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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

[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.