Is a Disturbing Undercurrent Trending in Publishing?

Or a one-time disturbance in the Force?

This is a disturbing story that outlines an undercurrent in American publishing that is a threat to every author, says Richard North Patterson.

Patterson, who has written 22 novels, been on the NYT bestseller list 16 times and sold more than 25 million books, couldn’t find any publisher in Manhattan to handle his suspense novel TRIAL, released in June 2023. Just about everyone agreed it’s a good novel, but they fear the AMERICAN DIRT syndrome, he says. They quietly told him white authors can’t write about the Black experience of racism in America.

What’s going on here? Can this be true?

At a time when writers are being threatened by calls for book banning all across America based on race and sex, 19 New York publishers did just that, says Patterson.

“My agents warned me that I was asking for trouble with major publishers, and I was acutely aware of the risk—most famously exemplified in 2020, when Jeanine Cummins, the white author of AMERICAN DIRT, was widely castigated for the way she depicted a Mexican mother and son struggling to cross the U.S. border. As the British novelist Zadie Smith observed in 2019, ‘The old—and never especially helpful—adage ‘write what you know’ has morphed into something more like a threat: ‘Stay in your lane,’” Patterson wrote in a column in The Wall Street Journal.

“To license the imagination across racial lines,” he says, “is not the enemy of diversity of authorship. Rather, we should directly confront the woeful lack of diversity in publishing houses and, even today, among authors.”

That said, Patterson’s account of racism, Black voter suppression, and an inter-racial love affair in America showed up on bookshelves, but from an unexpected source. Ironically, a small conservative and Christian publisher, Post Hill Press, took up the cause. Executive Editor Adam Bellow didn’t hesitate. A 30-year veteran of New York publishing and son of acclaimed bestselling novelist Saul Bellow, Adam saw a huge business opportunity. TRIAL had bestseller written all over it.

But it wasn’t a bestseller, the result of a small press’s inability to launch a major marketing campaign.

“It’s astonishing to me that a book by a prominent liberal author on a political topic of pressing interest to liberals can only be published by a conservative,” Bellow says. “…I’m a well-known conservative who disagrees with Ric on issues like voter suppression, but it turns out I’m a lot more of a liberal than the mainstream publishers who passed on his book.”

Post Hill Press is headquartered on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee, in Brentwood, certainly no backwater, but it’s not exactly the center of the publishing world nestled among the country music stars.

“Not once did anyone suggest that any aspect of the manuscript was racially insensitive or obtuse,” Patterson wrote in his Journal piece. “Rather, the seemingly dominant sentiment was that only those personally subject to discrimination could be safely allowed to depict it through fictional characters.”

What they are doing, he says, is committing literary apartheid—the cousin of book banning. “It’s kind of a misplaced notion of affirmative action.”

“A number of them found it (TRIAL) impressive; several opined that it evoked my best work. Nonetheless, my ethnicity was now deeply problematic,” Patterson said in the Journal.

Why is the publishing industry so afraid to take this on?

“It’s two things,” Patterson says. “It’s fear of self-righteous young people and fear of Twitter mobs.”

“The upshot,” Bellow says, “is the young people are in charge. What it means is writers are going to have to conform to the new standard. It will be fine if they are not white men…There’s a level of organized, idealizing activism within these publishing companies. At the managerial level, there’s a kind of cowardly abandonment of leadership and authority. The leadership when I was coming up would never allow the young people to determine which books were being published.”

Which is exactly what one publisher told Patterson. He said he liked the novel but would have to check first with his younger staff.

“This person knew perfectly well what the young people would say,” Bellow says. “They said, ‘no, it’s not allowed.’ It’s called cultural appropriation…It’s young people in their 20s—marketing associates, junior this and junior that.”

Patterson, who is a lawyer, says he has no desire to take on the role of aggrieved white man. Rather, he believes the publishing industry is woefully lacking in diversity. “But to repress books based principally on authorial identity is inimical to the language of creativity, not to mention to the spirit of a pluralist democracy.”

And what does this mean for other thriller, mystery, and suspense writers—those who have never visited the bestseller list or are struggling to get their first novel published? There are a lot of writers who are stretching the limits and taking chances right now who don’t fit the current trend in publishing, Bellows says. Now they are openly being discouraged from even trying.

Sorry for the downer today. I haven’t seen or experienced this personally since I have not focused on racism in any of my novels. But if you have, please share your comments.

Is this a single occurrence or are there others out there who’ve experienced the same treatment from young editors? Please share your experience in the comments section and share this with friends who you feel should read this.

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Former investigative reporter Rick Pullen is the author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. He’s also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

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