Thirty-two publishers turned down a new book called Volunteer Slavery for no good reason. Here are two of the worst: (1) The Washington Post wouldn’t like it. (2) The author and memoirist, Jill Nelson, is some kind of horny, angry, upper-middle-class “Negro” gal. Where’s the market? Who can relate?
Nelson is your garden-variety single black mother who grew up summering on Martha’s Vineyard. In the mid-80s, at the age of 34, she gave up her beloved New York and an underpaid career as a free-lance writer to take a staff job on the Sunday magazine the Washington Post was about to launch. The magazine was a disaster, and so was the job. After four years Nelson had a nervous breakdown and quit.
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The story line of the book is Nelson at the Post. But she wanders at will from that alienated sojourn into feverish ruminations about her race, class, sex life, and above all, family. “I can deal with all manner of black folks, white folks, other folks, just not myself and my family,” she writes. “Part of my becoming a journalist has to do with getting in other people’s shit before they even think to get in mine. It is both a power and a powerlessness trip.” As an author she wades into lots of other people’s shit. She’s probably unfair to someone–white or black–at least every other page.
Nelson comes to town this weekend for Black Expo, and she’ll be back a few days later to promote her book. We asked her by phone what it’s like to be turned down by 32 publishers.
Did any of the publishers see how funny it was? we wondered.
Because Noble is such a small house, Childs didn’t consider her work done when Nelson signed for a $10,000 advance. “We did something they don’t do for most of their books–I’m not putting them down. It helps to have quotes, and I got blue-chip quotes, people whose names will help sell the book. I sent the book to people in manuscript and told them I thought it was a very important book–but a small press was publishing it, and we needed to have the benefit of their endorsement to get it into the hands of the right people.”
