Soon after, though, Signet Books signed on for the paperback rights for $400,000, $200,000 of which went to King. After dozens of rejections, he finally sold it for a meager advance to Doubleday Publishing, where the hardback sold only 13,000 copies-not great. Even his now best-selling book, Carrie, wasn’t a hit at first. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing.” He received 60 rejections before selling his first short story, “The Glass Floor,” for $35. In his book On Writing, he recalls: “By the time I was 14…the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. King received so many rejection letters for his works that he developed a system for collecting them. They were so poor they had to borrow clothes for their wedding and had gotten rid of the telephone because it was too expensive. He lived in a trailer with his wife-also a writer-and they both worked multiple jobs to support their family while pursuing their craft.

King was broke and struggling when he was first trying to write. It was rejected dozens of times until finally Bloomsbury, a small London publisher, gave it a second chance after the CEO’s eight year-old daughter fell in love with it. When she was shopping it out, she was so poor she couldn’t afford a computer or even the cost of photocopying the 90,000-word novel, so she manually typed out each version to send to publishers. Rowling had just gotten a divorce, was on government aid, and could barely afford to feed her baby in 1994, just three years before the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, was published.

Read on and get inspired! People who never give up are normally the ones who succeed in the end. Some lived in their car, others suffered family abuse, and almost all encountered rejection after rejection professionally and personally-before finally landing a foot in the door. All these folks are now household names, but they didn’t become one easily.

Inspireme bracelet never give up