For those who are not easily offended

One thing the general public doesn’t understand is that most successful authors spend a lot of time on promotion and marketing. It doesn’t matter if you are published through a traditional publishing house, or you have taken the indie route. Unless people know about your work, they can’t buy it.

To that end, I do a lot of research on different marketing methods and I’ve joined a number of online groups that share ideas and such with each other. In the process, I note how other authors promote their work.

Recently, an author I’d never heard of posted about their book. The cover was very sexually suggestive, and the description said, (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Filled with graphic sex and violence, this book is not for those who are easily offended.”

I paused at that statement, and thought about what it implies. In a sense, the phrase “someone who is easily offended” is a bit of an oxymoron. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word offend is defined in the following ways: “To transgress the moral or divine law” and “To cause difficulty, discomfort, or injury” and “To cause to feel vexation or resentment usually by violation of what is proper or fitting” and even “To cause pain to.”

If you look at all those definitions, a common theme is that a type of action creates something considered offensive. In the case of the book noted above, the author chose to create subject matter which many people would consider is not “proper or fitting.”

All of this begs the question, “Where is the line between offensive and not offensive?” To include the idea that people can be “easily” offended implies that the line may be different for each person. In other words, the phrase suggests it is the nature of each person who determines what is offensive and what is not.

For example, one person may find it offensive if the “F” word is used in a movie. Someone else might care less if the “F” word is used. Does that mean the person who doesn’t want to hear the “F” word is “easily offended?” That seems to be the implication.

But if you look again at the definition, offense is tied to more of a general concept of what is okay, and what isn’t okay. Society, as a whole, has certain things it will put up with and certain things it won’t.

Can you imagine someone who robbed a bank using this as a defense: “Your Honor, I see nothing wrong with putting money from a teller’s drawer into my bag. I even told them ahead of time I was going to do it. The bank is being too easily offended by my actions.”

That concept seems ridiculous, no? Is it any more ridiculous for an author then to write something that could cross a generally accepted line of what is offensive and then blaming it on the reader if they don’t like it because the reader is too “easily offended?”