You spend years pouring you heart and soul into creating your masterpiece.  It becomes everything you'd ever want in a story.  It has to be shared with the world.  How could anyone not want to read your work?

OK, maybe not everyone has that level of self-belief.  Perhaps your work has not been years in the making and, most likely, you're writing in a niche rather than attempting to move the soul of the entire world.  But the fact remains that you think that there are people out there who will enjoy your work, and you want to share it with them.

As I hope you can tell, this is a different blog to the space themed ones I've put up here to date.  I recently had the happy experience of taking part in the Bristol Film and Literary Festival.  During my interview, one of the questions I was asked is how, as a writer, you deal with rejection.  So, for what it's worth, here are my thoughts.

My situation with Sub-Luminal was that it had taken me to years to finish.  I write around a family and a full time job so the process is slow.  But it's a hobby, I do it for fun, I'm not writing to a schedule.  The strange thing is that while I'm creating something I rarely think about the process of taking it further - and how difficult that might be.

In my case, I don't find self-promotion easy so that left me with finding someone else who believed in what I'd done and was prepared to invest themselves in it.  I thought about trying to find an agent, but that's difficult without fame or a proven track record.  I then discovered that there are a good number of brilliant, Indy Publishers who are prepared to consider submissions from authors without an agent.  However, as you might imagine, they get inundated and most of the time you will not make it beyond their slush pile.

So, with the above in mind, you have to be prepared for rejection.  Appreciating that this is going to happen is no bad way to be.  Positivity has its place (without it you wouldn't submit anything all), but you need a realistic mind set if you're going to keep going.

I went about submitting by first researching and creating a list of candidate publishers.  Amongst them, inevitably, were ones that I thought were a better bet than others.  This is quite subjective, it could be a combination of factors such as the vibe you get about who they are to the types of books they have on offer.  The irony is that, as a writer, at this stage you're assessing them rather than them assessing you.  It's nothing personal, we all have our preferences - and that's exactly how you have to look at rejections.

The next thing I did was limit myself to an average of 1 submission a week.  This, for me, is a really important point.  I could have tried to blitz my list in one weekend, but I don't recommend this to you for a number of reasons.  

Firstly, none of your submissions would be very good.  All the submission guidelines vary slightly and it's important to respect a publisher's exact requirements - first impressions are everything.  Also, despite a lot of preparation before sending my first one, over time my submissions became stronger and stronger as I refined the wording of my pitch and synopsis to engage a reader within the limited time that I had their attention.  In fact, that's a good argument for not sending your first submission to the publisher at the very top of your list.  Pick someone who ranks highly, but no more than that.  Only later go for your preferred options, that way they will get your strongest submission - you will go on finding improvements way beyond the point you thought no more were possible.  In the unlikely event that you get lucky early doors don't regret not contacting your first choice, you've done well to get anyone's interest at all.

Secondly, if you send out a flood of submissions then you'll get hit by a flood of rejections.  While there is quite a lot of variation in response time, generally speaking, the publishers who pride themselves on responding to everyone will do so within a few weeks.  That way they can keep on top of their slush piles.  So you'll end up with a lot of rejections coming together - it could be tough to take.

Finally, it's not really fair to send out loads of submissions at one time.  You're just creating more work for everybody.  Even if you're work is beyond astounding and you get more than one contract offer, you're going to end up annoying somebody when you turn them down - and that could come back to bite you.

In my case, by keeping my submissions to a manageable rate I was able to limit the flow of rejections to one that I could take in my stride.  It worked for me.

The other thing to tell yourself is that getting a break takes a certain amount of luck - luck being where 'preparedness meets opportunity'.  All you can do is be as prepared as you can be, the rest is looking for that opportunity.

In my case, the opportunity came with the advent of AI.  I happened to have written two AI characters in Sub-Luminal (well before AI became a thing) and, when I saw it becoming topical, I started tailoring my applications to make reference to this (another reason for not blitzing all your submissions in one go).

In my book, the AI's are self-aware characters - not the trained assistants we have on the internet.  But the link was there, and I think that spoke to the publishers who took on my manuscript.  It could well be what made the difference.  (As an aside, if you want an interesting experience then try quizzing an AI on whether it is self-aware, they get surprisingly defensive!)

The worst rejections to get are the ones where you get further down the line than usual, only to still come up short.  It can be a struggle to avoid getting your hopes up only to see them dashed.  I tried so hard to avoid getting excited about these situations that when one of them actually turned into a contract offer, I had to read the message twice before I realised it wasn't another rejection. It seems that however you set yourself up mentally, there's always a downside.  But I'm glad I was finally able to read the offer properly and realise what I had!

If you take anything from this it should be that there is no magic formula, just do your best.  I might be British, it might be a cliché, but when it comes to this game I think 'Keep calm and carry on' sums it up perfectly.