‘Shuggie Bain’ was rejected 32 times, and it’s not the first masterpiece snubbed by publishers

Those strange muffled thuds that could be heard all over Islington and Shoreditch on Thursday night were the sound of publishers kicking themselves. The announcement that Douglas Stuart’s debut novel Shuggie Bain had won this year’s Booker Prize will have left the 32 editors who turned it down red-faced..Stuart’s grim but life-affirming novel about a boy coming of age in the woebegone Glasgow of the Eighties is such a manifestly distinguished work that only a professional publisher – or 32 of them – could think it was not worth publishing. It often seems that behind every big book – be it a literary masterpiece or a worldwide bestseller, or both – there is a mass of publishers queuing up to reject it..There are endless examples to comfort those would-be novelists who are trying to grin and bear it while decorating their loo with rejection slips. Pride and Prejudice was returned by the first publisher it was sent to with the curt note "Declined by return of post," and would not see the light of day for another 16 years. Dubliners, James Joyce’s literary calling card, went the rounds for nine years before it was published..William Golding’s Lord of the Flies received 21 rejections: the author admitted in later life that on one occasion, opening the umpteenth rejection letter, he found himself shouting furiously, "It’s good! I know it’s good!" Although his failures caused him to fall "desperately sick psychosomatically", he continued to hawk his manuscript around; he deserved his Nobel Prize for persistence as much as anything..Even Golding’s eventual publisher, Faber & Faber, nearly turned the book down after it was initially dismissed as "an absurd and uninteresting fantasy" by one of the firm’s readers – "a lady called Polly Perkins, about whom very little now seems to be remembered apart from her one big mistake," as Golding’s biographer John Carey acidly comments. Poor forgotten Polly stands as a symbol of all those sorry souls whose contribution to literary history extends no further than trying to prevent their publishing company from acquiring a masterpiece..An anthology of publishers’ terrified responses and offbeam predictions might include remarks made about Nabokov’s Lolita ("I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years"), John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold ("he hasn’t got any future") and J G Ballard’s Crash ("The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.").One can see why publishers may not quite know what to make of innovative literary works but, at the risk of sounding like Captain Hindsight, I do wonder how so many books that look like they were always destined to be sure-fire bestsellers can have been rejected so many times..Richard Adams’s Watership Down was turned down five times before it sold more than 50 million copies for Penguin. Stephenie Meyer, John Grisham, C S Lewis and Dr Seuss all struggled to find publishers for their first works of fiction, as did Stephen King ("the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it [so] I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.")..And any time you make a cock-up at work just be thankful you can’t have done as much harm as the editor at Constable and Robinson who turned down J K Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel thus: "I regret we have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we could not publish it with commercial success.".The Great Pursuit, Tom Sharpe’s satirical novel about publishing, features a literary agent who is supremely confident in the refinement of his own taste: he rejects any book he likes, and takes on any book he doesn’t because it is sure to be popular with the general public..I suspect the 31 publishers who turned down the first novel by James Patterson, author of undistinguished but mega-selling thrillers, should have taken that attitude. (And not least because they’ve made an enemy for life: "I keep a list of all the editors who turned down my first novel," Patterson has said. "Sometimes they send me books and ask for blurbs. Mostly, though, they’re dead.").Still, it is honourable to turn down a likely bestseller because you’re not personally keen on it; what is sad is that so many publishers turn down manuscripts they admire because they don’t know how to sell them. It is telling that one of the many publishers who rejected Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 observed: "It is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.".Of course, publishers have always rejected fine books for fatuous reasons. If T S Eliot, a brilliant publisher as well as a great writer, could turn down Orwell’s Animal Farm then one can hardly blame lesser mortals for their errors of judgment..Still, the problem does seem to be getting worse. When I spoke to Irvine Welsh recently, he told me that his masterpiece Trainspotting (1993) might not get published today: "It would be risky commercially now, because it’s not really in any particular genre. Fiction has changed, we’re writing to commercial rules to some extent – we’re driven by the retailer really.".This echoes Douglas Stuart’s view that the publishers who turned Shuggie Bain down "didn’t know how to connect it with readers... working-class Scotland was difficult for them.".You have only to compare the swanky premises publishers inhabit these days with the rickety offices of a couple of decades ago to realise that they have become more interested in profit than providing unusual or challenging fare..It is not really the fault of the editors: they want to acquire unusual books, but are told by the moneymen to concentrate on books that are easily marketable to middle-class readers, or fit pre-packaged into a genre, or have a chance of being stocked by supermarkets. Of course, it’s up to the publishers if they prefer that strategy to the slim chance of carrying off the Booker and boosting sales that way..But it’s hard not to wonder, thanks to the attitude of these gatekeepers of the literary world, whether we readers are being deprived of masterpieces that would knock all the books mentioned in this article into a cocked hat..Read more. Dubai-based Booker nominee Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar probes into the ‘most essential relationship’ An essential guide to the Booker Prize 2020 Booker winner Douglas Stuart: From penniless teenager to literary toast of 2020