MAJOR PUBLISHERS DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT SEX TRAFFICKING

During the writing of the first draft of Karma I learned that white slavery was an archaic term. But the issue of sex trafficking was still very much hidden from public view. I finished my first draft in 1992, believe it or not. I signed with a New York agency and waited, thinking I would have a book deal. It was not meant to be. I kept the rejection letters for many years. In fact, I just tossed them two years ago when we moved from Santa Barbara to Boston.

I learned a lot from reading and rereading those letters. For a long time I thought I wasn’t destined to be a novelist, though I love writing fiction. I wrote a series of books in the health genre, books on weight loss, Chinese medicine, adrenal burnout, and my latest sole authored book Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America (no explanation needed, I assume).

But I still missed writing fiction. So I got out my draft and started working on it and a year later I was ready to shop it to publishers. The only problem was, as one editor put it to a friend of mine who was shopping his memoir, “. . . this is without question the absolutely worst time the publishing business has experienced since Gutenberg invented the printing press.” She went on to write, “Honest to God, the entire industry virtually imploded upon itself late last year and things continue to deteriorate, with every major house laying off dozens of employees and drastically reducing the number of books signed for publication.”

I could understand that. What really blew my mind though was editors at major publishing houses telling my agent, “We don’t read manuscripts on sexual slavery.”

Okay . . . why not? Because this is an important social issue, so why wouldn’t a publisher want to at least look at a book with an urgently important social message?

It was after hearing many variations on that theme that I decided to self publish.

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