How the Publishing Industry Pressured Me to Compromise My Values
First, a brief—albeit awkwardly personal—tidbit about me:
I grew into adulthood with an aversion to sex. I hated anything sexual. I pretended to be unbothered by sex scenes in movies and books or by sexual talk among my peers. I even pretended to be interested in sex in real life to be like everybody else. But all the while, I was screaming inside, scrubbing my skin with a metaphorical wire brush to remove the filth and shame.
Now that I got that out of the way:
I’ve written and published twenty books to date, and of those twenty, more than a few contained sex scenes—some of them quite explicit. You might be asking: If you hated the sexual world so much, why include explicit sex scenes in your books?
The answer is simple: just as I had done throughout my young adult years, I thought I had to in order to get anywhere in the publishing world.
I’ve been writing books since I was barely thirteen. I started publishing around 2011 and released four books that didn’t go anywhere. I was desperate for people to read my stories. I wanted what all writers want: a successful career as an author.
So, I set aside my natural “clean” writing style and started paying more attention to what readers seemed to love. I noticed that in 2012, the hottest trend in publishing was the emerging New Adult genre. Readers were passionate about these books—so much so that a popular book blogger could single-handedly shoot an unknown author into literary stardom, as what happened with me—and one thing these books all had in common was explicit sex scenes.
That’s what people seemed to talk about the most:
“This book has a lot of steam!”
“Omigod, this book is so sexy!”
So, I took a deep breath, set aside my aversion for the sake of a writing career, and dove headfirst into uncharted territory. I’d never written a romance book before—I’d never even had any interest in reading romance novels, much less writing them. (Nothing wrong with them, it was just my preference at the time. Now, I enjoy reading them occasionally—clean, Christian ones, of course.)
But that’s what I did. And guess what happened?
I published a New Adult novel, made an instant success name for myself, and earned a boatload of money that year.
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