Can I work for a secular publisher?

[brigidmarie]

I want to work for a publishing company, specifically one that produces novels. However, I doubt I would be allowed to choose the projects I work on, and I know that all secular publishers produce at least some works that are anti-Catholic or borderline pornographic. Does this mean I cannot work for a secular publisher? If I can work for such a company, how bad would a work have to be before I could not morally proofread it or write blurbs for it?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

Only if a book were so morally problematic that it had absolutely no redeeming value and it was positively poisonous to Christian faith and morals, would you face the possibility that you might have to ask your boss to excuse you from working on the project. Although there have been horror stories in recent years – such as with The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown and If I Did It by O. J. Simpson – most mainstream publishers of literary and commercial books do not often seek to publish books that are utterly unfit for publication from a moral perspective.

In preparation for a potential career in this industry, you may wish to track down a copy of How to Read a Dirty Book by Irving and Cornelia Sussman. The Sussmans were lay Catholics who taught drama and literature at UC Berkeley in the 1960s and wrote this book to educate Catholics on how to read novels with morally problematic material. The book is out of print now, but you should be able to find it through interlibrary loan or through used-book services.

Recommended reading:

Can Catholics read explicit novels?
Questions about Evaluating and Watching Movies by Steven Greydanus (scroll)