So now you have written your block busting killer book or outline and you are looking for an agent or publisher.  You send it off to several publishing houses and agents. Two weeks later it comes back not having even been looked at.

Most people would recognise that it’s important to pick yourself up and move on to the next round of contacts. The issue is not moving on but finding a way of doing this effectively and getting the most you can from the experience. This article is about how you can do that.

Understanding the meaning of rejection

For most people rejection is not a nice thing. It is easy to take it personally and let emotions come to the fore. The reality though is that in the context of publishing, rejection is just a business decision and is not a personal thing.

If we take the idea a little further the action of being rejected is just information or feedback for you and can lead to improving your results if you use it as such.

Good sales people recognise and expect a certain amount of rejection. They use what they call “objections” to hone their pitch. Great business people, athletes and entrepreneurs all recognise failure and rejection as a vital step in the process of getting great results.

How does being rejected help?

Every rejection gives you important information about your pitch. If you were rejected without your outline or manuscript being looked at then you know that you selected the wrong agent or publisher for your book. If it was read, hopefully they gave you some feedback. If there is no “useful” feedback coming but you know it was considered then you know they were not seeing the value in your book. So either your pitch or your product has flaws. By looking systemically around the circumstances of the rejection you can get valuable information that you can use to improve your approach and as a result move on to the next round.

How do I put this into place?

The first thing to do when a rejection slip comes through is to let go of the emotion so you can think clearly. The only time to take on this process is when you have let go of enough emotion to be able to think clearly. Remember rejection and failure is a vital step in getting results.

The next step is to look though the information that you have, the copies of what you sent, the research you did on the publisher or agent and any information they sent you back. Familiarise yourself with all the information you have to hand.

This step is the hardest, but can give you some great results. Imagine yourself as the publisher or agent you sent your material to. Look over everything you have from their eyes. Ask yourself whilst acting in the persona of the publisher good questions. Here is my most favourite question as the publisher, “What would have to change about this pitch for me to accept it?” I am sure you can think of some more and if you can’t, this is a great question to start you of.

Looking at information in this fashion can lead to lots of good learning. The learning of which lets you let go of the emotion of rejection and sets you up for the next round better prepared and one step closer to getting the result.

To succeed means you have to do something. Doing something courts the possibility of failure and rejection. Being rejected gives you information on how to succeed. The issue is not how to deal with rejection but how can you possibly succeed without a few rejections.

I am going to share with you three powerful ideas about how you can keep your readers interested in what you have to say. These ideas work for articles, books, web pages and blogs. In fact one particular idea is so powerful that when used properly it will guarantee that 99% of your readership will read what you have to say.

Individually each of these ideas produces results but used in combination you can create some very powerful results. By the end of this article you will have the opportunity to see how you can use these ideas singly and together in an article.

Making Benefit Statements

If you tell your readers what they can expect to gain by reading your article, chapter, book, web page etc. then they are more likely to follow through. Obviously this needs to be modified slightly for each situation. A 500 word article may only need a paragraph or three bullet points. Whilst a book might have the whole of the first chapter, the front and back cover and the whole contents pages set up to sell the benefits of your book. Then each chapter might also start with benefit statements for that particular section.

Telling the Story

We are all socialised to listening to stories. Think about early childhood and having your parents reading to you in bed. How about your favourite TV programme, films and book? Stories intrigue, fascinate and most importantly for us keep your readers interested. Any anecdote, case study or example livens up the sometimes dry world of instructional text.

The other real benefit of stories is that they “make real” the points you are trying to get across. When used skilfully you can use a story to pre-teach your process or idea before outlining it in full. The result this creates in your reader’s mind is familiarity and therefore they are likely to take the point home more readily.

Opening the Loop

Imagine what would happen to a reader if you told them of three huge benefits they will receive from reading a particular chapter. You then in quick succession outline the first two and then explain each in depth. My guess is that you will keep reading through this to find out about the third, particularly if the third is the biggest and most powerful benefit statement. This is the basic idea of opening a loop.

Here is another way of opening a loop. Perhaps the start of a chapter might be an example of a big result you got from using the techniques you will explain in the chapter. You could build the drama of the story, perhaps the stakes were high and the results were critical with you only just finding the solution to the problem in the very last seconds.

You might even add in some pre-teaching or even how much better your life has become because of you taking on board the lessons you will share in the chapter.

All of a sudden what could have been a lifeless chapter on a specific technique can take on a life of its open and draw your reader into really wanting the information you have to give.

Putting it all together

When I first came across these ideas I was overwhelmed about how I would be able to use them and put them together in a meaningful way. This was because I had not yet really seen how easily these ideas can be put together and used.

What I needed were a couple of examples that I could analyse and work out how the concepts fitted together. So to that end I deliberately wrote two articles specifically packed full of these ideas so you can see how easily these ideas are to put together.

The first is the article you are reading now. Feel free to go back through this article and notice the techniques that I have used. The second is a case study I wrote on my own blog about finding markets. You can find the article here in the NLP Techniques Section.

Final Thoughts

In an upcoming article we will talk about techniques you can use to get your readers to backtrack and re-read sections that are important as well as anticipate what is coming up in new chapters. I will see you in a future article where we will explore these concepts more fully.

In this 5-part video series, Rintu Basu, author of The Persuasion Skills Black Book introduces and illustrates 3 powerful creativity tools (Mind Mapping, 4MAT and Perceptual Positions) for generating and creating new content quickly and easily. Once you have discovered these approaches you’ll be able to devise and write books with ease, quickly come up with and produce high value information products in audio and video format, and also rapidly generate hundred of articles to help promote your book and yourself as an author.

In this 5-part video series, Rintu Basu, author of The Persuasion Skills Black Book introduces and illustrates 3 powerful creativity tools (Mind Mapping, 4MAT and Perceptual Positions) for generating and creating new content quickly and easily. Once you have discovered these approaches you’ll be able to devise and write books with ease, quickly come up with and produce high value information products in audio and video format, and also rapidly generate hundred of articles to help promote your book and yourself as an author.

In this 5-part audio series, Rintu Basu, author of The Persuasion Skills Black Book and Romilla Ready, co-author of Neurolinguistic Programming for Dummies discuss the whole process from coming up with best selling book ideas, writing your book, getting it published and selling loads of copies.

In this 5-part video series, Rintu Basu, author of The Persuasion Skills Black Book introduces and illustrates 3 powerful creativity tools (Mind Mapping, 4MAT and Perceptual Positions) for generating and creating new content quickly and easily. Once you have discovered these approaches you’ll be able to devise and write books with ease, quickly come up with and produce high value information products in audio and video format, and also rapidly generate hundred of articles to help promote your book and yourself as an author.