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Selling Books with GLBTQ Characters

Why can't you sell your "gay" book into the mainstream? Here are some thoughts on it.

Comments

[julesjones]

You told me a while back that part of the problem with selling "gay romance for women" is that the bookshops simply don't know where to file it -- and now that I have a print book out, I'm seeing this up close and personal... The m/f print books from Loose Id go in the romance section, mine seems to go in Gay Interest if they order it at all. :-(

The "original slash" thing came out of trying to say that here were books that gave the same emotional kick as slash but with original characters. Calling them gay romance tended to get, "oh, I've read gay porn, and I'd rather read slash." It's been picked up by the romance readers who weren't familiar with fanfic, and some of them now seem to think "slash"="gay romance for women" without realising what the term actually means in its original environment. One or two of them are going to get a shock the first time they wander into a slash archive and stumble across the stuff that doesn't conform to romance genre conventions. There's a reason I don't tell my profic fans where to find my Blake's 7 slash stories. :->

[myriad69.livejournal.com]

Wait, are you the Jules Jones who co-wrote The Sydicate series from Loose Id? Because I freaking LOVE LOVE LOVE that and was just going to post here to mention to Anna that I recently purchased some stuff off Loose Id and it's fantastic and then I thought, oh, not the forum, and oh crap I'm babbling.

Seriously, I am completely and utterly in love with Allard and Vaughn and now know bits of the stories off by heart. Honestly. I'm lame that way. But I've read each "book" about three times each and get warm fuzzies when I even think about these boys and their snarky awesome love. And scorchingly hot sex.

(omg sorry anna for jamming your journal with my fannish squeeing!)

[julesjones]

The print book I was talking about is the omnibus paperback of volumes 1 & 2 of The Syndicate. :-) And yes, it's Anna's LJ but she'll probably be understanding when I say that I welcome any and all fannish squeeing about the geekpr0n. It's still a novelty for me to be on this side of the squee. :-)

If you want to squee at Alex, she's predatrix. And yes, that's the fanfic Predatrix of various fandoms - she never bothered getting a seperate LJ for her profic persona.

[eroticjames.livejournal.com]

Actually original slash is only talked about when you are in a Slash contex.. in order to tap into what people are used to hearing in that arena. So, at a slash con you identify as Original Slash (and many of us got our start in the FanFic slash arena btw). Depending on the context it is also referred to it as Homoerotic Romance - which has its own buttons. Many of the e-publishers are adding Homoerotic romance to thier lineups. Phaze, Venus, Loose-Id, Samahine, Extasy, Liquid Silver, Coyote Moon. Then there's Torquere and Iris Press who survive exclusively on it.

[julesjones]

Yup, but because we also talk about it in mixed venues online, some of the romance folk who aren't familiar with fanfic have picked up the term, and are using it without really understanding where it comes from or that it's not identical to "gay romance" or "homoerotic romance". (A lot of my slash stories are *not* romance in the way a romance fan understands the term.) I suppose I should rethink using it in my LibraryThing profile, but I subconsciously expect the majority of people reading that to understand the context.

M/m has been part of the Loose Id lineup since the beginning. I don't normally talk about this in public because it Sets A Bad Example To Young Writers, but I was actively recruited by one of the editors who was looking for material for the LGBT section of the catalogue before they opened their doors.

(Don't try this at home, kids. Not all approaches from strange agents/editors are scams, but a lot of them are. I knew how to run a basic sanity check.)

[eroticjames.livejournal.com]

"Want some candy little author..."

Basically, there isn't a good name for it. Gay Romance is not the same as Romances written for women featurning gay characters. And homoerotic is misleading as some of it is as tame as a 70's era romance novel.

[mroctober.livejournal.com]

I have asked a number of gay men and none of them tend to read the romances released by these e-pubs.

[eroticjames.livejournal.com]

That's because women read it.

[mroctober.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I have always had trouble believing the characters involved as real gay men.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

That's not really the reason, though. The Scott and Scott romances are written by men for men and the characters are not especially realistic.

I've been pondering why there are these different ways of writing romantic stories about gay men, with these very defined conventions and audiences, and all I can get is a thisness about it. But there are:

-- archived amateur gay coming-of-age romances whose creators and audience appears to be mostly very young gay men (I think formerly these were mostly less young than they are now), with a liberal sprinkling of very young women and another group of women of a matronly age, mostly not involving any money changing hands besides donations to support the archives:

-- fanfiction and fiction in a fanfiction mode, formerly amateur but developing a professional character, largely written and read by women, with a sprinkling of men, mostly published as e-fiction:

-- print romances largely lighthearted and I think mostly written and read by men, distributed in the usual book channels:

And I forget, but there was something else. Oh, yes: YA novels most of which are also "problem" novels. I don't know but I think these are mostly read by very young women.

So there's sort of something for everybody who wants to read about men loving men. And you could go off on another tangent about what all these different kinds of people are getting out of these stories.

But notice that some of these genres are less lucrative than others.

[mroctober.livejournal.com]

I will say the Scott and Scott books made a brief foray into mainstream but the experiment apparently failed.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I don't even understand what this means. All I know about Scott and Scott's distribution is their books turn up in my regular bookstore, and they're shelved on the Gay Men's Fiction shelf.

[mroctober.livejournal.com]

A mainstream publisher released a version of Hot Sauce hoping to capitalize on the success of the series. The sales were very disappointing from what my editor friend told me. So they are back to self-publishing.

[julesjones]

I do know gay men (and have received fan mail from gay men) who read both slash fanfic and slash-a-like pro romance aimed at women because it gives them the emotional content they're not finding in the mainstream gay material aimed at gay men. They're a minority, yes, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

[mroctober.livejournal.com]

I never said they don't exist. And I'm curious that they cannot find such elements in gay fiction (which is often very present in the better works). All I said is that I have polled and found the % to be very low. Even the publishers acknowledge their readers are women. I think the gay characters they present are not like any gay men I know.

[duskpeterson.livejournal.com]

With the exception of Torquere, all of the romance publishers I know of aim their advertising at women, so it's not surprising that they don't pick up many male readers.

In general, I'd agree with you about the contemporary male characters in these stories acting differently from the way most contemporary men act, but it depends very much on which author you read. I once had a lengthy discussion with a bisexual guy who was absolutely convinced that a gay romance author we both liked was male. The author was writing under a gender-neutral pen name, so there was no way to tell. We eventually found out that the author was female. "This is weird!" my friend said. "She writes about men as if she was inside our heads."

Another gay romance author I know of is routinely referred to by male pronouns in online reviews because her male characters are so masculine. Again, she writes under a gender-neutral pen name, so there's no way to tell.

A third author I know of, who used to post gay stories at erotica newsgroups, told me that she often received letters from male readers who assumed she was male. Gender-neutral pen name, once again.

On the other hand, I've been fooled the other way round. I've encountered authors in the slash world whom I assumed - from their characteristically slashy style - were female and discovered they weren't.

Have you read Jim Merrett's Advocate essay on this topic, which was reprinted in Flesh and the Word 2? In the essay, he (somewhat naively) expresses astonishment upon learning that some of the authors whose stories he's been jacking off to were written by women. I believe there's a similar phenomenon in the heterosexual romance publishing world, in which male authors hide behind female pen names.

I know that you didn't deal in your post with the issue of the genders of the authors, but I think perceptions about authors often color how their works are received. I write under my nickname, which is gender-neutral. Half the correspondence I receive from readers assumes I'm male; half assumes I'm female. Surprise, surprise, the readers who assume I'm male have encountered me in the gay world, while the readers who assume I'm female have encountered me in the slash world. Both sets of readers, no doubt, are making assumptions about writers' gender styles in accordance with what gender they think I am. And no doubt someone out there right now is making assumptions about whether my gay male characters are authentic or not, based on whether they believe me to be a gay man.

So what we're seeing here, I think, is not a conflict between gay male reading matter versus female reading matter; as ritaxis suggested, it's a matter of stylistic conventions that govern particular genres. Slash adopts many of the conventions of fantasy literature, and that genre - I'm sure I don't have to tell you - is inclined to depict masculine modes of behavior that were popular in the past, rather than present-day modes of masculine behavior, even when the story has a contemporary setting. Gay erotica, on the other hand, is wedded to the present, which is why (I reluctantly say) gay erotic fiction authors tend not to do a very good job of taking into account historical gender behavior differences when they place stories in the past. Both genres have their strengths, and in both cases their weaknesses are all too clear to critics.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

"The characters don't act like any gay men I know" -- no, nor do the characters in Stephen McCauley's work, even though they strike me as dealing with some sorts of truth. Nor do the characters in Chris Hunt's books, which might be considered kind of slashy, though I think the term "slash" was just about being invented at the time of the first one or two. These stories are not about reflecting life, they're about drama, which has a strong, true, but really tangential relationship to life.

I wouldn't say that gay men's romance was lacking in emotional content, but I would say that the emotional content's general range, while overlapping a great deal, differs from that written for women. Again, I can't quite describe the difference. It's subtle.

Also, I think sometimes in this discussion we're comparing the wrong things. I don't think that comparing erotica written for men and romance written for women, or erotica written for women and romance written for men, is necessarily all that revealing. But if you took the whole lot of each and compared how erotica and romance interrelate in the two cases (written for men vs. written for women) you might see something interesting.

It's not that erotica and romance are deathly different, it's that their purpose, tone, and conventions are not identical.

[duskpeterson.livejournal.com]

"It's not that erotica and romance are deathly different, it's that their purpose, tone, and conventions are not identical."

Well, the problem I was having in the previous post - and the reason I mixed apples with oranges - is that the romance versus erotica divide, which definitely exists in heterosexual fiction and GLBT fiction, doesn't exist in slash (IMHO). Except in a few extreme cases, I don't think there is any great difference in approach between G-rated slash, PG-13-rated slash, and NC-17-rated slash. That why it's hard to compare slash to non-erotica genres (such as romance or genre fiction) or to erotica genres.

I read a news article recently about the problems that librarians have in evaluating shonen ai books; the books will seem very kid-friendly (from an American point of view), and then bam, on the next page, the characters will be in bed together. Same problem with slash. Most PG slash fantasy novels read like mainstream fantasy novels. But god help you if you pore through the author's site to see what else they've written. You could find yourself reading a fetish tale - and with no discernable change in the author's style.

[julesjones]

Surprise, surprise, the readers who assume I'm male have encountered me in the gay world, while the readers who assume I'm female have encountered me in the slash world.

Been there, done that, maybe we should get a teeshirt. :-) Though admittedly the names I write under in slash are gendered, and apparently my gender-neutral pro name isn't as gender-neutral in the US as it is in the UK.

[duskpeterson.livejournal.com]

Dusk, starting "One Size Fits All" two years ago: "By Jules Jones. Must be written by a guy."

Dusk, halfway through "One Size Fits All": "Don't know whether the author's a guy or a gal, but they must be a slasher."

[julesjones]

[snicker] And if I said that there wasn't another version of that story on my hard drive, would you believe me?

I was very surprised to find that erotic romance readers assumed I was a guy, because the default assumption in slash (at least in my fandom) is that a writer is female unless there is good reason to think otherwise.