Don’t worry about rejection. Everybody that’s good has gone through it. Don’t let it matter if your works are not “accepted” at once. The better or more personal you are the less likely they are of acceptance.
- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

When creative work is rejected, an artist needs to think through whether it was because he or she didn’t probe deep enough, avoided territory that was scary, that might offend, or because the work probed too deep, because it alienated those concerned about protecting their comfort zone, them that lives in the straight and narrow, who want to be reassured that they made the right decision by avoiding risk in life, by avoiding the juice of life. As an artist, you’ve got to accept that them that dwells in the Wasteland is not gonna like ya.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The art genius has the courage of his or her conviction. Art geniuses work at their craft out of a compelling need to express something. They take the same thoughts as you and me, but they act on them. The genius was as much in their courage and discipline as their intellect.

Genius believes in the power of dreams, in the interior world, in the mystery of the universe.

In every madman is a misunderstood genius.
- Antonin Artaud

Or is it that every misunderstood genius is a madman, a man who didn’t care much what others thought? He (or she) was in search of deeper truths. The mad genius believed that the work would ultimately transcend the marketplace’s rejection. They don’t teach that at the Harvard Business School.

If you place your work at the mercy of the marketplace — the literary agents, the book publishers, the art galleries, etc. — you will encounter people who are experts in what is selling, what has recently sold. They are also experts at determining the minimum amount of effort and money to put behind your work in relation to the minimum expected result. In other words, they are experts in giving the minimum in order to get the minimum acceptable result. Unless you are an established, best-selling author or artist, you’ll work with drones, people going through the motions without thought or creativity.

If your work is different than what’s recently sold, if your work is truly unique, then expect rejection, especially at first. The list of bestsellers that were rejected hundreds of times before publication is legendary (J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are two examples that come immediately to mind). In painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon received such a angry response from critics and fellow artists alike when first shown that Picasso hid it away for years in embarrassment before exposing it to the public again. Ultimately though it changed art. Crowds booed Bob Dylan’s early electric folkrock music. Etc., etc, etc.

We live now in a different marketplace, and one that doesn’t rely on intermediaries. Print-on-demand self-publishing, the internet, YouTube, Amazon, and a dozen successful art sites (Etsy, Saatchi, Imagekind, etc.) offer opportunities to artists (in all art forms including painting, novels, poetry) with unique work — opportunities that have never before existed.

Still, expect struggle, expect a long, gradual process — probably years — before your unique work achieves market viability. Your inner momentum needs time to displace the market’s ambivalence and inertia.