The One Thing I Learned about Rejection from 60 Days of Crowdfunding My Memoir

Today I want to talk a bit about rejection and how it affected me personally as an author specifically with crowdfunding.

When I finalized the decision to go the crowdfunding route for my second memoir Sand and Steel: the Spiritual Journey Home, I was a bit hesitant. I had already published an award-winning book called Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces through She Writes Press, which was a great decision and entry point to the publishing field. So when the time came to decide on the publishing path for memoir #2, adding another middle person like a crowdfunding endeavor to the process seemed to complicate things.

In the end, the decision to crowdfund my second memoir would test my effectiveness – in short, execution. With Publishizer, a crowdfunding platform that attracts publishers based on the number of pre-orders, you need hard-core numbers. I thought I had acquired enough experience building my platform thanks to the crowdfunding efforts for Accidental Soldier.

I’ve been crowdfunding Sand and Steel: The Spiritual Journey Home  ever since the campaign launched on May 1st 2017 and each week I reach out and follow-up with additional family, acquaintances and friends in my network who might be interested in supporting the campaign in a mad effort to reach my publishing goals.

It hasn’t been easy.

It’s time consuming to keep the momentum going. And because the idea of rejection is ALWAYS at stake, I have to quickly find a way to arm myself to reach my 250 pre-order goal, the minimum needed for attracting a publisher. (Right now I’m up to 85.)

At the end of the day, the one important thing I learned about rejection goes something like this:

Embrace Rejection as a Goal

I live in a small community. I see many familiar faces at various social events and people I’ve gotten to know beyond the world of Facebook. Many of them know my story from my service in the Israel Defense Forces in Accidental Soldier. When it came time to ask them to pre-order a copy of the second memoir, many didn’t.

Boy was it hard not to take these responses personally!! My old self wanted to agonize over each and every response. But that would be a complete waste of my time and energy, wouldn’t it! So I went online in search of answers. I googled “how to not take rejection personally” and in this way, I found this website. It’s called rejectiontherapy.com. It’s actually a game invented by a Canadian entrepreneur named Jason Comely, who I learned more about from this TedX talk.

The cool idea behind this game is that for 30 days, you seek opportunities to get rejected. Now I didn’t do what Jia Jiang did in his TedX talk such as asking to plant a flower in a neighbor’s garden or borrow $100 from a security guard, (I’m not that gutsy!) but in my planner I embraced the daily goal of getting rejected with my personal outreach efforts. I actually wrote at the top, “Let’s Get Rejected!

By seeking opportunities to be rejected, the pain of shame and fear wouldn’t hit me so hard. 

You see, I had always been running away from rejection. By looking at my efforts as “playful” and “in the sandbox,” I started to embrace this notion of rejection suddenly as a positive thing.

So now, each week, I make my networking list with the intention of getting rejected.

By embracing this notion more playfully, seeking out rejection has become more of a game than something bad to feel about.

Dealing with the Rejection in My New Memoir Sand and Steel

My new memoir tells the story about our courage to deal with the way the kibbutz doesn’t help my Israeli born husband professionally. And when the second Israel-Lebanese war kicks in, we suddenly find ourselves as refugees. We return to our cold, privatized kibbutz literally forced to reconsider our options. Do we leave the kibbutz and find our luck elsewhere in Israel or abroad or do we stay? Ultimately we muster the courage to leave the kibbutz and attempt to find a home in Pittsburgh only as a returning American, I soon find myself struggling with Reverse Culture Shock or  RCS.

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