Rejection is part of an author’s life just like strong coffee, procrastination, and very thick skin. Most people will not like your story, I reflected. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone will like what you have written. The science I use to justify this statement goes something like this:
JK Rowling sold 120 million copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The Hobbit sold 100 million. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, 85 million. You have to go a long way down Wikipedia’s list1 to reach the first sci-fi book; Nineteen Eighty Four, which sold a mere 30 million.
The population of the world is (today) 8,057,082,617, meaning that only just over one percent of the world has ever read Harry Potter. In other worlds, ninety nine percent of people don’t like Harry Potter. So what hope do I have?
Ok, the logic isn’t exactly sound, but it actually makes me feel better by putting my own writing into the same perspective as Hogwarts, and it encourages me to keep submitting.
So, to be a little more scientific I started to do some thematic analysis about the rejections I was receiving. Not unsurprisingly, I began to find that many reviewers had an absence of a sense of humour, adding weight to my argument that a lot of people who read science fiction are perhaps a little too serious.
But what really surprised me was that reviewers were rejecting my work on the basis of being too unbelievable. There was a definite need for the ‘science’ to be acceptable, believable, achievable. One magazine would not accept submissions that concerned Faster Than Light travel – so rule out Star Wars, Star Trek…and Dr Who, then?
One of my short stories (The Man Who Made The Moon) is a satire that follows on from Space: 1999, the seventies TV show made by Gerry and Silvia Anderson3. You remember this? A massive nuclear explosion throws the moon our of earth orbit, and the crew of Moonbase Alpha go on to survive adventures meeting new life and new civilisations. I speculated, what would happen a few hundred years later if we wanted to go and get the moon back? But my premise (and that of Mr and Mrs Anderson) was rejected on account that readers would not accept it, and that science fiction can not rely on out-dated science.
It went to prove my point that many people take Sci Fi far too seriously, and may have forgotten the need to have a laugh at ourselves once in a while.
Thank goodness I received at least one sentence of praise, this one from Quenntis Ashby at the fabulous Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine:
I laughed out loud in places. Your writing style feels like a mix between Harry Harrison and Douglas Adams.
Quenntis Ashby, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine:
So, here’s a free download for you, a short story from the Random Access Memories of Jonny Naylor, Cosmic Sailor, available as a Flip Book, or PDF download (click on the three dots, and select PDF download). Just leave me a comment below, and let me know what you think, or Contact Me.
References
1. Wikipedia. List of best-selling books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
2. Worldometers. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
3. Space: 1999. IMDB. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072564/