What Nobody Tells You About Rejections By Book Editors

Not long after I moved from the New York area to Alabama, I went to a bookstore event where I met a local writer who recently had failed to sell his first novel. He thought he knew why no publisher had bought it.

“New York editors don’t like books about the South,” he said.

I was incredulous, and not just because I’d met a lot of those editors while covering the publishing industry as a journalist.

Editors “don’t like books about the South”? Was the writer talking about the region that had produced William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Alice Walker?

Our conversation was taking place two hours south of Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee and Truman Capote grew up. A famous resident of our town was Winston Groom, the author of Forrest Gump, a novel the bookstore displayed steps from where we stood. About 30 minutes away, the faculty of the University of South Alabama included the novelist Jesmyn Ward, who had won a National Book Award for her Salvage the Bones and would soon earn her second, making her the only woman and only black author to win that prize twice.

To my mind, all of that didn’t prove that “New York editors don’t like books about the South.” It proved — if anything — the opposite.

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