You can't call yourself a true writer if you don't know what it means to be a writer in the twenty-first century. After all, the rules that applied to Shakespeare could hardly be said to apply to you.

In case you've been living under a rock, a lot of things have changed in the world around you since the invention of cellular phones. You can say that publishing has changed just because the whole landscape of human life has changed. I mean, instead of taxi cabs you have Uber and Grab rides. Instead of hotels, you have Airbnb accommodations. Instead of CNN, you have Facebook or Youtube. Instead of JC Penney or Walmart, you have Amazon. What did you think would happen to publishing?

In the past, the only way that an aspiring writer could reach readers was through publishing houses. And that meant query letters, submissions – solicited or unsolicited – author agents and rejection letters... lots of them. Publishing houses held all the keys to the kingdom and, for a long time, this setup kept the quality of works up to a certain standard (no shoddy e-books made in a dinghy basement then). But the real question was: Whose standard?

All the established authors you've come to love and respect? Almost all of them have experienced rejection from traditional publishers; some more than others.

· J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: 12 rejections.

· Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl: 15 rejections

· William Golding's Lord of the Flies: 20 rejections

· James Joyce's Dubliners: 22 rejections

· Frank Herbert's Dune: 23 rejections

· Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time: 26 rejections

· Stephen King's Carrie: 30 rejections

· Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind: 38 rejections

· Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 121 rejections

These are but a few. Naturally, many authors have lost track of how many times they've been rejected. For instance, Agatha Christie had to wait 4 years before she could land a publishing deal. Gertrude Stein submitted poems for 22 years before finally getting published.

John Le Carré, author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, was told that he "hasn't got any future." William Faulkner's Sanctuary was called "unpublishable." George Orwell's Animal Farm was rejected because "there is no market for animal stories in the USA." Rudyard Kupling, author of The Jungle Book, was told that he didn't know how to use the English language. And Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, was told to stick to teaching.

(*Note: These statistics and trivia originally appeared on a post in BuzzFeed: 20 Brilliant Authors Whose Work Was Initially Rejected) 

But even more surprisingly, some of the established authors of today didn't go through the fire of traditional publication.

· Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit: self-published

· Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: self-published

· Christopher Paolini's Eragon: (originally) self-published

· James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy: (originally) self-published

· Michael J. Sullivan's The Riyria Revelations series: rejected and became self-published

· E.L. James' 50 Shades of Grey: (originally) self-published

· Andy Weir's The Martian: (originally) self-published

· Amanda Hocking's books: rejected and became self-published

· Mark Dawson's John Milton series: self-published

Incredible, right? Gives you hope you're still on the right track. But the winner among all the rejected writers was E.E. Cummings, who named all 14 publishers who had rejected him in a self-published book that he titled "No Thanks." 

LOL! 

I guess you can say he did it like a boss.

Up Next: The never-ending battle between tradition and modernity

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