What is happening to our publishing industry?

Do you ever wonder why all those publishers rejected Harry Potter before Bloomsbury took it on and made publishing history? I wonder it all the time because I have seen, first hand, some of the nonsensical and humorous reasons a book is rejected.

I wrote one of my novels - Bloodline: Alliance - seven years before it was finally published. So, why did it take that long for someone to say yes? I still don´t know the answer to that, because almost without exception, my rejection letters said: "Loved the story, and your writing shows so much promise. But . . ."

Which begs the question: When is an enjoyable story and proficient writing, simply not enough? Worse, when did it become secondary to what can only be described as irrelevant?

I once sent Bloodline: Alliance to a very keen agent who later rejected it because she believed my heroine, Shenna, a starving, injured thief, should have been a vegetarian. In one scene, my fantasy characters sit around an open fire in a quasi-medieval world. Shenna´s new-found friends – who are nursing her back to health after an injury – offer her some salted lamb. But the agent has scribbled out lamb and written in ´tofu´. Yes, tofu. And it was a point so significant to her, that she mentioned it as a reason for rejecting the book.

To be fair, Shenna can speak to animals. And she shares an incredible mind-bond with a wolf that is constantly at her side. But let´s disregard works like Robin Hobb´s Farseer Trilogy, where Fitz speaks to and yet eats animals. And ignore the fact that Wolf is a carnivore, so Shenna would have to watch him eat animals. Apart from all of that, who would actually bother to read it unless starving Shenna only ate tofu she regularly stole from specialist medieval traders of Asian vegetarian products? I think the agent had a point!

One editor enjoyed my novel "very much", but claimed the age group was "ambiguous". My heroine is youngish – about twenty-one – and in many ways she is childish, having had her life stunted at the age of ten when her father died rather brutally while saving her life. And the breadth of my readership indicates my book is enormously appealing to fifteen-year-olds all the way to sixty-year-olds. But apparently this makes it a sales risk. So, how would she view, say, the Lord of the Rings written for a young audience and obsessively loved by adults? Or perhaps she may not have heard of a little novel called Twilight – published for young adults and bought by almost every age you can imagine? And Harry Potter is for which specific age group? But maybe the editor had a point?

One agent believed that to keep her reading, I needed to reveal the answers to the underlying mystery much earlier, not near the novel´s end. And the rest of the book could then be filled up with, well . . . stuff. Mysteries, it seems, only keep a reader reading when they are no longer a mystery. (Perhaps she had just never come across detective fiction?) But apparently readers were all willing to wait for seven entire novels, to resolve the mystery between Harry Potter and his nemesis Voldemort. But perhaps this agent too, had a point?

It seems though, that no one told my growing list of fans that lamb versus tofu is a serious issue. They seemed to have been too side-tracked with the page-turning plot and the unforgettable characters. Neither did anyone mention to them that a mystery should not be revealed at the end, but halfway through. Instead they naively had an intense need to know how it ended. And nobody told the adults that they weren´t to enjoy the book because the main character was a little younger than them. Adult readers just couldn´t seem to get past the deep and moving issues that Shenna faced.

It´s just as well, with inexperienced readers like mine, that our publishing industry keeps a strict vigil against such serious errors. After all, we can´t have page-turning plots, great writing styles and tofu-free novels sneaking through, can we?