A Lesson in Rejection:Write the Book You Need to Write:

Rejected by every publisher. Sold over a million copies. The lesson isn't what you'd expect.

My first book was rejected by every agent and publisher I sent it to. No one would take a bite. So I self-published it and it sold over 60,000 copies. I thought I'd made it. Surely it'd be easier from here.

I got an agent this go around. Things were looking up. My second book was rejected by every single publisher except one. Rodale gave me a shot. It sold over 350,000 copies.

Normally, when we hear these stories, it’s about believing in yourself, never giving up, embracing failure. And all of those points have some validity. But as I reflect on my journey from rejected writer to full time one, the important takeaways are a bit different.

1. Write the books you need to.

Every book I’ve written has felt like I was compelled to. It wasn’t because I thought it would sell hundreds of thousands of copies or what the audience wanted. It’s because I needed to write that book.

I wrote The Science of Running because every training book out there was kind of watered down for mass appeal and I wanted something that went deep. So I wrote the book I wanted to read, one that included all the science and went into the weeds and nuance of training theory instead of a paint by numbers book.

I wrote Peak Performance as a correction to all of the trappings that led me to burnout in sport. The all-in, never rest, always grind culture needed a counterbalance. So I wrote it.

Do Hard Things came out of a disconnect between what I often saw in the perception of toughness versus what worked in the actual arena. I’d grown up with the put your head down, grit your teeth, bulldoze through everything kind of toughness. And it worked…until it spectacularly failed. So I wrote the book to help performers not fall into the same trap I did.

Win the Inside Game was my book to make sense of the messiness of identity and chasing excellence. It came out of my whistleblowing experience and trying to show people you can reach the top without adopting a win at all costs, single minded approach to performance.

The point is, you write the book because you need to. It’s not because you think it’ll sell a million copies, or that it’s got the potential to go viral, or because some algorithm told you this will resonate with the most people.

No, you write it after years of research and scratching ideas in a notebook. Where eventually you can’t stop thinking about the book idea. You keep coming back to it because you saw athletes, parents, or coaches getting dragged down a path you knew was wrong.. You need to put the book out there and at least offer a course correction. That’s the fuel that allows you to get through the multi-year process of writing a book, and not being a slave to the results.

2. Don’t fall for the status game

I’ve sold over a million copies in total. I’ve had two different books sell over 350,000 total copies on their own. One book reached #1 in the entirety of audible. But I’ve never had a book make the NY Times bestseller list. There’s a lot of reasons for that.

But if that’s the point, if you’re writing to become a bestseller, to get the status of some label or designation, you’re setting yourself up for failure and more so, a miserable existence.

I consider myself fortunate that I came to writing as a kind of afterthought. If it wasn’t a running book, I didn’t read it in high school. Even as I came to love reading, I’m a slow reader so seldom could keep up to the demands of college reading lists in english or literary courses. I came to writing in the era of blogs. They were filled with typos, needed lots of editing, but it didn’t matter because I was writing to convey knowledge.

I came to writing as a coach. The goal was to help others understand topics I had some level of expertise on. And since coaching was my day job, I didn’t really see myself as a full time writer. Sure, it was nice when free lance opportunities came in from magazines. But it was a kind of fun side project.

That's what allowed me to take a shot. When my first book got rejected, I didn't think 'no one gets or likes my work, I’m not any good! I just said, that’s fine. The goal is to help others, let’s put it out in the world. And even though it definitely needed some editing, it sold a lot.

If I was concerned with the status game, the prestige of a big time publisher, or being seen as a writer, that thing never makes it into the world. And the story was the same after that. If a publisher didn’t like my work, I never saw it as a declaration of my value. Because the goal was always the same, put out something that could help people. Coach them up. It wasn’t to make a list.

In the words of so many sports coaches, I stumbled upon being process driven, understanding that the results would take care of themselves if I did good work.

3. We suck at predicting potential

In sports, every professional draft is littered with “can’t miss” prospects who miss. And guys or gals taken in the latter rounds who turn into stars. It’s the same in college recruiting. We see people no one wanted turn into Olympians.

Early in my college coaching career, I quickly realized that we really suck at predicting potential. I had walk-ons break school records. People who finished near last their freshman year become conference champs as upperclassmen.

And we make those decisions after having literally watched someone perform the same job they’ll do for you, and we still suck at it. I mean, in terms of the NFL, they just watched someone perform for 3-4 years, got loads of physical and cognitive measurements on them at the combine, and still kind of suck at selecting the right person. Predicting potential is hard.

It’s the same in writing or any other endeavor. Just because I got rejected by so many folks didn’t mean much. That’s partially because it wasn’t my day job. But it’s also because I grew up in the world of sports where so often we get it wrong.

I realized early on that I couldn’t let other folks opinion of my work determine its value. Whether it helped a few, hundreds, thousands, or millions of folks, it still had value. And that was the point.

-Steve Magness