Publishers and unique text characters

So I have this thing in my novels, which has to do with "æ" - I often use it instead of the letter a.

It has to do with the alphabet in the primary languages I have created for my novels and it comes up often in the names of places and characters that are other than human in origin. Meaning, my primary non human race uses this letter. Thus a reader can always tell that a name is based on the non human language rather than being based in the human language that would just use a or o.

But I worry that publishers won't want to bother with this, will see the unique character, and move on.

I dread having to change my manuscript back to "ah" like I used to write this character years ago.

Has anyone run across a problem like this before?

kuwisdelu said:

The more important question is whether your readers will find it distracting or know how to pronounce.

Click to expand...

Well, I've had tons of test readers by now, including two teenage girls (albeit nerdy ones) - and so far no complaints about the æ. In fact, I don't think they even noticed that it was there... Still, I do a lot of hand wringing over things like this.

Agents are not answering at all. So I have gone through dozens of versions of query letters and I am looking at minor details such as this. I ask myself: "Do they see that funny character and immediately react ***trashcan***!!!! "