Stephen King

What failed

He submitted to one magazine editor for two years before a single acceptance. He wrote a whole novel at nineteen that stayed unpublished for thirteen years. He qualified as a teacher in 1970 and could not find a post straight away, so he worked in an industrial laundry. Even after Hampden Academy took him on in the autumn of 1971 he spent his summers at the laundry and moonlighted as a janitor and a petrol pump attendant, living in a doublewide trailer. An editor at Doubleday asked him for revisions on a novel, he made them, and the book was turned down anyway. By 1972 he had five finished novels and no publisher, and he threw the opening pages of the next one in the bin.

What happened next

His wife took those pages out of the bin. Doubleday accepted Carrie in the spring of 1973 and published it in April 1974. The paperback sale, in the editor's words, changed everything.

The point

The number everyone quotes is thirty rejections for Carrie. It does not trace to him or to anyone at the publisher. What is documented is stranger: the editor who bought Carrie was the same man who had already rejected an earlier novel after asking him to rewrite it. The person who said no was the person who eventually said yes.