The Triggering Scene

A guest post by Anthony Grooms

An associate who has been a long-time agent in commercial publishing proposed a disturbing idea about the industry. Noting a scene in a draft of my novel in which a man slaps a female prostitute, she said that no editor would buy a book with such a scene. Most acquiring editors, she reasoned, are women and this scene would be a possible negative trigger for them and for their mostly female readership. She noted that a client of hers had a book rejected for a similar scene, though that scene was only one page in a 300-page novel. In another example of possible triggering, she said that a publisher rejected a book because the protagonist was an obese woman and that the publisher’s staff worried that the book would fat shame readers.