Her first writing to be professionally published was an article about rowdy travellers on a coastal train at Easter 1919, which she submitted to and was accepted by the ChristchurchSun. She followed it with further articles, stories, and poems in the same paper, which also employed her temporarily for a month as social editor. The Sun ran regular poetry competitions which she sometimes won. She took third prize with That Crocus Feeling in 1925. The Christmas Supplement of 1926 carried her poem Heloise, which gives voice to its subject (remembering her, of course, as a lover not a writer).

There was no inkling at this stage that during the same year they would turn down the next.

From 1948 she was making the amazing sum of three guineas for 1,000-word articles for a nature magazine. She once wrote a correspondence column: questions as well as answers. Someone suggested she should write for the BBC . She did not act on this at the time, but later placed an article with the BBC and followed it with two stories. Nevertheless, several times during the next few years when she needed money and was writing a lot, she received quantities of rejection slips. Material went into her first book from the Pinnacle Club Journal, 1950, and the Scots Magazine, November 1954 and April 1955. Over the course of her career she has contributed to the Daily Express, Sunday Express, Glasgow Herald, the Guardian, She, and Woman. In her early years as an author she also wrote for (and spoke on) BBC Radio.

The novel appeared in Dublin, before the London edition of the same year. Owenson dated her preface 2 November 1802. Her payment was said to consist of four free copies. A London edition followed the next year, and a second edition in October 1811. Owenson had canvassed several publishers, incognita in clothes belonging to a servant, and been rejected.St. Clair was almost complete several years before this, when she told her father, I wrote it in imitation of Werther which I read in the school holidays. She was also inspired by the money-making example of Frances Burney .

After leaving school and the accompanying family rows, DM wrote nothing for three months. Then she began another boys' adventure novel in which, although there was still plenty of violence and mayhem, and the hero had keen fearless grey eyes and a firm mouth, there was also a new attention to character and dialogue. For the first time she not only wrote but revised (all within three weeks). She drew out all her money from the post office, found a typist, and sent her manuscript off to a publisher—then to about half a dozen more, all in England. Though it was always rejected, it always produced an encouraging letter of advice.

At the suggestion of Venetia Montagu , LCA wrote a journalistic article intended for, but not accepted by, Lord Beaverbrook 's Sunday Express (launched the previous month).

DB had tried to find a publisher for Nightwood while she was living in New York, but the manuscript was turned down repeatedly. Emily Coleman suggested revisions, which Barnes carried out. Coleman also exploited literary connections in order to send the revised manuscript to T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber in London. Eliot substantially edited the manuscript before its publication.

After having written and published several novels for adults, NB issued her first book for children, calling it—unsurprisingly perhaps—The Secret Passage. It had taken a long time to find a willing publisher.

While in Spain (where she lived during 1914-16), SB wrote and tried to publish in the United States an essay called Spanish Feminism in 1916. She was unsuccessful in placing it.

This book too dated back to 1911, when WC produced two stories, Alexandra and The Bohemian Girl, which eventually became part of it. She now wrote, she later said, entirely for myself, and she wrote spontaneously, finding the process more absorbing than for Alexander's Bridge. She did not in the least expect that other people would see anything in a slow-moving story . . . concerned entirely with heavy farming people [and Swedes at that], with cornfields and pasture lands and pig yards,—set in Nebraska, of all places, a distinctly déclassé literary background. She dedicated the book to the memory of her recently deceased friend and mentor Sarah Orne Jewett , She used as epigraphs a prairie poem by herself, and lines from the Polish national epic writer Adam Mickievicz .WC submitted this work to Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin , publishers of her first book. She said their acceptance truly astonished her, while that of Heinemann for a British edition very much pleased her, because of William Heinemann 's high literary standards. It was only later (and in rejecting her next novel) that Heinemann told her explicitly how much he admired O Pioneers!. By 1954 this book was in its twenty-eighth impression.

Privately published by Chopin after the manuscript was rejected by the Chicago periodical Bedford's Monthly, the edition of 1,000 copies was printed for the author by Nixon-Jones Printing of St Louis and bound in pale green covers. KC had begun work on the novel in July 1889 (before the publication of her first short stories), and completed it on 20 April 1890.

She began it in summer 1909, writing it in the schoolroom where she was meant to instruct her younger sisters, using a sharp-pointed pencil and tiny handwriting in a series of exercise books, digging the pencil into the paper when she crossed out and rewrote. It was probably the same work-in-progress as the one at first titled Unhistoric Acts. She later claimed that she had lost interest in the book because her brother Noel had collaborated or meddled in it; this, it seems, was not true.Blackwood at first rejected the novel, with a not entirely discouraging letter. They then proposed to print 1,050 copies, to spend about forty pounds on advertising, and to be subsidised by the author to the tune of seventy-five pounds, or half of their publishing expenses. Two hundred of the copies were printed in a cheap paperbound edition expressly for export to the colonies.

It was badly presented, by two of the cast in particular. It had been completed by 1777, but rejected by Thomas Harris of Covent Garden , who then produced Hannah More 's Percy instead. Tragedy, says Angela Escott , was considered an unsuitable genre for women writers. HC judged that the managers of the two licensed theatres, Harris and Richard Brinsley Sheridan , had entered into an unnatural conjunction, a league of friendship in which each undertook not to accept a play which the other had rejected. This bad practice had enabled plagiarism of her play while its appearance hung fire. One source of anxiety was Robert Jephson 's The Law of Lombardy, produced at Drury Lane in February 1779. Another was Hannah More 's Fatal Falsehood (staged in spring 1779).

SD began writing after reading an injunction from Doris Lessing about putting one's life in order. Some fringe plays that she attended were absolutely dreadful, which made her confident that she could do better. She worked on her first script for eighteen months and sent it to the Royal Court Theatre in October 1978, having read in Time Out that they would reply to all submissions. The play was rejected on the grounds that it hovers on the edge of melodrama and the tone blurs into the sensational, but the theatre's reader, director John Burgess , praised the vigour of the dialogue. Not many people are writing like this for women—casual, angry talk, shrewd, bitter, violent, witty, etc. This very complimentary report gave SD the confidence to try again. She admitted later that the report's criticism was apt. The Royal Court Theatre accepted and staged the second play that she submitted to them.

EMD began while she was at school to write stories for her friends, though she was handicapped in this pursuit by her lack of knowledge of the world. Her father had these stories printed. After moving to Knockholt in 1898 she embarked on unreal but idealistic love stories, which she submitted to magazines, but without success. She was soon getting up at four in the morning to write before breakfast as well as during the morning.

With little formal education and no experience of writing, the recently married GE bought a penny exercise book in which to begin her work.When she finished these stories—she wrote all six in ten days—she sent them to Thomas P. Gill , who edited a column in the Weekly Sun. She signed her accompanying letter Ardrath, after the name of the first house that she and her husband had lived in.Gill sent her a glowing letter on 10 March 1893, assuming that she was a man and recommending the excision of the sexual references and innuendoes from her stories: To put it brutally you would not (however Scandinavian your ideas may be) invite your coachman, or even your bosom friend, to assist while you and your wife were engaged in the sacred mysteries. Despite these criticisms, Gill advised sending the stories to The National Observer and The Speaker.When GE replied revealing her sex, he wrote back: It never once dawned on me that the author of those virile sketches was not one of my own sex or I would never for a moment have written as I did. . . . I feel more sorry than I can express.

This acceptance marked the beginning of a long and fruitful publishing history with the magazine, with 116 of her stories appearing in it in the years until 1995. However, the relationship had a more tumultuous start than first appears. The first story MG had sent from Montreal (The Flowers of Spring, published by John Sutherland in Northern Review in 1950) was rejected by The New Yorker because the context was judged too specifically Canadian, but editor William Maxwell asked if she had others.

SG submitted to George Colman , new manager of the Haymarket Theatre , her three-act comedy The Matrimonial Advertisement, or A Bold Stroke for a Husband.

She wrote a farce which she submitted to Robert Elliston , manager of Drury Lane (and an old friend who later proposed marriage to her). But he did not accept her play. In 1829 (after launching her literary career with her Memoirs) she claimed to have declined a payment of £1,000 for her scandal comedy Bought In and Bought Out, which she began writing that year but which was apparently never printed.

Editor John Rood had accepted the short stories in March.

The poems were sent to Chatto and Windus by her friend David Garnett .

The series ended in December 1927, with the author about to move to Devon. In March 1943 FT discussed with her editor Geoffrey Cumberlege the idea of making the papers into a book; but she did not do it. After her death her daughter again re-discussed this with Cumberlege, but again nothing was done. It was years more before a selection appeared in A Country Calendar, 1979, and then a larger selection as The Peverel Papers, 1986.

Sappho had been rudely rejected by Smith, Elder , and Dawson used all of her savings (£64) to get it published.

VSW privately printed Constantinople: Eight Poems, an instalment of a volume accepted for publication by John Lane but postponed on account of the war.