Beneath the romanticised allure that getting your work published by the “Big 5” publishing houses that dominate the industry, it can be easy to misjudge our own abundant opportunities to publish fictional, non-fictional, or poetic works through other means. Relinquishing our preconceived barriers to these alternate avenues and broadening the scope of the potential for our work to be shared can help us reach our personal and professional goals for publishing in new, inspiring ways.
This is something I can attest to as I developed my creative piece, “Violets from Astroturf”.
My creative piece, Violets from Astroturf, is a section of a potential novel-length queer psychological domestic thriller in which Eve Owell, a young black mother of two and wife of an unidentifiably upper-middleclass white man, finds herself in an affair with the wife of the family across her idealistic suburban cul-de-sac. While inspired by the submission guidelines of Joffe Books, who’s body of published work focuses mainly on commercial crime, psychological thriller, and domestic noir fiction[1], it also echoed environmental and social contexts from works such as The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (1972) and The Price of Salt, or Carol, by Patricia Highsmith (1952).
Pulling from these works, as well extrapolations and projections of my own experience, I feel confident that Violets from Astroturf presents a fresh but familiar diverse representation that coyly plays within established frameworks of thriller and domestic horror.
How Much is that Novel in the Window?
When considering the positioning of this story, I kept in mind my awareness of both the publishing industry’s continued, and possibly systematic, preference for normative, commercial, white stories, but also on the general call of the last few years for more diversity. With a reported 72.5% of the publishing industry being white as of 2023[2], I maintained an underlying worry that either this story would be less likely to be considered due to its striking diversity from the supposed normative standard, as well as a concern that if it were chosen, it would mainly be for its narrative and author not fitting the majority demographic.
The criticism of this notion is not lost even within the publishing industry. The 2023 satirical metafiction Yellowface by R.F. Kuang presents the delightfully unlikable white protagonist’s bitterness towards her Chinese-American apparent friend’s literary success, which she chalks up to her simply being an “ambiguously queer woman-of-colour”[3], rather than for any other merit or writing talent.
The fear of tokenism doesn’t only grip authors of diverse background, but also can be a consequence of publishers’ lack of understanding of diverse authors and readers. In a report by Dr Anamik Saha and Dr Sandra van Lente titled “Re:Thinking ‘Diversity’ in Publishing”, one of the underling concerns unveiled about this tender question stemmed from the fact that publishers “do not know how to engage with the communities that those authors belong to”[4]. This consequently affects the effectiveness of their marketing of diverse books, representation of the author and the care owed to that author, and the publication of an authentic work as it should be received.
In the end, the efforts never feel work the hassle of handling potential public and internal fallout, and so the cycle of returning to the systemic devil you know continues.
From One Door Opens a Million
Thankfully, there are other avenues to publishing one’s work that could mitigate these systemic barriers of preference more so than not, and by championing the validity of these paths just as much as traditional publishing is, we can cultivate a more honestly engaged publishing sphere.
As the world has become more technologically based, the use of social media as a means for authors to cultivate their own platforms to reach readers seeking their stories, and access to even more opportunities to publish their work in the most authentic state. The physical book, while a vision associated with ‘making it’ as an author has become “one option among many, chosen when it is the most appropriate form.”[5]
If publishing as a concept simply refers to the means by which one shares their writing with readers, then avenues such as online magazines, posting to a blog such as this, presenting at open mics, self-publishing, crowdfunding, or submitting work to be included in an anthology are all equally valid means of publishing that all come with their own merits to their form. And with those new forms, comes the creation of even more insightful storytelling than traditional publishing could have allowed.
I have a story worth telling
Violets from Astroturf was born out of an idea for a smaller story, and while I now see it as part of a potential novel, even considering the adaptability of it enables me to also envision the flexibility of its distribution. I feel there will always be the dream for many writers to see their book, printed in beautiful bright hardback, sitting in the window of Waterstones (myself included), but we must not limit ourselves to that as the only vision of publishing success.
These days authors being offered book deals after self-publishing and promoting themselves on social media, and there is even more diversity in so many forms of publication. There is no limit to the spaces we can create for ourselves and readers who want to read our stories.
The acceptance of the worthiness of new stories to be enjoyed by readers like and dissimilar to their authors, to people who are curious for a new perspective on something familiar or an insight to something they’ve never seen before, was born from a realisation of the breadth of publishing in today’s age.
References
[1] Joffe Books, Submissions ([n.d.]), JOFFE BOOKS, https://joffebooks.com/submissions, [Accessed: 08 May 2024].
[2] Lee and Low Books, WHERE IS THE DIVERSITY IN PUBLISHING? THE 2023 DIVERSITY BASELINE SURVEY RESULTS (2024), Lee and Low, https://blog.leeandlow.com/2024/02/28/2023diversitybaselinesurvey/, [Accessed: 19 May 2024]
[3] Rebecca F. Kuang, Yellowface, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2023), page 6. [Accessed: 19 May 2024]
[4] Anamik Saha; Sandra van Lente, Re:thinking Diversity in Publishing, (Goldsmiths Press, 2020), page 17. https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Rethinking_diversity_in-publishing_WEB.pdf [Accessed: 19 May 2024]
[5] Caroline Harris, ‘The Real New Publishing: How interconnected ‘outsiders’ are setting the trends’, in Contemporary publishing and the culture of books, ed. by Alison Baverstock; Richard Bradford; Madelena Gonzalez (Routledge, 2020), page 185-205 (p. 185), https://doi-org.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/10.4324/9781315778389 [Accessed: 19 May 2024]
Bibliography
Harris, Caroline. ‘The Real New Publishing: How interconnected ‘outsiders’ are setting the trends’, in Contemporary publishing and the culture of books, ed. by Alison Baverstock; Richard Bradford; Madelena Gonzalez (Routledge, 2020), page 185-205, https://doi-org.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/10.4324/9781315778389 [Accessed 19 May 2024]
Joffe Books, Submissions ([n.d.]), JOFFE BOOKS <https://joffebooks.com/submissions> [Accessed: 08 May 2024].
Kuang, Rebecca F., Yellowface, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2023), page 6. [Accessed: 19 May 2024]
Lee and Low Books, WHERE IS THE DIVERSITY IN PUBLISHING? THE 2023 DIVERSITY BASELINE SURVEY RESULTS (2024), Lee and Low < https://blog.leeandlow.com/2024/02/28/2023diversitybaselinesurvey/>, [Accessed: 19 May 2024]
Saha, Amanik; van Lente, Sandra, Re:thinking Diversity in Publishing, (Goldsmiths Press, 2020), https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Rethinking_diversity_in-publishing_WEB.pdf [Accessed 19 May 2024]