The Bulletproof Writer: How To Overcome Constant Rejection To Become An Unstoppable Author: A Guide For Newbies, Midlisters & Best Sellers

Great book. Lots of helpful hints and tips. Michael Alvear really knows his subject. Would recommend!

Brilliant as always and a surefire route to becoming a successful author, Michael Alvear's advice is always spot on, Susan

As a screenwriter, I found this guide helpful during my last painful rejection... It still hurts, but less than the others times. Thank you, Michael.

Dear Mr. Alvear: Thank you for your wise, insightful and helpful book! As a professional writer of many years, I suffered in silence when a disappointing book review came in or a publisher failed to re-up a contract. Like many like-minded silent sufferers, I just assumed that once I reached a certain level as a writer, I'd be rolling in puppies (your allegory of the white rhinos). Thanks to your book, I now realize that the BUSINESS of writing sucks no matter where you are in the great Darwinian struggle. This new knowledge allowed me to recalibrate my expectations, which is the key to this particular minnow surviving the meat-flecked chomping teeth in the shark tank.Your Matrix analogy particularly hit home.I want you to know how greatly your wisdom was appreciated. I will carry it with me as I continue to swim in these oh-so-tainted waters.May we all prevail!

The real value of this book is that it goes beyond what we writers already know about dealing with rejection. We KNOW we need to stop taking rejections personally. We KNOW it’s a numbers game and to keep on trying. We KNOW that not everyone is going to love our work, yet we are still secretly wrecked when someone criticizes it or we get one-star review. But finally, FINALLY, someone details the many ways we can internalize the things we “know” we should do to deal with rejection, but have never been able to, you know… actually do.The author is a working writer himself and pulls no punches over what he’s experienced in the business—from having a book that everyone thought would take off tank in sales to watching an amazing promotional opportunity pulled at the last minute. His experiences—and how he used different tools and methods to pick himself up from the floor—were powerful and oddly encouraging.Occasionally, he went on a little too long about how the brain is “wired” for negativity and how that amplifies all our little and big failures, but just when he was about to lose me, he’d give actual examples of how to counteract those tendencies in a way that seemed both reasonable and realistic. Just reading through some of the techniques made me feel better and more hopeful that when the next rejection comes, I’ll be better able to handle it. Also, there were some suggestions that completely surprised me—using “counter-factual reasoning” for one—which made me laugh, always a plus.The author uses research from the latest scientific discoveries on the subject, which I liked because it meant it wasn’t just the same old, feel-good “mumbo-jumbo” that makes me want to pull out my hair and drop-kick the next person who tells me to just “roll with it.”If I could only keep two books on writing, I would pick On Writing Well by William Zinsser and this one. The first one improves craft; The Bulletproof Writer, helps you keep your head on straight when the inevitable rejection punches you in the gut. No serious writer should be without either.