Jack London Collected 600 Rejection Slips
Quick answer: Jack London collected some 600 rejection slips on a spike before editors gave in. The documented story of his rejection years and the habits that ended them.
A spike, the kind clerks used for filing receipts, sat on Jack London's desk in Oakland, and by 1899 it carried a stack of rejection slips reportedly six hundred deep. He was twenty-two. He had already been a cannery boy, an oyster pirate, a sailor, a coal shoveller and a Klondike prospector, and he had come home from the gold fields with scurvy instead of gold. Writing was the last plan available to him, and for more than a year the plan produced nothing but small printed slips telling him no.
The spike is the detail that lasts. Other writers hid their rejections in drawers; London filed his where he could see them, a growing monument to how often the magazines turned him down. What follows is the documented story of how a man with no connections, little formal schooling and no money broke into print, and the working habits that carried him there. Very little of it is romantic. Nearly all of it is usable.
Pawning his coat to buy stamps
London's lowest point is easy to date. His stepfather died while London was in the Yukon, and he returned to Oakland in 1898 responsible for his mother and with no trade that paid. He sat the civil service examination for the post office and did well, and by his own account a steady position at sixty-five dollars a month was within reach. He turned away from it to keep writing, a decision that looked reckless because, on the evidence then available, it was.
The months that followed were the grimmest of his working life. He wrote through the day on a borrowed typewriter that printed only capital letters, and he pawned his bicycle, his watch and at times his coat to cover postage. Manuscripts went out; slips came back. In John Barleycorn and in his letters he laid out the arithmetic plainly: every submission cost money he did not have, and every rejection was a receipt for the loss.
The first cheques: five dollars, then forty
The turn began small. Late in 1898 the Overland Monthly, a respected but nearly broke San Francisco magazine, accepted his Klondike story To the Man on Trail and offered five dollars for it. London was reportedly appalled at the sum; he had calculated that even hack rates ought to pay several times that. Around the same period The Black Cat, a magazine that bought strange and sensational fiction, paid him forty dollars for a story called A Thousand Deaths. London said more than once in later years that the Black Cat cheque arrived when he was close to quitting and kept him in the game.
Then quality caught up with persistence. The Atlantic Monthly, the most prestigious magazine in America, took An Odyssey of the North and paid one hundred and twenty dollars, running it in January 1900. Houghton Mifflin collected his northern stories into The Son of the Wolf that same year. Two years earlier no editor in the country would print him. The stories had improved, certainly, but not six hundred rejections' worth. The larger change was simpler: he was still there, and still mailing.
The dog story that made him, on bad terms
In 1903 London wrote The Call of the Wild in about a month, intending a short story that kept growing. The Saturday Evening Post serialised it for seven hundred and fifty dollars, and Macmillan offered two thousand dollars for the book rights outright, with no royalties. London took the flat fee because he needed the money. The novel became one of the bestselling American books of its era, has never been out of print, and paid its author nothing further from a single copy sold.
He was publicly philosophical about the bargain, pointing out that Macmillan's heavy promotion made his name, and the name raised his rates on everything that followed. Within a few years he was among the highest-paid writers in America. The lesson cuts both ways and deserves honest statement: persistence got him to the table, and inexperience cost him a fortune once he sat down at it.
A thousand words a day
London's method was mechanical, and he was proud of that. He set himself a quota of a thousand words a day, written mostly in the morning, and he held to it at sea, in sickness and through hangovers, by his own cheerful admission. He did not wait to feel ready. The advice long attributed to him says you cannot wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club, and whether or not the phrasing is exactly his, the output backs the sentiment: roughly fifty books in under twenty years, before his death in 1916 at the age of forty.
The quota mattered because it separated the two jobs. Writing was governed by the calendar; selling was governed by the post. A cruel slip in the afternoon mail could not cancel the next morning's thousand words, and a bad morning could not stop the mail.
Martin Eden: the rejection years, novelised
If you want to feel those years from the inside, read Martin Eden, the 1909 novel London built out of his own apprenticeship. Its hero, a sailor teaching himself to write, comes to suspect there are no human editors at all, only a machine, a cunning arrangement of cogs that slides each manuscript into a return envelope and sticks on the stamps. Anyone who has submitted for a year without one personal word will recognise the fantasy at once.
The novel is also a warning, because success arrives in it and does not heal what the striving cost. London was too honest to write persistence as a fairy tale, and that honesty is why writers still pass the book to each other more than a century on.
What a working writer can take from this
The usable core of London's story is that he industrialised hope. He did not defend each story's fate; he defended the routine that produced stories. Volume gave the magazines many chances to say yes, and the quota made sure volume happened. If your whole month rides on one poem at one magazine, every rejection is a crisis. If a dozen pieces are out at once, a rejection is a Tuesday.
The other lesson sits on the spike. London made rejection visible and ordinary instead of secret and shameful, which drained it of most of its power. Keep your own count somewhere you can see it, and the number becomes evidence of work done rather than worth denied. Poets who want a steady feedback loop to anchor that habit can borrow a deadline: Writory's monthly contest reads and scores every entry submitted between the 1st and the 25th, so the work is never met with silence.
What poets can take from this
- Set a small daily word or line quota and protect it from your submission moods.
- Keep several pieces in circulation at once so no single rejection carries your whole month.
- Log every submission with dates; a spreadsheet is the modern spike.
- Turn rejected work around to the next market quickly, the way London did, before doubt gets a vote.
- Read Martin Eden when the silence gets loud; it was written for exactly that feeling.
- Learn contract basics before your break arrives, so your Call of the Wild moment pays royalties.
Try it yourself
Write a poem titled The Spike about the physical evidence of your own persistence: a drawer, a folder, a notebook, an inbox. Let the object do the talking and keep self-pity out of every line.
Questions
How many rejections did Jack London actually receive?
The figure most often cited is around six hundred rejection slips gathered during his early career, drawn from his own accounts and repeated in biographies. The exact count cannot be audited, so it is best stated as widely reported. What is beyond doubt is that his apprenticeship ran on rejections until his first acceptances in late 1898.
What was Jack London's first published story?
His first professional magazine acceptance was To the Man on Trail, published by the Overland Monthly in January 1899 for five dollars. A forty-dollar payment from The Black Cat for A Thousand Deaths in the same period, by his own telling, stopped him from giving up altogether.
Did Jack London make money from The Call of the Wild?
He received 750 dollars for the magazine serialisation and 2,000 dollars from Macmillan for the book rights outright, with no royalties. The novel sold enormously for decades, but that flat fee was all he ever earned from its book sales. The fame it brought did raise his rates on everything he wrote afterwards.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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