Just saw this on Quora, and thought it’s kind of relevant to this thread:
https://qr.ae/pNcFrv
I don’t know whether non-members of Quora can see posts there, so I’ll reproduce it here in full:
What is something interesting that you know because of your career that other people might not?
I illustrate children’s books used in schools worldwide. The publisher has a staff of editors to scrutinize the books before they go to press to ensure they are accurate and contain nothing that could be offensive to anyone. This often means that something that would be inoffensive or quite normal in one culture has to be left out because it causes offense in another.
For instance, pigs and pork are considered disgusting in much of the Middle East where we sell books. Parents reading the books to their children would not be happy if there was reference to something they consider horrible. So if I’m illustrating a BBQ or something similar, I never draw sausages, because sausages are traditionally pork. However I am perfectly ok drawing hamburgers. Despite the porky name, hamburgers are traditionally beef. Beef is fine.
To avoid any issues, I just don’t draw certain things as a rule. Meat. Women exposing any flesh at all. Anything that could be remotely considered as dangerous. Any activity without the correct safety equipment in place. I’m very careful to draw people in cars wearing seat belts, people on bikes wear helmets etc.
It’s not just causing offense I have to worry about. Apparently there is a train expert in virtually every family, so once I had to completely redraw a book because it was set in the 1880’s and I drew a train in it that didn’t come into service until 1906.
Even so, the publisher often receives long, long letters pointing out all the litany of “mistakes” in the books, despite extreme caution and much careful scrutiny. It’s as if some people have made a career out of going through the books (we’ve done hundreds) and noted down anything they dislike. They count the number of dark-skinned people in a crowd. They check who is serving in shops and are they doing it correctly. (A fellow illustrator recently received a stiff letter about a man in a jewellery shop looking too stereotypically Jewish. This was bad, apparently). Is there something dangerous going on in the background? It must be exhausting.
The books might seem excessively PC, but it’s not because I or the publisher are sanctimonious or too cautious. It’s because the publisher wants to sell books worldwide and doesn’t want to spend their lives politely answering letters from “Outraged of Aberdeen”.
So the answer is that people as a rule don’t know the lengths children’s book publishers go to make sure what they publish is accurate and inoffensive.
I can see now just why the vast bulk of children’s books have become so bland and uninteresting. A guy like Hans Andersen would never get a story published today, and would in fact have been lynched. One more reason to consider self-publishing, though I suppose Andersen would have found himself promptly banned from Amazon as well.
