JK Rowling:
Her manuscript for the first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times by major publishers. London-based Bloomsbury Publishing eventually agreed to put it into print and the books have sold more than 400 million copies.
James Dyson: The British inventor and founder of the Dyson company is best known for inventing the Dual Cyclone bagless vacuum-cleaner. While developing his vacuum, he went through 5,126 failed prototypes, and exhausted his savings. He is now a billionaire.
Richard Branson: The entrepreneur spent a night in prison after his Virgin record shops hit cash-flow problems and he tried to save money by avoiding domestic taxes on record sales by pretending to export albums.
The Beatles: After two years of practising and performing, often for 10 or more hours a day, the band were finally given their first audition for a recording contract with Decca records. Decca turned them down, stating: "Guitar groups are on the way out."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article