Sometimes, you send an email campaign that communicates a truly valuable offer and it falls flat. At the bottom of your heart you know that, objectively, the offer was a compelling one. So why didn’t anyone respond? Well heck, I’ve tried to give things away on Freecycle and haven’t had luck.
Sometimes, there are forces between us and the people we are communicating with that just don’t line up. It could be the timing or the particular mood that a recipient is in at the time of delivery. It could be that there was an office party on the same day that your message was delivered and someone spilled wine on the mail server where your fabulous offer once glistened with hope and promise.
Sometimes, there is no good reason for rejection. It just happens.
Dr. Seuss got rejected too. One publisher said, “too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.”
A rejection letter for The Diary of Anne Frank said, “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.”
The Tale of Peter Rabbit was turned down so often that Beatrix Potter initially self-published it.
The editor of the San Francisco Examiner told Rudyard Kipling, “I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.”
A rejection letter to Pierre Boulle about his “Bridge Over River Kwai” commented that [it was], “A very bad book.”
Emily Dickinson’s poems were ever published during her lifetime. A rejection early in her career remarked that her poems, “…are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities.”
George Orwell’s Animal Farm, was initially met with a rejection which said, “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.”
So, keep on truckin’ — keep on writing and keep on communicating the value that you have to offer. Sure, it might meet rejection sometimes. In fact, it will.
But in time, it will be given the attention that it deserves.
