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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

[m-barnette.livejournal.com]

The only thing about Changeling is they have a very low word count cap which means they don't take anything longer than novellas. Great if that's what you write, not so great if you mostly write longer work.

[crazywritinfool.livejournal.com]

True about the word count, although I rather like it, myself, because I make more $$/word on the shorter stories than I have on longer e-published works. The cutoff is about 28K, which isn't horribly low, but yeah, not novel-length. It's possible, too, to break up a novel-length work into pieces and publish them in serial form, if you're so inclined and that works for the piece, and then you've got a win-win.

[m-barnette.livejournal.com]

I've got a series of shorter works running at one publisher already, and the thought of breaking up a book like this is mind numbing to me when it's a proposed 5 book series. It would take a months to get a book into release one chapter at a time, much less 5 entire novels. And honestly, my readers would absolutely murder me if I serialize anything else.

Authors rule #1 in small press: Your readers are your lifesblood, keep them happy or be very unhappy when sales drop like a stone

For me 28k is very short since my average word count runs 75k to 100k. My plots tend to be a bit more complicated than boy meets boy, and I tend to bend genres. My last one, the 105k novel was mystery/suspense with paranormal and psychic elements, and it was about a Visual Kei band and took place entirely in Japan.

The research for that one was brutal.