STORIES BEHIND THE PATH TO PUBLICATION
By D.G. Thomas, DBN Magazine Editor-in-Chief
Wanting to become an author and actually becoming one can sometimes be separated by a lot of years, a lot of life, and more than a few rejection letters. Amy Smith Linton, author of She Taught Me Everything, may have one of my favorite rejection stories from the interviews I’ve revisited because she started collecting rejection slips when she was still in junior high. Amy knew early that writing interested her. She remembers writing a poem in about the fifth grade that told the story of a murder from the victim’s point of view. It got her into trouble, which apparently made writing seem like a pretty exciting job. By junior high, she was already submitting her work and receiving rejection slips.
Then life handed her a rather funny twist. Amy eventually went to work in publishing, where she became the person sending rejection letters to other aspiring authors. I had to smile when I reread that part of our interview because there is something wonderfully full-circle about it. Amy knew what it felt like to put something she had written into someone else’s hands and have them say no. Then she got to see rejection from the other side of the publishing desk.
I think that’s worth remembering because rejection can feel incredibly personal when it’s your work being rejected. You wrote the words. You created the characters. You spent months or maybe years working on the manuscript. So when someone says no to your book, it can be difficult not to feel like they are saying, “You aren’t good enough to be an author.” But Amy kept writing.
Her professional life kept her close to books and storytelling. After attending the Publishing Institute at the University of Denver, she worked at Farrar Straus & Giroux Books for Young Readers in Manhattan. Her career eventually included sports writing, book reviewing, video production, instructional design, and product development, and her short fiction appeared in numerous literary publications. And yet, when Amy and I spoke on the Meet the Author Podcast, She Taught Me Everything was her debut novel.
That detail really stayed with me because when we see a debut novel, we tend to think we are looking at the beginning of an author’s story. We see the finished book, the cover, the author’s name, and the word debut. What we don’t see are all the years that came before it.
In Amy’s case, we don’t see the fifth grader experimenting with a rather dark poem. We don’t see the junior high student submitting her writing and collecting rejection slips. We don’t see the years spent working around books, publishing short fiction, developing her craft, and continuing to write before a novel with her name on the cover finally became a reality. That makes me look at the word debut a little differently. A debut novel may be an author’s first published novel, but it doesn’t necessarily represent the beginning of that author’s journey. Sometimes it represents years of continuing to write when there was no published novel to point to yet.
That’s also why Amy’s advice to aspiring authors carries so much weight for me. When I asked what she would tell people who want to get published, she said: “Do. not. give. up.” Coming from someone who started collecting rejection slips in junior high and eventually became the published author of a debut novel, those words feel earned.
When I look at Amy’s story through the lens of The Author’s Journey, I keep coming back to that junior high student collecting rejection slips. She could have allowed those early rejections to become evidence that publishing simply wasn’t going to happen for her. Instead, writing remained part of her life through different careers, different experiences, and different seasons until she eventually published her debut novel.
I think aspiring authors sometimes imagine persistence as something dramatic, but often it’s much quieter than that. It’s continuing to write when nothing has been published yet. It’s submitting again after a rejection. It’s allowing years to pass without deciding those years mean you’ve failed. Most importantly, it’s refusing to let someone else’s “no” become your own.
There may be plenty of rejections between deciding you want to become an author and finally holding your published book. Amy’s story reminds me that rejection tells you what happened with one submission at one particular moment. It doesn’t have to tell you how your story ends.
I think that’s the lesson worth holding onto for aspiring authors. Sometimes the distance between I want to become an author and I am a published author is much longer than you expected. A rejection—or even a collection of them—doesn’t necessarily mean the journey is over.
Read Amy’s author interview on DBN Magazine.
The Author’s Journey: Stories Behind the Path to Publication are from the DBN Magazine archives. Editor D.G. Thomas revisits past author interviews with published authors, sharing her reflections on the stories they shared behind their paths to publication—and the lessons that may inspire the next generation of authors.
Want to Share Your Author Journey? Are you a published author with a story to tell? Be featured in a DBN Magazine Author Spotlight and share the story behind your book, your path to publication, and what you’ve learned along the way. [Apply for an Author Spotlight]
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