in our novels daily...I think all of these posts are totally different and yet still valuable and awesome. OK, probably Nathan Bransford's is way more awesome than mine, but he's NATHAN BRANSFORD. I can't compete with that.)