Unless you did it intentionally. Canadian characters could use dialog in Canadian spellings, Americans the American, and so forth. In JPod by Douglas Coupland, several of his characters were of Chinese ancestry, so every once in a while you'd run across a "牛屄" or "王八蛋."
With my mod hat off - I take the view that i'm a british writer therefore I write in british spelling even when i'm writing an american setting or an american character - I do change idiom pavement/sidewalk boot/trunk etc if an american character is speaking (or thinking or narrating)
But I believe it is normal. An American publisher publishing for American readers is very likely going to require that a novel written by a UK writer use American spelling. As a sideways example, if a U.K. writer writes a story for an American magazine, he’s probably going to have to follow that magazine’s style book. Now, if a person is self publishing, they wrote the style book, so of course they can do as they please. OP, I would suggest that you choose the country where you are most likely to be published, use that country’s spelling for everything but actual material written by a character, but also keep a record of the words and your chosen spelling. If you decide to switch your target country, hopefully that will mean just a little search and replace.
Yup. Every publisher I've worked with has been American and has expected American spellings, even when my stories are set in Canada.
Gosh, @BayView and @ChickenFreak —this goes deeper than I realised. I stand corrected. I can't speak for American/Canadian spelling requirements, but it certainly is true that British books get changed for American readership, and vice-versa, to some extent. Even JK Rowling had to allow changes to fit American audiences! ...although she now regrets making them. https://www.hp-lexicon.org/differences-changes-text/ If you're a famous bestselling author, apparently you CAN prevail on publishers to stop twiddling your spellings, though. Does anybody know when this convention began? I certainly was aware of British spellings and word usages when I read British authors as a child. So they must have 'allowed' the foreign spellings in American releases, to some extent. I don't have any of my childhood books with me, to check. But I'm very curious. Does anybody know about the origin of this convention? I love the reaction of David Franklin, the South African responder, partway down this page. My feelings exactly : https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/7917/do-publishers-really-need-to-translate-between-uk-and-us-english It's self-publishing for me. If I had any doubts before this, they are gone!
But he’s talking about changing words and phrases, not changing spelling. It’s not the same thing. “Color” being changed to “colour” would absolutely not make me reject a publishing deal.
I did quite a bit of research on this (believe me, I was shocked) and indeed, spelling changes are commonly tweaked. (As indicated by the screenshot I included of Ian Rankin's tweet.) It's just that I was also totally shocked by the changes of WORDS as well. I mean, where does it end? That could suck the life right out of a piece. I agree with that Franklin guy in the blog commentary I quoted. He's from South Africa, and grew up reading English written from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand AND Britain. He said he had no trouble figuring out that they were all different forms of English and that each culture has different names for things as well. He said it was a good learning experience. Surely something like a glossary of the most common name-differences could be included, if readers really are likely to be confused. Skip/dumpster, lift/elevator, etc. Either that, or a disclaimer at the start saying : "This is a British author who uses British spellings and British/Scottish names for things. We (the publishers) decided not to wreck the flavour of the writing, and have left the story as written." We all have our red lines, I guess. I would not allow my writing to be changed to accomodate this sort of thing—because where does it end? JK Rowling has said she wishes she had not allowed this to happen. Another plus for self-publishing, from my point of view. Even Ian Rankin, who makes a very good living as a bestselling Scottish and international author, is considering a switch to self-publishing, because HE is getting fed up with his writing being interfered with by publishers. He talked about the possibility of a switch at a book festival I attended. Rankin has clout, because he's a moneymaker for his publishers, and I'm glad to see he's pressuring them to drop this nonsense ...and winning. I wish more successful authors would do the same.
be aware however that as a self publisher you'll get it from readers instead (and you can't win that one whatever you pick someone won't like it) and unlike trad us selfers can't easily do different editions for different markets. On the OP - isnt the import of this that the trad publisher will change the spelling (and potentially words) to suit their preference? - that's what Rankin and go are upset about. That being the case the OP probably doesn't need to worry too much until they've got a deal so long as its consistent
Yeah. It's just that I get to choose whether to do it or not, if I self-publish. I can see that if a story is 'universal'—in that the setting might even be imaginary—these kinds of spelling changes, etc, might not matter a lot to the writer. However, to those of us who research our stories and set them deliberately in a specific time and place, this is really not acceptable. At least not to me. I've lived in Scotland for over 33 years now, and I wrote my novel here in Scotland, BUT it's set in the USA in 1886. I will be sticking with the American spellings and words, because it matches the time and place where my story happens. I can't imagine changing it to 'fit' a British audience.
Sorry for joining this late. As an American, I'm more concerned about consistency. I have often read works written with UK spellings and once I told myself that the spelling is correct where the writer is at I only had to look past the words looking a bit weird. To be fully honest here I personally would rather see the spellings stay the same when the region changed than to have to wrap my head around the different spellings in the middle of the story. Not having read all the posts in this thread I may have skipped over a post or two expressing what I just said, for that matter, it likely was expressed better than I did.
