I am thoroughly discouraged from trying to publish in the Jewish market. For one thing, I am very much into fantasy, and that’s not gonna happen. For another, I was brought up in a home where reading was considered something important – we are all bookworms and grew up reading clean, well written children’s literature and the classics (like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen). My writing style reflects the well-written English I was brought up with, and every piece I have tried submitting to Jewish magazines I have had the response “we feel your writing is not for us”.
Personally, I feel that my vocabulary is very good, I do not use a thesaurus whilst I am writing, unless I find myself wanting to find a better way of saying something, and I feel like these ‘popular and well known’ writers write with a dictionary by their side as they use long words that sound fancy, some of which I have never heard! And I pride myself on good, high class language in my own writing… Some of the words which I do understand are written in completely the wrong context as well…
I feel that unless you have been brought up reading decent literature, you are not going to produce anything outstanding for those who are very well read.
On a side point, two of my favourite Jewish novels are The Betrayal and The Outcast. The author is Israeli and they are translated into English. They are very well written (yes, they also have their flaws but they are so much better than anything else) and the plot is intriguing without having too many twists. I really enjoyed them.