Introduction

Context

I have been a professional editor since 1989. In those 35 years I have worked across sectors—academic, professional, corporate, education and trade publishing—and in workplaces ranging from universities and commercial publishing houses to non-government agencies, and in private practice as a consulting editor, trainer and coach. If my career can be described as a journey, then I should mention a decade-long side trip into public health, academic and hospital-based research. During this time I continued to edit manuscripts for publication as well as doctoral research theses for assessment. In recent years my teaching, publishing and research interests have turned to social concerns within the publishing industry, including diversity, equity and inclusion (Otmar 2023), trauma narratives (Otmar 2024a, b; in preparation) and the use of generative artificial intelligence (Day et al. 2024). Since 2017 I have served as a member of a human research ethics committee with a national remit in the areas of defence and veterans affairs.

The aim of this paper is to give an insider’s perspective on the topic of trauma in publishing. I should clarify from the start that trauma and the publication of trauma narratives are not subjects that are widely or openly discussed within the industry, demonstrated by the dearth of research in this space. Consequently, we lack an industry-wide response, such as evidence-based frameworks, approaches and policies, and many of the citations in this paper necessarily reference the “grey” literature, including news reports, websites, blogs and other non-peer-reviewed publications.

Definitions

I start with a bold statement: that the publishing industry is awash with trauma and the publishing of books dealing with trauma represents both a commercial risk and a moral hazard for the industry.

Here, I use the definition of dealing with trauma as “to distribute or trade in” with due consideration of definitions for dealing with trauma: “to be about or to be on the subject of something” and “to take action in order to achieve something or in order to fix something” (Cambridge Dictionary Online). Thus, in seeking to raise awareness and highlight the risks, this paper is also a call to action.

The kinds of books I am referring to are those that recount or address trauma narratives across a wide range of genres and types from creative nonfiction to biographical accounts and self-help to fiction with traumatic plotlines, such as those dealing with war; interpersonal violence and abuse; violence and abuse perpetrated by the state, institutions and systems; environmental catastrophes; workplace trauma; loss; grief; and the contemporary concerns of modern life. They do not include crime fiction, horror, romance or erotica subgenres such as BDSM.

Trauma is medically defined as a physical injury, such as trauma to the head or other body part (e.g., Avital & Hanson 2021), and psychologically as a deeply distressing or disturbing experience (Procter et al. 2017). The research literature reveals that not everyone who experiences an injury or a stressful event will develop trauma, and that some people develop symptoms of trauma that resolve after a short period, while others experience long-term and ongoing effects (Procter et al. 2017). However, trauma theory and discourse are not without controversy. As Smith and Monteux (2023) highlight in their critical analysis:

[The] current turn to trauma … risks reifying another similarly reductionist understanding of human experience and how to respond to it. Despite its claims to be strengths-based, trauma discourse often focuses on symptomatology, highlighting dysfunction and pathology within individuals who have experienced violence and abuse.

Hence, there are different types of trauma and different ways of characterizing it. In this paper I hold trauma as individual and/or collective experiences that present as enduring, long-term psychological injury, including moral injury, psychosocial harm, and harm to people’s spiritual and general well-being. My assessment of the literature and evidence on trauma is that symptoms and evidence of harm can manifest in material ways, such as physically, mentally and financially, as well as in ways that are unique to the individual or as cultural and social influences.

To start, I introduce the context of trauma narratives as published in Australia and elsewhere, and briefly examine what trauma looks like in the publishing industry. Next, I offer an overview of what I call the three faces of trauma within the publishing context: recounting trauma as a vehicle for healing and reconciliation, trauma narratives as a commodity and vicarious trauma as an occupational hazard. I conclude with a call to action, including recommendations for research and policy.

Background

In Australia, recent decades have seen unprecedented, unexpected and previously unimagined social trends, such as changes in attitudes towards the importance of protecting human rights for everyone, the education and treatment of children and young adults, and legal and social responses to sexual violence and sexual abuse, sexuality and gender identity, to name just a few. Public responses have given voice to generations of people whose suffering had been silenced by formal and informal social mechanisms; these responses have included Royal Commissions into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, and into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, as well as other public and internal institutional inquiries. Worldwide, new and emerging technologies, social media and social campaigns such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #TimesUp and #OwnVoices have empowered citizens to take control of their narratives and tell their own stories. A great many of these campaigns have revealed, and continue to reveal, the nature and extent of traumas experienced by individuals, families, groups and entire communities.

Alongside these voices are those of First Nations and Indigenous peoples, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who have long sought to initiate and engage in public conversations about the individual, collective, historical and continuing trauma wrought by colonisation and the enslavement of peoples, directly and trans-generationally (e.g., Raphael et al. 1998; Yehuda and Lehrner 2018; The Healing Foundation 2021; Burgess et al. 2022). A related phenomenon is the complex, collective trauma of peoples, groups and communities who have endured (for example) extreme weather events, environmental catastrophes and human-induced crises such as terrorism, mass shootings, war, pandemics and the effects of poor engineering and building practices (Turmaud 2020; Williams 2016).

Trauma in the Publishing Workforce

Given the lack of published evidence, as mentioned, on the nature and extent of trauma manifesting in those who work in the publishing industry, it may be helpful to look at secondary traumas that have been examined in other sectors, including health care, education and social services. These traumas have been characterized as:

  • re-traumatization—a conscious or unconscious reminder of past trauma that results in the person re-experiencing the symptoms of the initial trauma event (Pazderka et al. 2021)

  • vicarious trauma—the cumulative effect of being exposed to someone else’s trauma or trauma narrative (Leung et al. 2023), which can disrupt the person’s sense of well-being, meaning or hope (McGarry 2017)

  • secondary traumatic stress—the emotional and behavioural effects of exposure to someone’s account of trauma, the symptoms of which may resemble those of the person who experienced the trauma or of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (McGarry 2017; Ogińska-Bulik 2023)

  • compassion fatigue—a symptom of burnout and emotional exhaustion evident through “anxiety, decreased job satisfaction, disempowerment, fatigue, feelings of confusion, headaches, hopelessness, impulsiveness, irritability, negativity, weight change” (Boggs 2024).

A recent study by Spence et al. (2023) found that content moderators on social media platforms experienced symptoms consistent with secondary traumatic stress and PTSD, and that they were “at heightened risk of various problems including compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma and burnout.” Aspects of the content moderation role resemble those of the publisher, editor, proofreader and other publishing personnel in that they must determine whether content meets the community’s standards and is suitable for its various audiences, intended and unintended. It is no stretch to consider that these effects may apply also to publishing personnel. But while studies such as these may offer a proxy to justify the need for this kind of research in publishing, they do not provide the evidence for understanding the risks, effects and necessary responses to trauma in the publishing workforce at the population level and in individual job roles, such as editing.

Writing Trauma as a Vehicle for Healing and Reconciliation

The management and treatment of psychological trauma was boosted in the 1980s with the development of a new theory and approach in psychotherapy, namely narrative therapy, by White and Epston (Morgan 2000). Narrative therapy uses language to give meaning to patient experiences of trauma, empowering them as the narrators of their own stories (Ekinci and Tokkas 2024). As a tool in narrative therapy, writing enables survivors of trauma to achieve self-defined goals, including catharsis, truth-telling, self-expression, externalisation of the trauma and “re-authoring” or “re-storying” (Morgan 2000; Everall 2021).

The Biographical Turn

Contemporaneous to the revolution in communications technologies that began in the 1980s, in the academy we also saw a phenomenon known as “the biographical turn,” in which biographical research became accepted and valued as a useful method of scholarship across the full spectrum of historical research and other disciplines and fields of study (Renders et al. 2017). The biographical turn was not the only reason, but it was certainly a critical factor in the increasing popularity of life writing genres.

Autobiography, biography, memoir, autofiction and other literary genres in life writing have long been accepted forms of “trauma healing.” Trauma theory offers an explanation for how people explore traumatic events and experiences through literary texts. Its early focus was resolutely Eurocentric until the early twenty-first century, when it sought to become decolonized and expanded to encompass, for example, intergenerational traumas originating in colonisation and enslavement, and also complicated with “attributes such as complicity, guilt, or shame” (Broome 2020; see also Andermahr 2015). Perhaps in extension to both published life writing and the trauma narrative (which may be published, or written only for therapeutic purposes) came new literary forms that sought to go beyond catharsis and self-expression to truth-telling and activism; literary activism is one of these forms, the “rape novel,” which emerged from about the 1970s, being a stark example (Tashjian 2019).

An emerging genre known as “heritage fiction” is enabling the voices of the descendants of immigrants from recent decades to be heard in the increasingly crowded market of biography and memoir. It is providing opportunities for people to tell their own stories, which often involve trauma, to set the record straight; to find compassion, healing and reconciliation; and to tell the stories of the individuals, families and communities who are no longer here to tell those stories. In contrast to historical fiction, which can perpetuate trauma through its tendencies to limit minoritized voices and propagate stereotypes and colonialist perspectives, heritage fiction enables a form of truth-telling when it is not possible to verify stories and facts according to convention in English-language publishing, or to expand on critical narrative elements such as the nature of relationships, discussions held between people and the details of events that were not recorded or whose records have been destroyed. Heritage fiction also provides a respectful and compassionate avenue for the publication of oral histories and family sagas in diaspora. (For examples of heritage fiction, see Cook [2023]; for a brilliant, and self-described, example in the Australian context, see Dao [2023].)

This emergence represents an important moment in the discourse on the nature of belonging, patriotism and nationhood, truth-telling and the recording of history. The biographical turn has also afforded minoritized and marginalized groups the opportunity to publish stories that previously were not sanctioned—legally or socially—to be aired in the public square that is book publishing. These are the true stories and the based-on-a-true-story narratives about all manner of trauma, including child abuse, child abduction, foundling experiences, human rights abuses, family violence, and repression of sexual and gender identities. Further, as an adjunct to the care provided by the helping professions, trauma narratives can be seen as performing an important social and therapeutic role in society, enabling practitioners to benefit from reading first-person and other personal accounts of trauma as a route to deeper understanding of the nature of trauma.

Trauma Narrative as a Commodity

There is a popular adage, that “trauma sells” (e.g., Stephenson 2022; Sehgal 2021), but where is the evidence? Sales and marketing data are tightly held assets in the publishing industry, and unless you are willing and able to pay the large sums demanded for extracts of such data, it is nigh impossible to say exactly how many books dealing with trauma are sold each year, or to analyse their collective content and influence.

In a recent interview on ABC Radio National’s The Bookshelf program, author Eleanor Limprecht, when asked about why she chooses to write historical fiction, responded: “I am just interested in the way the past reflects the present. And I love the stories that are hidden, that we don’t really read about in history books; the stories from the crevices of history.” This perspective may explain why histories, biographies and fictional accounts dealing with trauma are so popular (anecdotally, of course), and why there is such a vast array of subgenres that encompass trauma. The hidden stories are often those deeply intimate and painful personal histories that audiences want to read and to understand, to hold up to the light and examine as they reflect on what has—and has not—changed over time.

The publishing industry is facilitating the sharing of these stories and helping previously hidden voices to be heard, but the cynics among us might say that the industry is also not averse to profiting from this trauma. This points to the moral hazard of profiting from the pain of others while at the same time performing an important social role.

Politicians, athletes, minor celebrities and even influencers are nothing if they have not published a biography of one sort or another—whether they have written it themselves or with the assistance of a ghost writer. And if there is a trauma that has been overcome, it will most certainly sell (Kean 2017). There are many people who are obsessed with royalty and the lives of the royals, so it is not surprising that Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, is considered one of the most popular memoirs, ever (Gbogbo 2023). Many people read this work because it was the first time that the public was given access to the prince’s perspective of the traumatic events of his life in his own words—albeit via a highly acclaimed ghost writer (J. R. Moehringer).

Australian independent retailer Readings publishes the titles of bestselling books in its shops; the top ten in 2022 included seven titles that dealt with trauma and loss in one form or another (Readings 2023). Similarly, when Nielsen BookScan (2023) published its own top-ten titles for 2022, apart from a kids’ book on finance, a self-help book on tiny habits and a cookbook, the rest focused on topics involving trauma and loss. These lists tell the same story: that people are keen to buy and read books that deal with trauma and loss. An examination of the trends and effects of this on the collective psyche would be of interest but is outside the scope of this paper; suffice to say that trauma is surely a profitable business for the publishing industry, or it would not do it.

The reading public’s appetite for trauma narratives means that the publishing industry must continuously search for new stories and angles, and it has begun to reach toward authors from diverse and minoritized communities to satisfy that interest. Increasing awareness of Indigenous trauma narratives has ignited the public’s desire to uncover the truth about Australia’s bloody history (McBride & Smith 2023). On the face of it, this ought to be a good outcome, but as Wiradjuri writer and academic Jeanine Leane highlights, the increasing public interest in the experiences of minoritized and marginalized peoples, including those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, demands that those narratives fit narrow stereotypes about the individuals and peoples who experienced those traumas: “There is pressure to produce trauma and deficit narratives from minority groups at the expense of narratives of resilience and agency that readers tend to associate less with minorities.” (Dewey 2022) It is understandable that Australians would want to read first-hand accounts over dated historical tomes, particularly considering the history wars (e.g., Macintyre and Clark 2022), but this points to a risk that increasing commodification of trauma narratives in this way has potential for more harm than good.

Vicarious Trauma as an Occupational Hazard

In the industry itself, scant attention is given to the occupational risks faced by the publishing workforce producing trauma stories: the publishers, editors, literary agents, proofreaders, publicists and other personnel who are repeatedly exposed to trauma narratives and who regularly and deeply engage with the authors of these narratives, themselves survivors at different junctures on the road to recovery, healing and/or reconciliation. Thus, while the industry may be facilitating healing and reconciliation through the publication of trauma stories it is also perpetuating, or at the very least enabling, forms of vicarious trauma in its workforce.

It is not surprising that writing about the process of writing trauma proliferates in bookshops and online—it is the raison d’être of the writer to be published after all. But writing about the editing and production of trauma narratives is virtually non-existent.

We do know that the role of the editor of a trauma narrative extends beyond engagement with the text. Academic editor Camilla Cripps (2022a) writes that:

Contemporary editing requires us to be more than mere midwives to literary babes. Writing through trauma is trench warfare … Editing narratives of trauma means joining the author in the trenches … it is our responsibility as editors to facilitate cultural and philosophical change that will make space for safe, diverse, and inclusive practice.

Cripps (2022b) is undertaking research to test and validate “a set of trauma-informed guidelines for Australian and New Zealand editors.” The focus of this work is to enhance the editor’s competence and their ability to support the creators of trauma narratives. What, then, of the editor’s own well-being? Apart from the training I offer through annual workshops and professional supervision for editors of trauma narratives (Otmar 2024a, b) and a forthcoming guide (Otmar in preparation), I could find no evidence of others seeking answers to the questions of (a) how exposure to trauma narratives affects publishing personnel and (b) what can be done to ameliorate the risks and support the publishing workforce.

Re-traumatization and Emotional Labor

As mentioned, the publication of trauma narratives supports the empowerment of those who have experienced trauma and, in the process, seeks to inform and educate the public, but we are also seeing unintended effects of publication. When The Bookseller published the results of its author survey in 2023, it revealed that 54 percent of authors had reported “a negative experience of debut publication, anxiety, stress, depression and ‘lowered’ self-esteem” (Bookseller Editorial Team 2023). A writer who told the survey that they had been re-traumatized during the process of writing their memoir said: “I think I spent the majority of my book advance on therapy to deal with the treatment I endured.”

In recent years we have seen fiction, memoir and self-help resources by authors from across the spectrum of diversity. In addition to the aforementioned goals for publication, these authors are responding to the need to educate and raise awareness of the issues they face as members of minoritized and marginalized groups and communities. This is rightly classified as “unpaid emotional labour” (O’Byrne 2019). In essence, emotional labor is the work people must do to hide their discomfort and pretend to be accommodating, even at the cost of their own mental health (Peat and Ridge 2023). Authors from diverse backgrounds who write about their trauma may be torn between giving voice to their pain and shouldering the burden and the emotional labor of raising awareness and educating the world. Bri Lee’s memoir, Eggshell Skull (2018), was a runaway success prompting an “outpouring” of correspondence from readers disclosing their own traumatic experiences, some of them for the first time (Dewey 2022). This presents a profound problem for the authors of such works. Dewey (2022) writes: “More and more Australian writers are having to deal with the consequences of sharing their story in the public domain.” The problem this presents is that these authors now must be alert to disclosures by their readers, particularly if they feel a sense of responsibility to their reading audience. They may be asking themselves what, if any, action are they expected to take. And even if there is no action to be taken, the knowledge of someone else’s unresolved, probably untreated, trauma can take its toll on the writer. There may be a reminder in reading such correspondence of their own trauma, which has the potential to distress and perhaps re-traumatize them.

If the correspondence reaches the author through their publisher or agent, the staff who manage their correspondence will also be exposed to these readers’ disclosures of trauma—it might be the publisher or agent themselves who open the correspondence, or it could be a junior staff member, or an admin staffer whose only training and experience may be in dealing with business correspondence. The risks, as for other publishing staff, of re-traumatization, vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress would appear to be heightened when the staff member is an untrained junior. This presents a risk that ought to be unacceptable to the industry.

A Call to Action

Where do we start in addressing these complex and complicated issues? For one, we need solid, independent empirical research to explore and test best practices in engaging writers of trauma narratives in the publishing process, and in response workplace protocols for those who produce these works. The research being undertaken by Cripps (2022b) and colleagues and early evidence, such as that of Spence et al. (2023), are important, but they represent only the tip of the iceberg and a promising start for a body of research needed to provide the evidence base for development of trauma-sensitive approaches across the publishing supply chain. This evidence base will enable:

  1. 1.

    Universities and other education providers to equip their staff to create safe spaces in which students in writing, editing and communications disciplines can explore the risks and best practices inherent in writing and editing trauma narratives for publication. This includes pastoral care for the students, as well as professional development and professional supervision for their teachers. Some universities (e.g., Tsantefski et al. 2020; Gildersleeve et al. 2022) already have trauma-informed policies and frameworks in place to support student learning and teaching practice.

  2. 2.

    Workplace policies and protocols for the staff who work with both the traumatic content and the authors of such content. Editors need to be equipped with knowledge that enables them to work sensitively with authors, including those from diverse, minoritized and marginalized backgrounds. The Dart Center Style Guide for Trauma-Informed Journalism (Thompson 2021) provides an excellent model.

  3. 3.

    Development of best practice guidelines for publicists and other marketing professionals, so that they can support authors once their work is published, on the understanding that the support needed by the authors of trauma narratives may differ substantially from those of other authors.

There is a need for the publishing industry as whole, as well as individual publishers in their decision-making, to revisit the commodification of trauma narratives and to assess the risks versus benefits for authors, publishing personnel and readers in the publication of trauma narratives. The weighting of ethical approaches to publishing trauma narratives versus profit-making would provide a starting point for an industry-wide conversation.

Conclusion

We know from the health research literature that appropriately targeted trauma narratives offer important social and therapeutic benefits for health practitioners and their patients (for a comprehensive summary, see van der Kolk [2014]). It is possible that this approach may apply to readers more broadly, but we do not know near enough about the benefits and potential risks of reading trauma narratives. We also do not have solid, empirical evidence on whether and how working with trauma narratives and their authors can and does affect the publishing industry’s workforce. Robust and independent research is needed in this space.

We need robust research on the lived experience and the needs of authors who write about their trauma to enable evidence-based policies and practices to guide the publishing process. We need to test different approaches and methods that equip workers across the publishing industry: not only best practices in producing these titles, but also how to care for themselves and others in the process.