SMFS Member Guest Post: Northern bias in NYC publishing by Paul A. Barra

Please welcome SMFS list member Paul A. Barra to the blog today with his perspective on an interesting topic…

 

 

Northern bias in NYC publishing by Paul A. Barra 

 

I finished a middle grade novel early in the new year featuring four eleven-year-old Charlestonians who lived in April 1861. When the smoke clears over the Battery and they realize not a single Union soldier was killed in the CSA bombardment of Ft. Sumter, they decide there must have been a Yankee spy who warned the fort of the imminent attack. The rest of the story is about their adventures trying to identify the spy. The action all occurs before the War Between the States begins in earnest, so there is little blood and gore. One of the four is the son of a slave—excuse me: an enslaved person—and another the daughter of a prominent Catholic family, so there is some drama and tension over both slavery and nativism among the children.

 

My agent sent the manuscript to a Sensitivity Reader (now misnamed an Authenticity Reader) while we were editing it. I discovered that historical accuracy is less important in publishing today than are the sensibilities of modern-day readers, or should I say editors? If some people were called Negroes by polite southerners then, they must be called African Americans now; if they were colored people then, they must be people of color now; if they were Papists then, they must be Catholics now. A Black person, capitalized b only, can never be called boy, even if he is an eleven-year-old male, and even if rural southern folk tend to call male children boys. It did not matter if the historic terms I used were in narration or dialogue. They had to go.

 

I caved, of course—I want the script published—only to discover that some editors are reluctant to publish stories from a Confederate perspective no matter how sensitive the verbiage. Children who uncover a spy for the North and are hailed by Gen. P.G.T Beauregard as heroes cannot be. Maybe the protagonist himself could turn out to be the Yankee spy? He'd then become a genuine hero, a hero the upper half of the nation can admire, even if he's a traitor to his own community. One editor had the effrontery to suggest that actual scenario to my agent.

 

The publishing industry is beset with serious problems these days, and my complaint is as a zit on the forehead of a man infected with Monkey Pox, but I think it does relate to at least one of those problems: sales. Editors buy what they like; their readers do not necessarily like the same books. Ten-year-old boys and girls do not work and play on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue, nor do they read the New York Times. They would like to learn a little something as they are entertained by adventure novels. They don't keep up with the current fads in language that seem to preoccupy the lives of editors, and that is not what they want to learn. If they read an historical novel, they expect to learn true history.

 

I am grateful for at least two things that came out of my altercations with traditional NY publishers:

1. middle grade readers are apparently too young to be concerned yet with the rather abrupt change to gender-inclusive language that's battering the East Coast, since no one to date has requested from me a plural pronoun joined to a singular verb form;

2. I left "Papist" in my novel and have yet to receive a complaint about it. I guess Catholics have not been victimized by the language of the past as much as I thought. 

 

Paul A. Barra ©2022

Paul A. Barra's latest novel, WESTFARROW ISLAND, was a Silver Falchion finalist, and since one of his short stories was selected for the MWA's WHEN A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN anthology, which is in the running for an Anthony, he claims a portion of that glory road for himself also.