8 Classic Books Publishers Rejected Before They Became Hits

Before it became one of the best-selling series in history, Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected by around a dozen publishers. The commonly cited figure is 12, and Bloomsbury only took it on after the chairman handed the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter, who demanded to know what happened next.

Even then, the editor famously advised Rowling to keep her day job, warning that there was little money in children’s books. The series has since sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide. You could hardly ask for a cleaner example of how far off the experts can be.

Frank Herbert’s sprawling desert epic was turned down more than 20 times before anyone would print it as a novel. Publishers found it too long, too strange, too demanding — a book about ecology and religion and giant sandworms was a tough sell in the early 1960s.

It was finally rescued by an unlikely house: Chilton, a company better known for auto-repair manuals, where an editor had fallen for the story. Dune went on to become the best-selling science-fiction novel of all time and the foundation of a whole universe of sequels and films.

Madeleine L’Engle’s genre-bending children’s novel was rejected around 26 times — the figure most often quoted, though L’Engle herself sometimes recalled the pile running to “forty-odd” publishers. The problem, she was told repeatedly, was that nobody knew what shelf it belonged on: too odd for children, too strange for adults.

She never forgot those years of no. When the book finally found a home and won the Newbery Medal, it became a fixture of childhood reading for generations — and a standing rebuke to the idea that a book has to fit neatly into a category to matter.

Stephen King’s debut was rejected roughly 30 times, and it nearly didn’t survive the writing, let alone the submission process. Disliking his own opening pages, King crumpled them up and threw them in the trash — where his wife, Tabitha, found them, smoothed them out, and told him to keep going.

Doubleday finally published Carrie in 1974. It launched one of the most commercially successful careers in modern publishing. Somewhere in that wastebasket is a lesson about how thin the line can be between a discarded draft and a bestseller.

William Golding’s dark parable of schoolboys turning savage was rejected as many as 21 times. One publisher’s reader dismissed it flatly as “rubbish and dull,” and the manuscript ended up in a reject pile at Faber & Faber, one no away from oblivion.

A junior editor there, Charles Monteith, fished it out, championed it, and pushed it through the committee. The book became a modern classic, a fixture of school syllabuses, and part of the case that would eventually win Golding the Nobel Prize in Literature.

George Orwell’s satirical fable was turned down by at least four publishers — and the rejections weren’t about quality. In 1944, with Britain allied to the Soviet Union, a biting allegory about Stalinism was politically awkward. One of the editors who passed was the poet T.S. Eliot, then at Faber & Faber, who found its point of view unconvincing.

Secker & Warburg finally published it in 1945, just as the war was ending and the political winds were shifting. Animal Farm became one of the most widely read political books of the century — proof that sometimes a book is rejected for being too right, too early.

Anne Frank’s diary, edited and championed by her father Otto after the war, was passed over by around ten publishers in the United States before Doubleday took it on. An editor there, Judith Jones, reportedly discovered a French edition in a stack of rejected manuscripts and refused to let it go.

Published in English in 1952, the diary became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust ever written, translated into dozens of languages. It is a sobering entry on this list: a book that nearly stayed buried is now read by schoolchildren the world over.

If you ever need proof that persistence borders on the absurd, here it is: the first Chicken Soup for the Soul was rejected by 144 publishers. The refrain was always the same — nobody buys collections of short inspirational stories. Their own agent eventually quit, unable to sell it.

Canfield and Hansen kept knocking on doors until a small publisher finally agreed, warning it might sell 20,000 copies “if we’re lucky.” The franchise has since sold hundreds of millions of copies across hundreds of titles. One hundred and forty-four noes, and then a yes that rewrote the whole story.