Anna Jones Buttimore

Last week I blogged about the fact that Cedar Fort, a leading LDS publisher, had cancelled a publishing contract because one of the book's authors wanted to be open in his bio about the fact that he is gay.  This week I want to move on from that and talk why this should come as no surprise. It's happened before. Something really quite similar happened to me with my first book, Haven. I should mention that Haven  is the archetypal LDS book. It's light and sweet and fluffy, with lots of people embracing the gospel, learning valuable life lessons, and even a touching chaste romance. It was picked up by Covenant Communications, the second-biggest LDS publisher (now owned by the LDS church) and I happily signed a right-of-first-refusal contract. (More about those another day.) As with King and Jensen's Woven, the manuscript was edited several times, polished, the cover designed and blurb written, artwork set out, and bookmarks, posters, advertisements and catalog...

I think it's fair to say that the LDS publishing world has recently been rocked by a scandal involving Cedar Fort (who published my fourth book, Honeymoon Heist) and a single word in a bio. You can read the full story in the author's own words via this lin k , but in a nutshell Cedar Fort agreed to publish a book, edited it, designed the cover, started promoting it, scheduled it, and then dropped it when the authors refused to take the word "partner" out of one of the bios, thus indicating that one of the co-authors is gay. They've been widely condemned by the LDS community for this decision. Their reasoning was that the large church-owned bookstore chains (Deseret Book and Seagull Book, primarily) who are their main marketplace would not carry a book by a gay author, and they could damage their important relationship with these shops. That is, sadly, probably true. However, I should add that this is a national market sci-fi  book, not a specifically LDS book...