The amount of sex in a book also has a lot to do with its acceptance in the mainstream, especially if written by a male author. Someone like Stephen McCauley, who has only published in the mainstream, writes books about men who by and large never have sex. (I published an excised sex scene from Paul Russell's THE COMING STORM in my anthology THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF GAY EROTICA from Carroll & Graf.)
There are exceptions, but they are usually imports from other markets, especially the UK, where class often comes into play: like Alan Hollinghurst's THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY.
In general, it is easier for a book with gay-male content to be successfully published in the mainstream if it is written by a woman, in large part because a heterosexual male READER can thereby be seen reading the book without his own sexuality being called into question (as would happen if a purportedly-heterosexual male reader is seen reading a gay male novel written by a male--and thereby supposedly gay--author).
Stephen McCauley's characters have sex at least a couple of times in each book: but he doesn't linger with the sex act, he just makes one or two observations about it.
Well,Samuel Delaney is pretty darn popular. I'm with you-- write a really darn good book. That'sthe only pub hope for most of us, regardless of preference. PS, I hope you've read "Will you be my POSSSLQ?" By Erma Bombeck. So much alphabet soup out there...
I don't think minorities are best served by creating specialist minority fiction. There's a time and place for 'gay fiction' but I'd much rather have interesting characters who are characters first, gay second. And in place of 'gay' insert 'black/asian/female/geeky/anything.'
It's not about promoting the minority, it's about promoting the book. Niche fiction exists so that books can more easily find their market. How would you ever find the fantasy you want to read if there were no science fiction and fantasy shelves in the bookstore or library?
What appears to happen is the opposite - and an understanding that the identified subgroup had better stay outside the mainstream.
I'm not saying that categorisation is always a bad thing. Personally, I prefer to know that I don't have to read my way through graphic sex scenes when I pick up a mystery, family saga, or fantasy story. What appears to happen in the romance genre is that there is a special category named 'black' (or 'African-American') and another named 'Hispanic' and never the twain shall be sold to a mainstream line or shelved on the mainstream shelves, for God Forbid that any good 'ordinary' reader should have to grapple with a heroine who is black or hispanic. Yes, it might make it easier for someone who wants to _particularly_ read about either of those groups to find them, but... should they? There are many ways of grouping humanity, and I would bloody well hope that two people who live in the same street and who went to the same school have more in common than someone who lives at the other end of the country in a completely different community. Regardless of the whether the distribution is white, black, white or straight, gay, straight respectively.
I think you (and big publishers in general) are underestimating the market for this. Amazon keeps suggesting yaoi manga after yaoi manga to me. The manga publishers have clearly found it profitable to pick up and translate a bunch of yaoi and shounen ai stories, from bigger names like CLAMP to probably any sort of yaoi they could find that another company hadn't picked up.
I'm not surprised to hear YA is making strides in this, since that would seem to be one of the primary points of overlap with the manga audience. The other being sf/f.
I'm not a romance reader, but I can understand why the fans are pounding on the door waiting to be let in. These stories are primarily romance stories told by women for women. Why wouldn't they turn to the romance section to look for more?
The first big publisher to publish a line of m/m books by women for women is going to hear 'kaching!' Provided they've understood the market properly.
Me, I'm kind of rooting for one of the smaller publishers to become a player. They know where it's at and it's always fun to cheer for the underdog.
>Amazon keeps suggesting yaoi manga after yaoi manga to me.
I know that Amazon isn't the basis for your entire argument, but it's difficult to trust Amazon recommendations as an indicator of the market. They've made targeted marketing into an art form. If you buy one book about frisbee golf, you're going to be recommended pretty much every other frisbee golf book out there.
I know Anna's said it many times before: Amazon sales are usually a very tiny part of the market.
I used Amazon because I don't get to bookstores that often, and usually when I'm there, I'm there for something specific. When I browse, it's on Amazon or other online bookstores. Also, it's not clear when browsing in a bookstore what's shounen ai/yaoi and what isn't. At least not just by looking at spines. In the Amazon recommendations, it's often pretty clear.. they put (yaoi) after a lot of them and I'm shown covers, not spines.
It's the sheer quantity of different yaoi manga Amazon recommends that surprises me. A couple of years ago, you wouldn't have seen that. Manga translation has exploded and I'm glad to see a variety. It used to be all you'd get was shounen/boy's manga like Dragonball.
And to respond to the most recent post, I don't read manga because I like manga and graphic novels. I read them because I'm interested in the stories that are being told there. Stories I can't get anywhere else (except anime and some Japanese live action shows). I've also read a few modern Japanese novels in translation. They're a different animal from American/British/Canadian/Australian/other English novels, granted, but they're.. perhaps a step from manga towards English novels. I would absolutely love to see more Japanese novels translated, particularly any shounen ai/yaoi ones!
The Japanese language and culture interests me, but it's also just how many stories have GLBTQ characters. Some good, some bad, some main characters, some side, some comedic, and some tragic. They're relatively easy to find in manga and anime. They're a lot more difficult to find in English fiction.
I attended the RT convention in Daytona Beach last month. While there I was tracked down by a staff member of one of the NY publishing houses and questioned about my M/M erotic romances, specifially, A BIT OF ROUGH, a 2005 Passionate Plume Finalist for the RWA erotic chapter. This person loved M/M stories, understood their appeal to staright women and was actively seeking supporting facts and numbers to show her CEO that the next big market was going to be M/M erotic romances and that they should get on it. I call my novels Manlove. It bridges the space between gay fiction (written for men mostly by men) and slash (written mostly by ametuers-some very good, some not so good). Staright women can walk into a store and ask for a 'manlove' romance without feeling as uncomfortable as they might feel asking for gay fiction. It's all about preception and what people are at ease with. I think there will be a market for it in the near future in all genres. At least I hope so, became I LOVE writing it. Laura Baumbach http://www.laurabaumbach.com
Yes, I'm sure men do, but women don't. And having a more romantic story hasn't stopped men from buying my books. It's probably the highly explicit and frequent sex that attracts all of them.
I write M/M erotic romances. I recieve fan mail from both gay men and straight women. My work is on the shelves at A Differnt Light, LA biggest gay book store, and avidly purchased by both genders on line from publishers, Amazon and B&N. I call what I write 'manlove' because it had more emotional romanctic elements than traditional gay fiction does, (I also write for gay online sites, I know the difference) and is focused on the male/male relationship as the main characters. The audience is out there in both the gay and romance markets.
Sybaritic Press, an LA based small press. I'll be doing a book signing in WeHo in September, during the WeHo Book Fair. Sybpress will have a booth there. I believe they are also planning a get together with other like-minded authors in the area and seeing about a booksigning at A Different Light. Nothing is firm at this point though.
Once again, you are doing an awesome service writing about this stuff and giving your perspective away for free.
*It is interesting how your basic discussion translates well into other mediums. I help run a local theater company. People keep wanting to do original works or obscure, post-modern plays... and they get fussy when companies are reluctant to produce their work. We put on Dangerous Liaisions instead... risky, company-mission-fulfilling, and something no one was willing to do... but obviously EMINENTLY marketable... the perfect storm. And we made fistfulls of cash (for a non-profit community theater company, $5k is fistfuls!) Writers should look for similar opportunities and remember that writing a great book and having people read it are two very seperate battles.
*I always thought "slash" referred to taking existing characters from other properties and having those characters have sex. (i.e. "Kirk/Spock Slash, Buffy/Willow Slash, Dr. Crusher/Counselor Troi") While this was the kind of thing I would have LOVED to find on the bookshelf when I was fifteen... I wouldn't pay $6.50 for the paperback today.
"I always thought 'slash' referred to taking existing characters from other properties and having those characters have sex."
And purists still use the term only in that fashion. However, there are now so many original fiction writers (i.e. non-fan-fiction writers) who are publishing stories in the slash community that the term "original slash" is sometimes used to refer to their works. As somebody pointed out above, these same stories, if published elsewhere, magically become gay fiction.
I too am a little surprised that there isn't a bigger market for Gay Romance. I've been reading Yaoi scanslations for many years and the readership and number of titles translated seems to be growing exponentially. You can now find Yaoi/Shounen Ai with the other manga in bookstores (which has ALSO become grown huge over a few years). Of course Yaoi ranges from basically hetero (one of the pair looks like a girl and just *happens* to have male genitalia) to more sensitive, realistic portrayals.
I do notice, however, that a lot of the Yaoi readers are my age, late teens/early twenties, so I wonder if that has anything to do with it. Or how, as my age group and those yaoi readers get older, the market will change.
As an aside - I agree with some others, I need my HEA for romance. The whole reason I started reading romance was after one too many fantasy novels killed off the character I most emphathized with and left me in tears for days. Never mind the agony of a couple taking 6 books to decide they won't work out (while killing ogres or something).
Point them in Kensington's direction. It might be privately owned but last I heard it's still a "mainstream" house. Their website actually has a Gay/Lesbian section, if that's any indication of their support for the genre. http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/kensington/catalog.cfm?dest=dir&linkid=103&linkon=section
It's so *good* to see someone in the blogosphere carrying the banner of realism about publishing. I have to believe that you are helping to reduce the number of writers who break their hearts trying to will the world to be more as they would have it be.
I only wish you had the time to join some of the publishing listservs and perform some of the same reality checks over there.
Which ones? I belong to a number of them, but am always happy to join more of them to spread the word about the reality of publishing (naturally, directing them over here...heh) :)
There are bunches of good lists/discussion groups on publishing. Some of the larger are: --Publish-L (www.publish-l.com): I don't participate in this one myself. It stays on topic and doesn't get too rambunctious, but has, I hear, lower levels of activity.
--Pub-Forum (www.pub-forum.net): A flame-prone, disgression-plagued watercooler for far flung publishers of modest or smaller size. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the fireworks on weekends. Somewhere around 500 members, and 700 posts/month. [Standard Disclosure: I was shanghaied into being a listmom here, so I'm biased.]
and the Yahoo Groups --Self-Publishing: the largest and most active group of which I am aware. 2,500 members, not all self-publishers, but few making more than $500k per year in sales, about 1,000 posts/month. Rigorously moderated (I know, 'cause I'm one of the moderators) and on-topic, but the knowledge level runs from rank beginners through folks with decades under their belts.
--SmallPub-Civil: Smaller, less active off-shoot of Publish-L, via its child Pub-Forum.
--PODpublishers: Big, active, focused exclusively on niche houses using POD printing to reach tiny market segments.
--Ebook-Community: Big, active, focused on ebooks only. Wear a flak jacket if you question the canons, but interesting nonetheless.
Page 2 of 2