Congrats, Udy! I don't know you, but I'm proud of the work you're putting in! I know the industry is insanely tough, and it sounds like you're getting some traction. Good luck, and I hope I get to see your name in print some day soon.
dan standing up at dinner as a child declaring “You are looking at an author now!” is indeed very in character. thanks for not stopping dan. we love ya!
The fact that you posted this episode with this topic today is kind of amazing. I am a Norwegian author and, I got rejected some financial support for my book today and it really bummed me out. So thanks guys❤ I needed this.
As someone who has received a lot of canned rejections, getting a personalized one definitely feels like a win. I've had a few of them and they've told me I had a story that was close. Uncanny Magazine gave me a really nice rejection spelling out what was missing from a short story of mine. I sold it a couple of of months later for $500 (which is a lot for a little scifi story!). The real downside is that you often have to wait several months for a rejection 🙃
Thank you for releasing an episode so soon after the last. My cat passed this Sunday and I needed some comfort ❤️ thank you to everyone involved in this production. And rest in peace my sweet baby Athens. It was an amazing privilege to have loved and been loved by you.
I’ve gotten a few. They’ve almost all been form letters besides one where she said something just wasn’t clicking for her, but even then she wasn’t specific so maybe that was also a form letter
The publishing industry isn’t the only industry that refuses to move into the 21st Century. The health care industry still insists upon using fax machines (invented in 1843). I point-blank refused to fax a single document to a surgeon’s office post-back surgery. I told them I would email it or text it, but I wasn’t going to drive 30 miles to look for a fax machine, especially when they had forbidden me from driving for 2 months! They eventually gave me an email address to which I could send all documents. Apparently it was specifically created for patients to send medical records/information, but they could not be bothered to check it!
Definitely needed to hear this…the opera industry is a mess right now and trying to move into professional work is a lot of unkind rejection, all the time
Doing VO, my early teacher told me, "Your job is to send out auditions. If you worry about everything you don't get, you'll drive yourself crazy." It's basically all rejections, lol.
Brandon’s rejection letters would have been your stories are very long….very very very long 😂….now they regret not publishing 😅 thank you for sharing and keeping up Brandon…I wouldn’t have loved fantasy as much as I do now without your stories.
I suppose a natural follow up to this subject is "Authors who were rejected initially", but then went on to have enormously successful careers, like say Stephen King (who famously threw 'Carrie' in the trash), or Frank Herbert, who shopped around 'Dune' to some 20 different publishers and got rejected every time (until a car repair manual printing company picked up 'Dune', and that particular editor was then fired in turn, cause 'Dune' sold too poorly...initially ofc! All in all, a fascinating subject!)
The trouble with your proposed topic is that it's a long-winded way of saying "authors". There might be one or two authors who genuinely never got a rejection letter, but they are going to be the tiny minority - or entirely self-published. UA-camr Jill Bearup released a video today of a Q&A session she did as part of promoting her book. She did a series of UA-cam shorts, about a novelist trying to write a low-magic fantasy novel (ie pop-culture medieval vibes, but you can't tell her she got anything wrong because it's technically a made up world so it works the way she says it does - but no actual magic anywhere in sight) and arguing with her heroine about the expected tropes of fantasy-romance. People said she should turn them into an actual book, so she did, and got approached by publishers asking to see the manuscript, only to turn around and say "it's a great book, but we can't market it" because it's too critical of the tropes to be a standard romance, doesn't have enough fantasy to be a fantasy, doesn't have enough literary aspirations to be literature, and the meta/contemporary stuff doesn't fit into any standard categories either... So even when publishers were directly approaching her to ask to read it, Jill still got rejection letters. Anyone having to actually go looking for a publisher is going to be even more likely to get rejections.
The law does not care if the other guy is a bad person if you actually violated the law. "But judge, they didn't give me the raise I was promised so I was just taking what was owed to me." Is not a winning argument. That is not a hypothetical, it's from a case I actually worked on. I also worked on a case that factually revolved around the ownership of a live chicken, just one chicken. I've had a weird legal career.
I had an agent request a manuscript. After I sent it it took her 8 months to respond that she doesn't deal with my genre anymore but that I've really got something there lol
Oh my gosh getting a box of rejection letters in the MTC sounds horrible 😂 especially since you were probably stuck there for like three months like I was for Korea in 2010
There is a translation guide to rejection letters interpretation in Scott Eddlestein's 30 Steps to Becoming a Writer... particularly for weirdly aggressive letters. It's in the back near the appendices. Unsure if it is in all editions.
I was wondering why my reactions and perspectives were ao different from these guys and then they talked about "inflated senses of self importance"... And suddenly, it all made sense
First I'd like to say thank you for this video it's, comforting isn't exactly the right word, something like that. I've written a couple of books. (not very good.) I'm coming to the end of a first draft of a book that i think might actually end up half way decent after some revision. There are some clunky bits in there but I think over all I'm happy with the shape of it. Once revised it will be the first book I go on submission with. I'm nervous and excited. This may or may not be my breakout book but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Hopefully with feedback that I can learn from. If i never get published I'll still write, writing is fun. not always easy or often easy but fun.
Brandon the new Path of Exile game is coming out Friday. You should try it! It is an mmo but it looks like the best Diablo-like game that has come out in years
I would image the most difficult rejection is either a standard form, and getting to hear it's just fine. If it sucks, or for example a "show don't tell" is written over the letter, you know what to improve. If it's great, but not the right moment you know you are on the right tract. But a standard rejection or just fine? What do you do with fine? Just fine might the worst response as it means your story is just run of the mill. Despite doing it alright, it's missing the spark. To put it bluntly, it's not special. And that just suck to hear.
I'm a self-published indie author with a severe lack of inflated self-importance. They hit big due to TikTok almost 2 years ago and I'm doing okay with them. But you can't get a rejection if you've convinced yourself you're not good enough to send anything 😅
Man, this episode was really hard to listen to. Became thoroughly disenchanted with the writing industry, especially the trad pub industry. Just couldn’t do it, and time ran out (i.e. had to get a real job) before I could ever get good enough to make it.
I was one of the two editors of our high school literary magazine. We had to publish some absolute overwrought trash (because high school), but at least we got to laugh at it first. Also, I had an email in 1990. :P Did either of you ever use LaTex, or was that just a scientific paper thing?
Random question...do you guys like musicals?? With all the movie chat recently, it made me think of movie musicals vs stage play musicals and your like/dislike for each? I think you've talked briefly on it before, but are you also the type to relisten to the music from said musicals on repeat??
So given Brandon is a bit business-y, and given he's already built out all the pieces of publishing he needs for his own better ways for himself, how long until Dragonsteel just becomes a full publisher with lots of authors (at least of speculative fiction)? It can't be that much longer can it?
Wait, this isn't dating advice... well anyway, that first letter Dan read was probably longer than all the rejections I've gotten in the past three years put together lol. Maybe in another three I'll get some kind of personalization too...
I'm wondering how much of the book's content that was mentioned in the rejection letter was also in the synopsis/summary that the author handed in with his writing...bc yes the letter is formulated very nicely and sounds like ChatGPT to me (which doesn't necessarily need to be a bad thing ofc)
It’s a short story, not a novel (DreamForge is a short story magazine) so the cover letter for the submission had no details about the content of the story except to say it’s fantasy and what the word count was (3500 words). There was a separate question in the form where I was asked how it fits their theme of breaking artificial barriers between people where I talked about imperialism and how colonial empires used divide and conquer strategies to psychologically divide subjugated people. So in short, nothing in the rejection letter was from outside the content of the story. This magazine also commits to reading and responding in depth to all stories, and they have an extremely strong anti-AI bias so it’s very unlikely they would’ve used ChatGPT. Even if they did though they would’ve had to read the story to know what to feed ChatGPT. But honestly this is in line with rejections I’ve seen other people get from this place over the years so that’s the real reason why I think it’s not ChatGPT.
Brandon!!! My wife and I have been royally screwed by Amazon. We were supposed to get your amazing book this Friday and now it's coming next Monday even though we had pre-ordered back in August 😢 We also bought the audible version. If anyone from your team sees this. Please reach out so i could get a digital copy emailed? After proving my previous purchases of course! But we absolutely have to read this amazing book on Friday if at all possible! We are up to date on all early chapters! Huge fans obvi!
Kevin J Anderson is proof positive you don't have to be a good writer to get published. I'm sure he's written something good, but in the dozens of his books I have read... none were.
😂 I recently reread his Jedi Academy trilogy which I loved as a kid, and oh boy it did not hold up. But Stackpole's "I, Jedi" was such a good follow-up, where Corran Horn goes around being like "Well, that's stupid, why not do this instead" and trying to fix all the dumb things Anderson's characters did 😂😂 it did not make me want to read any of the multi-tome series that Anderson has somehow gotten published. But as you said, maybe some are better than what I read.
@@aldarrin Nooooooo why did you have to remind me that those books exist 🤢🤮😂😂 oh well, it's just more motivation to write my own stories and appreciate good writing when I find it. Even halfway decent prose is so nice to discover, like the bit of Joe Abercrombie I was handed recently by a friend. Simple and refreshing.
Ayo that’s my rejection letter! It felt REALLY good. I’m really pleased about it. 🎉
Now I want to read the book
@@TheEvilmanikin It's actually a short story, not a novel. If it's not accepted by any markets, I'll be happy to share it with people.
❤
Congrats, Udy! I don't know you, but I'm proud of the work you're putting in! I know the industry is insanely tough, and it sounds like you're getting some traction. Good luck, and I hope I get to see your name in print some day soon.
Congrats!!!
STORMLIGHT 5 IN TWO DAYS!!!!
cannot wait
Crazy, isn't it!?
Pre oreddddderrrred!
I NEED ITT
Not for me because amazon is despicable 😢😂
only 6 months left until the Arcane season 2 discussion episode
When it comes to rejection, my dating life prepared me for my writing life
Sydney
Can’t get rejected if u never try get on my level
"Got Dear Johned by a bunch of Science fiction magazines," is an awesome line
I dunno if that’s better or worse than when a guy in my MTC zone got dumped two weeks after Christmas tbh
dan standing up at dinner as a child declaring
“You are looking at an author now!” is indeed very in character.
thanks for not stopping dan. we love ya!
The fact that you posted this episode with this topic today is kind of amazing. I am a Norwegian author and, I got rejected some financial support for my book today and it really bummed me out. So thanks guys❤ I needed this.
That "Alright. I'll do it myself" was a low key cold as he'll flex 😂😂😂
"Laminated Roll of Rejections" sounds like the worst Christmas gift ever LOL
On page 180 of WAOK and just want to say thank you Sanderson for all your writing. Helped me loads with my mental health
As someone who has received a lot of canned rejections, getting a personalized one definitely feels like a win. I've had a few of them and they've told me I had a story that was close. Uncanny Magazine gave me a really nice rejection spelling out what was missing from a short story of mine. I sold it a couple of of months later for $500 (which is a lot for a little scifi story!).
The real downside is that you often have to wait several months for a rejection 🙃
Thank you for releasing an episode so soon after the last. My cat passed this Sunday and I needed some comfort ❤️ thank you to everyone involved in this production. And rest in peace my sweet baby Athens. It was an amazing privilege to have loved and been loved by you.
I'm so sorry about your loss. I hope you find peace soon.
"I'll do it myself". I really want to see a Thanos meme with Brandon's face on the mad titan's body taking up the infinity gauntlet.
But the infinity stones are replaced by the secret projects 😂
I was just honored to meet the one and only Adam thank you for all the hard work you do!
2 more days until Wind and Truth!!!!!!!!!!! Let's GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8:05 shows how good Joshua is at spotting a potential success
A night of blacker darkness is hilarious! ❤
It's not what the pitch promises' is the best pitch I'll be buying into. Thank you for that.
People get rejection lettters?! I just get silence 😂😅
I’ve gotten a few.
They’ve almost all been form letters besides one where she said something just wasn’t clicking for her, but even then she wasn’t specific so maybe that was also a form letter
The publishing industry isn’t the only industry that refuses to move into the 21st Century. The health care industry still insists upon using fax machines (invented in 1843). I point-blank refused to fax a single document to a surgeon’s office post-back surgery. I told them I would email it or text it, but I wasn’t going to drive 30 miles to look for a fax machine, especially when they had forbidden me from driving for 2 months! They eventually gave me an email address to which I could send all documents. Apparently it was specifically created for patients to send medical records/information, but they could not be bothered to check it!
Definitely needed to hear this…the opera industry is a mess right now and trying to move into professional work is a lot of unkind rejection, all the time
JOURNEY BEFORE DESTINATION
Coincidentally, just got my first ever rejection!
One step closer to becoming a published author.
I had an agent say they were interested in my full manuscript, but then they said they were too busy to read it. That’s my best rejection story haha.
Your family opening and reading and then sending them in bulk is some dark stuff, man. Your family game nights must have been intense.
Doing VO, my early teacher told me, "Your job is to send out auditions. If you worry about everything you don't get, you'll drive yourself crazy." It's basically all rejections, lol.
I remember your Dad from one of these episodes, reminded me of my Dad. He had no problem opening my mail either. Haha
loved this episode
I started writing when I was 7, but never really told anyone about it. By time I was in my 30s, I became serious about it.
Brandon’s rejection letters would have been your stories are very long….very very very long 😂….now they regret not publishing 😅 thank you for sharing and keeping up Brandon…I wouldn’t have loved fantasy as much as I do now without your stories.
Fun thing. I love Brandon Books much more, but i am much more Dan like person.
If only we could all save our life’s rejections in a giant laminated roll of shame… wait, what were we talking about again? …oh.
Watching from my hotel room at Dragonsteel Nexus 😁
I really hope this episode ends with
"You know who I got rejected by... Ben"
"How about that"
I suppose a natural follow up to this subject is "Authors who were rejected initially", but then went on to have enormously successful careers, like say Stephen King (who famously threw 'Carrie' in the trash), or Frank Herbert, who shopped around 'Dune' to some 20 different publishers and got rejected every time (until a car repair manual printing company picked up 'Dune', and that particular editor was then fired in turn, cause 'Dune' sold too poorly...initially ofc! All in all, a fascinating subject!)
The trouble with your proposed topic is that it's a long-winded way of saying "authors". There might be one or two authors who genuinely never got a rejection letter, but they are going to be the tiny minority - or entirely self-published.
UA-camr Jill Bearup released a video today of a Q&A session she did as part of promoting her book. She did a series of UA-cam shorts, about a novelist trying to write a low-magic fantasy novel (ie pop-culture medieval vibes, but you can't tell her she got anything wrong because it's technically a made up world so it works the way she says it does - but no actual magic anywhere in sight) and arguing with her heroine about the expected tropes of fantasy-romance. People said she should turn them into an actual book, so she did, and got approached by publishers asking to see the manuscript, only to turn around and say "it's a great book, but we can't market it" because it's too critical of the tropes to be a standard romance, doesn't have enough fantasy to be a fantasy, doesn't have enough literary aspirations to be literature, and the meta/contemporary stuff doesn't fit into any standard categories either...
So even when publishers were directly approaching her to ask to read it, Jill still got rejection letters. Anyone having to actually go looking for a publisher is going to be even more likely to get rejections.
The law does not care if the other guy is a bad person if you actually violated the law. "But judge, they didn't give me the raise I was promised so I was just taking what was owed to me." Is not a winning argument. That is not a hypothetical, it's from a case I actually worked on. I also worked on a case that factually revolved around the ownership of a live chicken, just one chicken. I've had a weird legal career.
That's actually a very insightful example
You might be happy to hear the best rejection I ever got was from Lauren at Leading Edge. I still look back on it every few months fondly.
I had an agent request a manuscript. After I sent it it took her 8 months to respond that she doesn't deal with my genre anymore but that I've really got something there lol
Been three years and I'm still waiting to hear back from an agent I was emailing back and forth lol
Oh my gosh getting a box of rejection letters in the MTC sounds horrible 😂 especially since you were probably stuck there for like three months like I was for Korea in 2010
There is a translation guide to rejection letters interpretation in Scott Eddlestein's 30 Steps to Becoming a Writer... particularly for weirdly aggressive letters. It's in the back near the appendices. Unsure if it is in all editions.
Patiently waiting for a Cosmere show or movie
Which stories would you prefer as animation or live action
I was wondering why my reactions and perspectives were ao different from these guys and then they talked about "inflated senses of self importance"... And suddenly, it all made sense
First I'd like to say thank you for this video it's, comforting isn't exactly the right word, something like that. I've written a couple of books. (not very good.) I'm coming to the end of a first draft of a book that i think might actually end up half way decent after some revision. There are some clunky bits in there but I think over all I'm happy with the shape of it. Once revised it will be the first book I go on submission with. I'm nervous and excited. This may or may not be my breakout book but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Hopefully with feedback that I can learn from. If i never get published I'll still write, writing is fun. not always easy or often easy but fun.
Adoooonalsium
?
may he remember our plight eventually
Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight-Eventually should be a world-hopper
16:20 lmao
Hahaha Martin is like dont use a big magic explosion ending - then allows The last season of the GOT show to happen. Too funny.
Rejected by Marion Zimmer Bradley? What a relief, huh?
Hollow city sounds amazing, i read what its about and im not sure why i have not bught it yet.
oh 8086, dos, now I know how old I am lol.
Brandon the new Path of Exile game is coming out Friday. You should try it! It is an mmo but it looks like the best Diablo-like game that has come out in years
We don't have time for Brandon to play PoE 2! He needs to write not grind!
I would image the most difficult rejection is either a standard form, and getting to hear it's just fine.
If it sucks, or for example a "show don't tell" is written over the letter, you know what to improve.
If it's great, but not the right moment you know you are on the right tract.
But a standard rejection or just fine? What do you do with fine? Just fine might the worst response as it means your story is just run of the mill. Despite doing it alright, it's missing the spark.
To put it bluntly, it's not special. And that just suck to hear.
I'm a self-published indie author with a severe lack of inflated self-importance. They hit big due to TikTok almost 2 years ago and I'm doing okay with them.
But you can't get a rejection if you've convinced yourself you're not good enough to send anything 😅
Man, this episode was really hard to listen to. Became thoroughly disenchanted with the writing industry, especially the trad pub industry. Just couldn’t do it, and time ran out (i.e. had to get a real job) before I could ever get good enough to make it.
Every time I hear the word “slush pile” I get a little demoralized, even though it’s a totally understandable term.
I was one of the two editors of our high school literary magazine.
We had to publish some absolute overwrought trash (because high school), but at least we got to laugh at it first.
Also, I had an email in 1990. :P
Did either of you ever use LaTex, or was that just a scientific paper thing?
Grate epesode😊😮👍
no food heist? T_T I hope they aren't gone forever!
Cant wait for them to watch arcane s02 in 2026 will be a cool episode
Random question...do you guys like musicals?? With all the movie chat recently, it made me think of movie musicals vs stage play musicals and your like/dislike for each? I think you've talked briefly on it before, but are you also the type to relisten to the music from said musicals on repeat??
Watch some of their older episodes. They talk about musicals a lot
So given Brandon is a bit business-y, and given he's already built out all the pieces of publishing he needs for his own better ways for himself, how long until Dragonsteel just becomes a full publisher with lots of authors (at least of speculative fiction)? It can't be that much longer can it?
Wait, this isn't dating advice... well anyway, that first letter Dan read was probably longer than all the rejections I've gotten in the past three years put together lol. Maybe in another three I'll get some kind of personalization too...
It’s a short story rejection letter so it’s a little easier to do this.
Ohhhhh... rejection...
Dyslexia is funny sometimes
I'm wondering how much of the book's content that was mentioned in the rejection letter was also in the synopsis/summary that the author handed in with his writing...bc yes the letter is formulated very nicely and sounds like ChatGPT to me (which doesn't necessarily need to be a bad thing ofc)
It’s a short story, not a novel (DreamForge is a short story magazine) so the cover letter for the submission had no details about the content of the story except to say it’s fantasy and what the word count was (3500 words). There was a separate question in the form where I was asked how it fits their theme of breaking artificial barriers between people where I talked about imperialism and how colonial empires used divide and conquer strategies to psychologically divide subjugated people.
So in short, nothing in the rejection letter was from outside the content of the story. This magazine also commits to reading and responding in depth to all stories, and they have an extremely strong anti-AI bias so it’s very unlikely they would’ve used ChatGPT. Even if they did though they would’ve had to read the story to know what to feed ChatGPT. But honestly this is in line with rejections I’ve seen other people get from this place over the years so that’s the real reason why I think it’s not ChatGPT.
Please talk about arcane season 2
Brandon!!! My wife and I have been royally screwed by Amazon. We were supposed to get your amazing book this Friday and now it's coming next Monday even though we had pre-ordered back in August 😢 We also bought the audible version. If anyone from your team sees this. Please reach out so i could get a digital copy emailed? After proving my previous purchases of course! But we absolutely have to read this amazing book on Friday if at all possible! We are up to date on all early chapters! Huge fans obvi!
Kevin J Anderson is proof positive you don't have to be a good writer to get published. I'm sure he's written something good, but in the dozens of his books I have read... none were.
😂 I recently reread his Jedi Academy trilogy which I loved as a kid, and oh boy it did not hold up. But Stackpole's "I, Jedi" was such a good follow-up, where Corran Horn goes around being like "Well, that's stupid, why not do this instead" and trying to fix all the dumb things Anderson's characters did 😂😂 it did not make me want to read any of the multi-tome series that Anderson has somehow gotten published. But as you said, maybe some are better than what I read.
@@feathercompressor I'll never forgive him for what he did to the Dune Universe.
@@aldarrin Nooooooo why did you have to remind me that those books exist 🤢🤮😂😂 oh well, it's just more motivation to write my own stories and appreciate good writing when I find it. Even halfway decent prose is so nice to discover, like the bit of Joe Abercrombie I was handed recently by a friend. Simple and refreshing.
That final timestamp is an absolute abomination of a sentence.
That letter at the start sounds like chatGPT.
The first bit is a form rejection, and everything after my name is personalized. Even if it was chatGPT it was still personalized by the editor.