If your story hasn't been rejected multiple times, start worrying! :)

Andy Warhol: REJECTED!

Leigh Court (@LeighCourt3) posted this to encourage the discouraged!

Dan Poynter’s website, www.parapublishing.com…, lists these 'famous rejections' -- a reminder to us all to keep doing what we need to do to get our stories to readers. 

REJECTED BY PUBLISHERS:

Richard Bach – Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 20 times
Joseph Heller -  Catch-22 – 22  times (!)
Mary Higgins Clark – first short story – 40 times
Alex Haley – before Roots – 200 rejections
Robert Persig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – 121 times
John Grisham – A Time to Kill – 15 publishers and 30 agents (he ended up publishing it himself)
Chicken Soup for the Soul – 33 times
Dr. Seuss – 24 times
Louis L’Amour – 200 rejections
Jack London – 600 before his first story
John Creasy – 774 rejections before selling his first story.  He went on to write 564 books, using fourteen names.
Stephen King’s first four novels were rejected.

And of course: The first Harry Potter book was rejected by 12 publishers.

For those giving up on the whole rejection-factory of traditional publishing:

FAMOUS SELF-PUBLISHED BOOKS:

Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust

Ulysses, by James Joyce

The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter

A Time to Kill, by John Grisham

The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. (and his student E. B. White)

Robert’s Rules of Order

FAMOUS AUTHORS WHO SELF-PUBLISHED

Gertrude Stein

Zane Grey

Upton Sinclair

Carl Sandburg

Ezra Pound

Mark Twain

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Stephen Crane

Bernard Shaw

Anais Nin

Thomas Paine

Virginia Wolff

e.e. Cummings

Edgar Allen Poe

Rudyard Kipling

Henry David Thoreau

Benjamin Franklin

Walt Whitman

Alexandre Dumas

William E.B. DuBois

Beatrix Potter