Nearly 50 rejections — and the lessons that led to an award-winning book

Twelve lessons from the long path to publication

By the second grade, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.

“I’m going to become a famous author!” I told my parents and teachers on many occasions, amazingly self-assured.

My mother sent my first handwritten book — titled “Mallary: The Girl Who Loves Ducks” — to a company that bound and printed it when I was eight and three-quarters years old, according to my author bio at the time. (The three-quarters is very important at that age.) When my mom gifted me that book, I felt like a real-life author.

I chased that feeling for decades to come, never realizing just how hard it would be to actually become a published author.

The path to publication for my first book, SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery, was more circuitous than I ever could have imagined. It was laden with rejections and obstacles that derailed me and could have led to my book’s demise. Within a year-and-a-half period, I received nearly 50 rejections — roughly 35 from Big Five book publishers and the rest from writing residencies, fellowships, and grants.

My perfectionistic self equated rejections with failures. They made me feel like a fraud, as though the ID I’d been carrying around as a writer was suddenly fake. My inner critic got loud, especially after so many publisher rejections. Who do you think you are? You’re never going to become a ‘famous’ author, let alone a no-name one. I remember apologizing to my literary agent at that stage, letting her know I was sorry if I had wasted her time. (She assured me I hadn’t and stuck by my side the entire time.)

I stuck by my book’s side and tried to tune out my critic. I never gave up hope that one day, someday, my book would find its place in the world. And I found comfort in the old adage: “It only takes one ‘yes’ to get a book deal.”

Eventually, after two rounds of submissions stretched across a year-long period, I did get a Big Five book deal from Simon Element, a Simon & Schuster imprint. I also ended up getting the biggest grant I had applied for, from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. And just this week I learned that SLIP won the Association of American Publishers’ 2026 PROSE Excellence award for Biological & Life Sciences. It also won first place in the Clinical Medicine category and was a finalist in the Outstanding Work By a Trade Publisher category.

Deeply honored by these PROSE Awards, announced over the past week.

The rejections I received along the way make these accomplishments all the more meaningful and hard-won. Now that I’m on the other side of these rejections, I’ve been reflecting on related lessons learned. Here are a dozen for my fellow writers:

1.) Every rejection is one step closer to an acceptance.

Rejection is an enduring vulnerability for writers. The key isn’t to look away from rejections but to see them as stepping stones toward an eventual yes. If I gave up after my 20th rejection from a publisher, I may never have ended up with a book deal. Instead, I tried to view every rejection as an opportunity to strengthen my resolve as I navigated the path toward publication.

2.) Receiving defeats isn’t the same as being defeated.

This advice comes from the great Maya Angelou, who once said: “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.” So many classic books — The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, Carrie by Stephen King — were rejected countless times. Virginia Evans, who wrote the wildly popular book The Correspondent, also faced rejection time and time again before finding a publisher. A few months ago, The Wall Street Journal published a great piece about her path, titled “She almost gave up. Now she has the year’s unlikely hit novel.”

3.) Rejections are proof of action.

The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said: “Action has magic, grace, and power in it.” It also contains rejection; you can’t receive no’s, after all, if you haven’t acted in the first place. You could never apply for anything new, or never submit your work for consideration, for fear of rejection. But what’s the fun in that? When you try for a grant, or an award, or a book deal — even knowing you may get rejected — you’re taking action toward the goal you want to achieve. You may not reach it as soon as you’d like, but you’ll be that much closer for having tried.

4.) Don’t let inaction be your reaction.

In the face of rejection, it’s tempting to stick your project on the back burner. The risk, of course, is that your project gets forever stuck there. Take a break from the project if you need to. But then consider how you can turn up the flame on it every day.

When I was getting one rejection after another, I found it difficult to write. I couldn’t concentrate, and I longed for guidance from a book editor I didn’t yet have. So instead of writing, I reported. I channeled my energy into conducting interviews for my book, in part because I liked the act of talking with people about it. This made the book feel like less of an idea and more of a reality. When interviewing people, I would usually preface the conversation by saying, “I’m writing a book and don’t yet have a publisher, but I’m actively looking for one.” Having this action-oriented mindset — and communicating it with others — kept me going.

Seeing my book deal announcement in Publishers Marketplace: A surreal moment.

5.) Rejections can help you improve.

After 16 editors rejected my first book proposal, I re-assessed what I could do differently. Many of the editors said they worried they wouldn’t be able to get my memoir beyond modest sales, citing literary memoir as a “tough sell.”

Around this same time, the term memoir+ was beginning to emerge. This genre acknowledges the fact that it’s difficult to sell a memoir to a Big Five publisher if you’re not famous or don’t have a big platform. These days, you’re much more likely to get a book deal if you write a memoir plus something else: investigation, social commentary, reportage, etc. As a journalist by trade, I knew my “plus” could be reporting. (Here are more details about memoir+ from a recent interview I did with Poynter.org.)

I spent the next year interviewing others with lived experience, as well as clinicians and researchers who treat and study those with eating disorders, and I reworked my proposal accordingly. Instead of pitching SLIP as a literary memoir, I pitched it as a book that would blend personal narrative, reportage, and research. This approach eventually landed me a book deal and ultimately made my writing better. All of this additional reporting also led me to win the Sloan Foundation grant and the PROSE award.

6.) Don’t let rejections from smaller opportunities deter you from pursuing bigger ones.

Hoping to fund my work on the book, I applied for several grants in the $500 to $10,000 range. All of my applications were rejected, but I kept persevering, hoping I’d find the right fit.

After getting my book deal, I decided to aim high and apply for a much larger grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The foundation supports science reporting, and though I hadn’t initially planned to write about the science of eating disorders, I realized this could be a meaningful addition to the book. I made the case for this in my application, and to my surprise, I received the grant. Seeing the email notification felt thrilling.

The grant helped elevate the quality of my reporting and enabled me to schedule several reporting trips that I wouldn’t have otherwise taken. It also allowed me to save the money from my book advance for other activities, like my book tour. (Here’s a related piece I wrote for writers who want to apply for grants.)

This Sloan Foundation ad, featuring SLIP, ran in last week’s New York Review of Books.

7.) Sometimes the cliched “it’s not you, it’s me” line is actually true.

When trying to get a book deal, I encountered some editors who passed on my book because they had recently acquired another title like it, or because the subject matter hit too close to home. This didn’t have anything to do with my book; it had to do with external factors that were outside of my control. Rejections are often the result of such factors, and they’re sometimes more subjective than objective. Reminding yourself of this reality can make them slightly more bearable.

8.) Rejections are often short, and they can seem insensitive.

There have been plenty of times when I’ve pitched freelance stories and haven’t heard back from editors. In these cases, I always follow up once or twice and often find that I get a response after the third email. Sometimes it’s a yes, sometimes it’s a no. When it’s a no, it’s usually short and sweet.

Some recent rejections have included: “Hi Mallary, thanks for reaching out. I'm going to pass on this, but best of luck finding a home for it”; “Thanks, Mallory. We’ll pass on this one,” and “Dear Mallory, thank you for reaching out. We’re respectfully declining this one but appreciate the chance to consider it.” (I left the name misspellings in those last two notes to show how often my name gets misspelled!) It can feel off-putting to receive such a short response to a thoughtful pitch, but even short responses are better than no responses.

It’s tempting to ask for feedback about why your work was rejected, but editors typically keep their responses succinct for a reason: they’re inundated with pitches and can’t possibly provide feedback to everyone, let alone detailed feedback. For this reason, silence is a common form of rejection. If you receive a written rejection, it’s typically best to thank the editor and then refocus your energy on pitching your work elsewhere.

9.) Don’t compromise your vision just to get a “yes.”

There may be times when an editor suggests something that doesn’t align with your vision. I had this happen at one point while I was trying to get a book deal. I had to say “no” to a suggestion that would have changed the whole tenor of my book. As much as I wanted a book deal, I didn’t want to change course so drastically that I would regret my decision or resent the book writing process. You have to be willing to pivot when the situation calls for it (as I did when shifting from a literary memoir to memoir+), but you shouldn’t sacrifice your vision.

The long path to publication (not counting all the years I spent writing prior to finding my agent).

10.) One “no” doesn’t mean “never.”

Just because you get one rejection doesn’t mean you can’t ever pitch that editor again. I’ve worked with several newsroom editors who have rejected some of my ideas and accepted others. A rejection doesn’t close a door so much as leave it slightly ajar. You might just have to work a little harder to open it next time. If you get two or three rejections from the same editor, this might be a sign that you need to publish through a different portal (aka pitch a different publication).

11.) Remember that you have options.

Sometimes we get so focused on one particular path that we forget there are many ways to get to the same destination. It helps to remember that you have options in case you end up needing to take an unexpected detour. While getting rejections from Big Five commercial book editors, I began looking into smaller independent publishers, as well as academic publishers. Doing so helped me feel less lost. As a writer, you have to be your own best navigator. Your final destination may look different from what you had initially envisioned, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less worthwhile.

12.) Save your rejections.

I got this idea years ago after reading Stephen King’s craft book, On Writing, in which he said: “By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing.” I love the image of King displaying his rejection slips and then continuing to write in spite of them. Action does indeed have “magic, grace, and power in it.”

Not long ago, I printed out all of my rejections from book publishers — mostly short paragraphs that my agent shared with me every time an editor had passed. I stuck them in a folder for safe keeping and for parenting purposes. I want my kids, who are 8 and 10, to know that rejections aren’t just part of the writer’s life; they’re part of being human. I want them to see that, even when you slip and fall on the way to your goal, you have to get back up again and keep moving forward. Mom did, and it made all the difference.

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I’d love to hear from you! What related questions do you have about dealing with rejection? What advice do you have, based on your own experiences?

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