Are publishers afraid of controversy?

Here's my story...

I started writing my novel in 2012, and back then it didn’t occur to me that criticizing the then-new changes to Title IX sexual harassment policy on college campuses¹ and writing characters that reflect real Vermont demographics² might make my book too ‘problematic’ to publish. But when the MeToo movement and the takedown of Harvey Weinstein came in 2017, I realized any chance of my novel getting picked up by a publisher had just vaporized. Not that a literary novel from a no-name author ever really had a chance, but still. People were in no mood for nuance.

Of course, it’s not as though the literary gatekeepers would come right out and say, “Tina, look, this book just isn’t towing the party line and we’re not willing to risk backlash.” So I can’t prove this was going on, but it’s one way to make sense of what happened during my querying process. My submission package managed to garner a few requests to read the full manuscript even though my sample writing usually included my most ‘philosophical’ (unmarketable) chapter. Knowing these publishers and agents had read chapter 3 and were still interested gave me hope. Unfortunately these requests were followed by bland, sorry-this-isn’t-for-us rejections, if not dead silence. The most disappointing case was when a small publisher had me strip the formatting from my novel (and I had a lot of formatting) and mail them a printed copy.³ Their stats on Duotrope indicated they rarely asked for a full MS (only four times that year; I was the fourth), and when they did it almost always resulted in an offer of publication. So, yeah, I had not unreasonable high hopes. And yet they sent me a form letter rejection—and this they sent only after I gently prodded them months after they said they’d get back to me. That really sucked.

Something needed to change. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Time to switch strategies.

I wanted to find out what would happen if I submitted to a small conservative publisher…but I couldn’t find one. Next I compiled a short list of Christian publishers. The first on my list was an academic press that seemed to put out a lot of theology and philosophy, so I queried them. They asked for the full MS and got back to me with an offer of publication soon after.

Unfortunately I don’t get to say, Ah, HA! because, even taken at face value, this acceptance proves nothing. Of course, there was more to the story. Of course. Which I’ll explain at the end.

So was my novel getting rejected because it’s about a white male philosophy professor who gets falsely accused of sexual harassment? I don’t know, but publishers wouldn’t have been wrong to think certain readers would find this scenario difficult to wrap their minds around:

I love the last bit: “but…it would do well as a movie”!

If you can’t read the print above, this line should give you the gist of it: “Is the point of the book to redeem an accused sexual pervert?”

Now you probably won’t believe me when I say this, but this review doesn’t bother me—I only wish there were thousands more! Maybe that sounds cynical or even perverse, but I prefer to think I’m being realistic. What else could I expect? If my book ever became even remotely popular, I should expect far, far worse. Really, I think this reviewer was trying to be nice.

As a culture, we just don’t think about certain issues the way we did a decade or so ago, and yet, some don’t even realize how drastically their own opinions have shifted. For instance, it wasn’t so long ago that I could tell someone—anyone—the premise of my novel and they, too, would have found it completely absurd that an anonymous student critique accusing a professor of “standing too close to women” could result in a full-blown sexual harassment investigation. But now? Now my novel is considered realistic. Not even in the ballpark of satire.

Things have gotten to the point where some readers—definitely not all—have come to expect a social justice narrative every time they pick up a novel, and it seems the literary establishment is reluctant to publish books that deviate from that narrative.

“The new dogma, industry insiders told me, is two-pronged: books should advance the narrative that people of color are victims of white supremacy; and nonblack and non-Latino authors should avoid characters who are black and Latino—even if their characters toe the officially approved narrative. (White authors who write about black or Latino people oppressed by white people have been accused of exploiting their characters’ trauma.)” 

—The Free Press.

If that’s the officially-approved narrative, the paradigm by which all literature is now evaluated, can you guess which identity group gets excluded?

It’s not surprising, but it is curious when you think about it. Surely at least some of the (perhaps senior) editors at publishing houses have realized by now that the so-called diverse narrative has grown stale. (Was it ever fresh? I feel like I’ve been rolling my eyes at skin-deep diversity my entire life.)⁴ Consider the success of American Fiction! Is that not a sign? Aren’t publishers supposed to be ahead of the curve? Surely they know what’s going on. Then why do they keep doing stuff like this?:

Consider what has happened to books that have gotten on the wrong side of illiberal scolds… Last year, a bunny in a children’s picture book got soot on his face by sticking his head into an oven to clean it — and the book was deemed racially insensitive by a single blogger. It was reprinted with the illustration redrawn. All this after the book received rave reviews and a New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award.

—There’s More Than One Way To Ban A Book, Pamela Paul, The New York Times, 2022.

Who is to blame for this costly mistake? Not the blogger, that’s for sure. Bloggers are free to say idiotic things (you bet I will!) Why did the publisher react this way? One would think controversy sells books, right? Maybe. Who knows. It’s hard to tell when a book gets yanked off the shelf before the Twitter mob can get to it. If anyone is cancelling authors, it’s the gatekeepers themselves, even though their cowardice only feeds the frenzy.

Of course, it’s hard to say if “woke” books are tanking on a grand scale, and sure, declining sales can be caused by any number of factors. But I would love to be a fly on the wall during the meeting when the decision was made to pay a 3 million dollar advance (yes MILLION) for a transgender memoir. It’s hard to believe publishers could be that out of touch with the average reader, especially since it’s their business to know precisely what readers like to read.

This hand-wringing over controversial authors isn’t only happening in the big publishing houses. The NYT article cited above points out an example of a small publisher who yanked a book by “a white academic” who “was denounced for cultural appropriation because trap feminism, the subject of her book “Bad and Boujee,” lay outside her own racial experience.

Guess who cancelled the author above? My publisher.

Which brings me back to the outcome of my shift to Christian publishers and why it proves nothing. My offer of publication came from a legitimate small academic publisher that has been around since the 90s but, alas, they wanted to publish my book through its author-mill imprint. They were upfront in telling me I would have to chip in for typesetting—which was nevertheless cheaper than buying a package through a Big 5 Simon and Shyster self-publishing division—and sent me a sample contract which made it very clear that if I signed on the dotted line, that meant I would essentially hand over a decade of my life and get less than nothing in return. I’m not being hyperbolic. They didn’t lift a finger to publicize or market it, and like I said, they made this all perfectly clear in the contract. They didn’t spring anything on me. Everything they did was above board and honest. But it was a bad offer.

Yet I took it. There was no bamboozling going on. No charlatanism. No wool pulled over my eyes. I was just fed up. Done.

That’s what querying for a year did to me. I realize other writers have lasted much longer than that. But, well, I’m not other writers. It’s not even the rejections—I cherished every rejection, especially the personal ones—since more often than not, you don’t get rejections, you get silence. So no, it’s not the rejections. It’s the BS. The rules. The anal-retentive-ness of it. And for what?

I honestly don’t know whether I’ll go through the querying process again. I know I’m a wimp. I think I sent out something like 50 queries before calling it quits, which is nothing. What can I say? 50 seems like a lot to me.

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Dear Author Wannabe,

Send query and first chapter. Send the first and last chapter and a ‘covering’ letter—which is really just a fancy word for query letter but you’ll have to Google that yourself. Send us comps, query letter, the first two chapters. The first three chapters plus a character list and bio. The first 10 pages plus a three-page synopsis and comps. Query, comps, and 3003 words of MS and not one word more unless you are FAMOUS or an INFLUENCER WITH MANY MILLIONS OF FOLLOWERS, then just let us know that and we’ll send over a contract. Send a brief biography with a good-quality photo so we can tell what your ethnicity is without the bother and awkwardness of asking you because we’re only looking for #OwnVoices debut authors but we’re too nervous to come right out and say that but also because we don’t want to seem like we’re excluding anyone right off the bat, because that would be unfair, plus a query letter w/comps, and your best two chapters. Three-quarters of your manuscript stripped of formatting, printed in rose-gold ink on watercolor paper with a holographic Lisa Frank unicorn sticker centered on the top of each double-spaced page with one inch margins and ABSOLUTELY NO double-sided printing—no no! that would save paper, god forbid!—plus a check for $25USD + Fee + Tax, a percentage of which will go to some charity you’ve never heard of, and mail it to ATTN: PAPER-RECYCLING INTERN WHO LIKES PAINTING WATERCOLOR UNICORNS AND READING CHALLENGING BOOKS THAT MAKE HER THINK.

Thx!

The GateKeepers

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Yes, I know they’re inundated. I get why they want to dissuade us from submitting. I get it. All I can say is, it works. When your vision goes blurry just looking at all the file icons on your desktop, that’s when you give up. So I took the lousy deal. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted out. I wanted to move on. It had been a year, and I know some will scoff at that—only a year?—but a year of my life devoted to query letters is a year of my life I will not get back. Plus, I hadn’t self-published before, and I didn’t trust myself to do all those mysterious things publishers do.

Soon after, however, I self-published my husband’s philosophy manuscript, Truth & Generosity. And sure, it was frustrating at times. (Typesetting, aka formatting, turned out to be the one thing I might seriously consider paying someone else to do.) But at the end of the day, it’s not rocket science.⁵

Unfortunately I’ll never really know whether those who rejected my book deemed it ‘problematic’. Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore.

I’ll be serializing my novel right here on Substack in podcast form, and I’ve decided to make it FREE. Stay tuned! Chapter one comes out next week!

What do YOU think?

Do you have a publishing story you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it!

1. See this article in Higher Ed Dive for breakdown of Title IX since the Dear Colleague Letter in 2011.

2. Census data digested in this 2016 article, Is Vermont the Whitest State in the Union? The answer to the headline is kind of like, “No, no, we’re only the second whitest! Don’t forget Maine!”

What the article actually says: “Go into the schools — places like Brattleboro, Rutland, Burlington — and you’ll see young people of color,” he says. “That’s Vermont years from now.”

I say: Really? Maybe if you squint real hard. It seems to me the problem could be somewhat ameliorated if there were half-decent jobs available to those supposedly diverse college kids graduating from nearby colleges.

3. Some of you old-timers are probably shaking your heads at me and thinking, “Oh you dear girl, you have no idea how lucky you are. Imagine mailing out hundreds of manuscripts! The cost of shipping! The cost of printing!” To which all I can say is, I know, you’re right. I have no right to complain.

4. As kids, my friends and I would make fun of the obvious propaganda on TV, even though our motley crew could have been mistaken for the cast in the shows we were watching.

5. Well, DIY audiobooks come close. Especially if you’ve never worked with audio before.