And if you're a writer, save the page.

What these guys have failed to understand about rejection is that it isn’t personal. If you’re a writer, you’re more or less constitutionally incapable of understanding that last sentence, if you think there’s any chance that it applies to you and your book; so please just imagine that I’m talking about rejections that happen to all those other writers who aren’t you.

Anyway, as I was saying, it realio trulio honestly isn’t about you the writer per se. If you got rejected, it wasn’t because we think you’re an inadequate human being. We just don’t want to buy your book. To tell you the truth, chances are we didn’t even register your existence as a unique and individual human being. You know your heart and soul are stapled to that manuscript, but what we see are the words on the paper. And that’s as it should be, because when readers buy our books, the words on the paper are what they get.

This all becomes clearer if you think about it with your reader-mind instead of your author-mind. Authors with books are like mothers with infants: theirs is the center of the universe, uniquely wonderful, and will inevitably and infallibly be loved by all who make its acquaintance. This has its good aspects; books, like infants, need someone to unconditionally love them, and champion all their causes. On the other hand, it can be a form of blindness.

Your reader-mind has a different understanding of the whole book thing. Your reader-mind knows what it’s like to walk into a bookstore, or a Costco, or a Target, and confront a wire rack the size of your living-room wall, with slot after slot filled with books. At that moment, standing there in front of that rack, you don’t much care about encouraging new writers, or helping create a more diverse literary scene, or giving some author a chance to express herself. You want a book that will please you, and suit your needs, and do it right now. Dear reader, you are many things, but “gentle” isn’t one of them.

You may be a tired middle manager who just wants some fast-moving entertainment, or a teenager who wants entertaining, non-embarrassing books that tell you how the world works, or a language-sensitive reader hoping for a book where the sentences and paragraphs don’t hurt. You could be looking for something more specific—a Regency romance, a sexy vampire novel, or the numinous landscapes and significant personal actions of genre fantasy. Your single likeliest choice, statistically speaking, is a book by an author whose other works you’ve read and enjoyed, because you know it’s a good bet that you’ll enjoy this one too. But whatever it is, it’s all about you.

Thus the reader-mind in action. If you-the-writer can catch that reader’s attention with an intriguing premise, and further seduce them with well-written prose as they go flipping through the pages, there’s some chance they’ll buy it. If they like the book, next time around you’ll be one of the author names they’ll be looking for. And if they really like the book, or if they’ve read and enjoyed two or three of your books, they may begin to wonder about you as a person. But not before.