From Alcott to Zott: How Women Are (Still!) Both Too Much and Not Enough for Commercial Fiction
This is the true story of two U.S. based book PR firms firing me for my women co-protagonists being too “complicated.” The very women characters in my novel now celebrated by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, the Times Literary Supplement, LoveReading, GoodReads, and and librarians calling it “easily one of the top books I’ve ever read.” If you can relate as a scandalized “difficult” woman (or scandalized-adjacent), read on.
💃🏻 Women in commercial literature are often expected to be just the right amount of everything—strong, but not too pushy; flawed but not unlikable; complex, but still digestible for a broad audience.
You know: “quirky.” Mac n’ cheese (with maybe some kale tossed in) to sell just-so 80,000-word delicious and nutritious bricks.
This is not a news. History has long dictated which women are worth remembering, how their characters ought to be framed, and how their stories should be told. So when I uncovered my great-great-grandfather’s diary and letters—painstaking records of his business dealings, daily reflections, even weather reports—I was disappointed, though not terribly surprised, to find that his wife wasn’t even named.
She was a shadow. A footnote in his grand narrative.
The evaporation of women is not just a thing of the past—it insidiously persists in modern literature.
Interestingly, this erasure and scrutiny of female characters is not equal across genres. In literary fiction—where books are positioned for critical discourse rather than mass-market appeal—female protagonists are often afforded more space to be complex and contradictory, without the same immediate pressure to be widely “likable” or easily marketable. While even literary fiction has seen its share of resistance toward “difficult” women, the commercial stakes heighten the demand for palatability.
📚 Think of Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, or Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. These books feature female protagonists who are angry, selfish, conflicted, or morally ambiguous—yet, their complexity was not an obstacle to publication. These were books meant to be assigned in classrooms, dissected in literary essays, and discussed in academia.
💰 But when it comes to commercial fiction—books that need to sell, to boost a publisher’s bottom line, to earn their place on prestige bestseller lists—the scrutiny shifts. Female protagonists are expected to be not just compelling but “rootable” in a way that reassures rather than challenges readers.
It’s not that thorny women don’t exist in commercial literature—of course they do. But a pattern emerges: when they do appear, their authors often face more push-back, their marketability is questioned, and their success requires greater advocacy than that of their literary fiction counterparts.
It happens when publishers, marketers, and influencers insist that female protagonists be smoothed out and streamlined into something “relatable.” It happens when ambitious, rule-breaking women are labeled as “difficult” or “unlikable”—a problem male characters rarely face.
It also happened to my novel. Now. In 2025.
When I submitted The Covert Buccaneer (a Booklife, Publishers Weekly Editor’s Pick and recommended by Kirkus alongside The Women)—a dual-timeline feminist historical saga—for early marketing discussions with two US-based marketing teams, I was met with demands for “adjustments.” Could I make my female protagonists more consistent? Could I simplify their motivations—especially around sexuality, relationships, and motherhood—so readers wouldn’t be confused, wouldn’t struggle to “relate” to them?
What they meant was:
✅ Make them digestible.
✅ Make them palatable.
✅ (Make their job easy for plug-and-play marketing).
I stood my ground. Not out of stubbornness. But because capitulating to such pleas is precisely how women’s stories have been routinely sidelined.
The Women Who Wouldn’t Stay Small
The women in The Covert Buccaneer refuse to shrink. Not out of hubris or fearlessness or (gasp!) self-confidence. But out of necessity.
📖 Theodora “Teddy” Ellis, my 19th-century heroine, is a cross-dressing polyamorous miner, suffragist, and San Francisco real estate developer who infiltrates male-dominated spaces in disguise, survives the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and fights for women’s rights and healthcare for indigent communities alongside her Miwok BFF.
Had she lived today, she might have had a label for her identity. Instead, she simply lived it.
📖 Ellie Benvenuto, my modern heroine, is a single mother, a climate migrant attorney threatened with job insecurity, and a special needs parent. Her life is a tightrope. She also exhausted, unsure, and at times resentful of the impossible demands placed on her. She is strong, yes—but not in the effortless, inspiring 5-second-reel TikTok way that publishing and marketing teams often prefer female protagonists to behave.
Both women are deeply moral, compelling, and likable—but not in a way that is simple. They’re actually easy to cheer for, yet at times make the reader feel frustrated by them. They are contradictory, ambitious, uncertain, and grappling with being their full selves—and that is what makes them worth reading. They are real because they are based on real women and real lived experiences.
The Cost of Making Women’s Stories “Easy”
The pressure to make women’s narratives “easier” permeates the publishing ecosystem.
✔ Agents want manuscripts that are easy to sell to big 5 publishers.
✔ Publishers want to market to broad audiences.
✔ Publicists want to pitch stories in a 12-second, digestible Book-Tok using an existing click-bait formula for scalability (low effort: high yield).
✔ Influencers want characters they can champion without much internal conflict to appease the algorithm gods.
But when we sand down a character’s rough edges, smooth out their contradictions and rewrite their struggles into something less faceted, what we’re really doing is shrinking them to something for history to contain. And that’s exactly how women’s histories have been lost in the first place—erased not by omission, but by dilution. When we make women easier to consume, we make them easier to forget.
Publishing’s Pattern of Rejecting “Difficult” Women
Take a look at what publishing has long deemed “too much” for mainstream audiences:
🚺 Women who defy traditional relationships.
🚺 Women with certain sexual proclivities and choices will be judged as “not feminist”
🚺 Women who struggle with motherhood (and dare to admit it).
🚺 Women who exercise power in the outside world, yet remain riddled with internal self-doubt.
This isn’t just my experience. Legacy publishing has a long history of skepticism toward complex, unapologetic female characters.
📚 Consider Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell—Now considered a classic, Scarlett O’Hara was deeply controversial in her time. Unlike the traditional, self-sacrificing heroines of historical fiction, Scarlett was calculating, materialistic, and willing to manipulate to get what she wanted—whether that meant marrying for financial security, running a business in a man’s world, or refusing to be tamed by love.
📚 The Joy Luck Club (1989) by Amy Tan was a commercial success, but early criticism—especially from within the Asian-American literary community—argued that it played into stereotypes about Chinese mothers and daughters. It also fueled debates about who gets to tell Asian-American stories and what mainstream publishing deems “marketable.”
📚 More recently, Lessons in Chemistry (2022) by Bonnie Garmus was initially met with skepticism. Protagonist Elizabeth Zott is brilliant, blunt, and unwilling to conform. Publishers weren’t sure how to categorize a novel that was both feminist and deeply emotional, both sharp-witted and melancholic. Yet, it was precisely for her contradictions readers adored her.
📚 The backlash isn’t limited to historical fiction. Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You sparked heated debate because protagonist, Alice Kelleher, actively resists the “likable” heroine trope. Alice is depressive, detached, and at times outright difficult. She’s uninterested in performing for readers’ approval. But that resistance to easy packaging is what makes her so compelling.
And If You’re A Feminist Protagonist, You’d Better Be All-In
📚 Even when we have a clearly feminist protagonist in commercial literature, she must be unwavering across contexts. Take Jo March from Little Women. She was widely embraced as a feminist literary icon. But the moment she made a personal choice that didn’t align with feminist expectations (marrying Bhaer), outrage ensued. Louisa May Alcott admitted she had to write that ending because a single, independent woman was unthinkable in commercial fiction at the time.
📚 More recently, in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Katniss is a perfect case study in commercial fiction’s packaging of feminist heroines: strong, fiercely independent, and a survivor. But she’s also emotionally repressed and largely removed from personal desire. She resists romance, rarely expresses vulnerability, and is defined almost entirely by her fight against the Capitol. Backlash ensued when she showed hesitation, fear, or internal conflict—especially regarding Peeta and Gale. Many critics and fans demanded she be a consistent feminist warrior: uncompromising, mission-driven, morally certain. The expectation was clear—if she faltered, wanted protection, admitted to exhaustion, her feminist credibility would be suspect.
This is just another expression of the same discomfort—publishing’s wariness of ‘difficult’ women. When did we decide that “feminism” in fiction means a woman who never stumbles, never submits, never changes her mind—is unflappably consistent and stalwart? Is that really “relatable”? Or is it just manageable—binary for social media scrollers, not readers?
One American PR team questioned my character Ellie in the bedroom. “I couldn’t help but feel disappointed in her,” my contact wrote. “She’s doing all these things in the world, and it seems incongruous for her to just surrender [in the bedroom]. This potentially reads as non-feminist and perpetrating stereotypes of women as sexually submissive.”
❎ “Just surrender.”
❎ “Non-feminist.”
❎ “Incongruous”
My response:
Ellie hasn’t come into her power yet. It would be incongruous for the reader to see her dominate the bedroom. I’m crafting duality with this scene—not congruity. We can be staunch feminists who, behind closed doors, have facets that need to be held by a lover who will safe-keep both them and us. I’m not perpetuating stereotypes, I’m telling women that getting what you want and need sexually—without apologizing—is plenty feminist.
They fired me anyway. So I turned to the UK—where they didn’t blink. They lunged.
Book marketing scions continue to underestimate readers, assuming that audiences want streamlined women—that characters must be either aspirational or cautionary tales. But the success of Mitchell, Tan, Garmus, Rooney, Alcott, Collins, ME, and countless others proves that readers crave complexity.
Why is that? Perhaps it helps them understand themselves.
As it turns out, “complicated” women are relatable.
So what gets American marketers’ panties in such a twist that they still treat female complexity as a marketing liability rather than an asset?
Why Women Deserve To Be “Too Much”
🏆 Because we’ve earned it.
🏆 Because real women do not fit easy, pre-packaged narratives.
🏆 Because making a character relatable shouldn’t come at the cost of making her real.
The (historically real) women of The Covert Buccaneer don’t conform to expectations. Nor are they necessarily confident about bucking them. Their lives aren’t easy to summarize. They make choices that defy social norms. They love, they fail, they push forward. They exist in full contradiction—just like the real women history has too often cast aside.
Teddy, living in the late 19th century, knows that women like her are denied space in the written record. A woman who wears men’s clothing and stakes mining claims is already an anomaly. A woman who enters partnerships on her own terms, crosses cultural boundaries, and refuses to shrink herself into the mold of marriage and domesticity is nearly unthinkable.
💃🏻 Yet, these women existed. They aren’t figments of romanticized revisionist history, but real, flesh-and-blood figures who made impossible choices every day. Women who lived openly as men to access freedom; who cross-dressed and smoked cigars to keep company in male spaces; who stood on the front lines of labor movements, suffrage campaigns, and legal battles—but were later omitted from the mainstream narrative because their stories were too inconvenient, too difficult to categorize, too hard to sell.
Ellie, a modern woman, faces a different kind of erasure. She’s “doing it all”—at great personal cost. She is a devoted special needs mother, but that doesn’t erase her frustration or exhaustion. She’s an advocate for the marginalized, but that doesn’t shield her from self-doubt—especially when confronting past transgressions committed against her. She is deeply moral, but questions if she’s making the right choices. She resists the confines of traditional marriage—which she views as “a product leveraging guerrilla tactic marketing from a very young age. A product of security and legitimacy, a trap for women, and a way for men to look good to other men”—even as she grapples with the unexpected pull of new love.
In short, she is messy, conflicted, and wholly real.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that humanity—especially when it comes to women—is never as binary or breezy as social media buzzwords urging us to “speak our truth” and “conquer our fears” would have us believe. Nor should it be. Look, we’re all adults here. Can we quit pretending that we aren’t both altruistic and selfish; fighters and lovers; virtuous and janky; inclusive and biased?
I wonder: How many exquisitely written, fully realized women’s narratives we’re missing because marketers deem them too challenging for their molds? How many manuscripts sit on hard drives, unread—because they defy ready packaging?
I do not write to comfort. That’s what a personal journal is for. Or, as for my character Teddy in The Covert Buccaneer—scribbling from the ashes of the Chicago Fire, to the plains and mining towns on the frontier, to the ruthless Klondike, to the splendid atrium of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel—a diary.
🔥 I write to provoke thought.
🔥 To ignite discussion.
🔥 To illuminate untold stories—past and present.
If it raises a few hackles? I must be doing something right.
