Thus a book that is consoling to one reader may be corrosive to another, a book that is boring to one reader may be brilliant to another, because a reader's mind is where a book springs to life. In that way, writing is an imperfect form of communication: you write hoping to evoke this image or this feeling in the reader, but your tools are blunt, limited, and once the reader begins to read, you the author have lost control over what exactly they will feel and experience.
I am one of those writers who thinks that the book is made by the author and then remade by the reader's mind - remade by the act of reading - so that in a sense no two people read the same book. I always want to grow and improve as a writer, and I think criticism and praise both offer opportunities to do that, ways of glimpsing your work from the outside as it is received by different types of readers. I think it's important to take criticism seriously but not personally. Liking a book is often not only a matter of personal taste, but of the exact moment in time that you read it: the book I read and loved at fifteen I might hate at thirty, and vice versa. I found that useful to process what I was feeling, and make each rejection feel like part of a process rather than the End of All Things.Īs for criticism - I think all writers receive criticism, because no book is universally liked. I didn't necessarily have a single method for dealing with rejection, but I remember when I was sending Captive Prince out on queries, I kept a "rejection book" where I printed and pasted all my rejection letters, and journalled my feelings about each one next to them.
My book got to prove itself to publishers in the market. I was also really lucky to have had enthusiastic readers, who encouraged me along the way, and to be writing at a time when the internet and self publishing offers alternate paths for publication. Publishers might reject a book because it's just not to an editor's particular taste, or because it's new - publishers are essentially venture capitalists, and if something is new it's marketing potential is zero, or at best "question mark". I was lucky in that sense that I learned that rejection has nothing to do with whether a book will make it or not, or whether it will connect with readers. But because I had so many requests for a paperback from online readers, I eventually self published, and the books shot up the charts - and after that were picked up by Penguin, where the series went on to become a USA Today bestseller. Pacat Captive Prince started off as a web serial that garnered viral attention, and after I'd written the first two volumes in that format I tried to publis …more Captive Prince started off as a web serial that garnered viral attention, and after I'd written the first two volumes in that format I tried to publish commercially, and was rejected just about everywhere - agents, publishers, you name it.
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