Rejection

A frustrated author submits the opening chapters of three Austen novels (characters' names changed to make it a bit difficult) to eighteen publishers and agents.

And gets seventeen rejection letters. Only one reader spotted the ruse.

An easy trick: Pierre Menard tried harder.

“My intent is no more than astonishing,” he wrote me the 30th of September, 1934, from Bayonne.
[...]
He did not want to compose another Quixote —which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.