My first two columns were somewhat effusive in their enthusiasm for all the great strides writers and publishers of LGBT romance have made. I do think it’s worth taking the time to celebrate our accomplishments, but there’s still work to be done, so I thought this month I’d talk about what more can be done to really bring LGBT romance to the mainstream.
First, I think we
have to reframe the way we think about this industry.
You may have heard
about the University of Missouri football player Michael Sam, who came out of
the closet in early February. The reactions in the immediate aftermath (i.e.,
when I’m writing this column) have been mixed between “yay, good for him!” and
“the NFL is not ready for a gay player.” The latter argument goes that—despite
the fact that this player has been out to his teammates since last
summer—football players are a homophobic lot and putting a gay player in the
locker room will cause the straight players to be uncomfortable, and maybe someday
in the future professional sports will be ready for gay players, just not right
now. The coaches interviewed for articles all backpedal and go, “It’s not that
I’m homophobic…” but there is an insidious homophobia to the assumption that
NFL players can’t possibly cope with a gay player in what is arguably the
butchest of sports. *manly grunts*
I think also
underlying the assumption about professional sports being ready for gay players
is an assumption that everything is as it always has been and so it ever shall
be. But it’s not. Young people are more accepting than their parents. Marriage
equality is becoming the law of the land across the US and the world. Gay
athletes (and recently a Navy SEAL!) are tentatively starting to make the truth
themselves known publicly.
Such is the case in
publishing as well. I think sometimes that we all labor under the delusions
that the publishing industry will keep on trucking the way it always has been,
that the lack of success for LGBT fiction means it will never be successful,
that conventional wisdom is true.
In order to make
progress, we must challenge these old assumptions.
For the sake of
keeping this column from being 84 pages long, I’ll pick one assumption. A
hot-button issue is reviews in the trades. For romance writers, this primarily
means reviews in the big magazines like Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal,
and RT. Those reviews are super important because they help
booksellers and librarians determine what to put on their shelves. Very few
LGBT romances are reviewed in the trades; that’s changing slowly, but it’s
still pretty rare. I can usually count on one hand the number of LGBT romances
reviewed in any given issue of RT, for example, and even then, those are pretty
much limited to m/m.
They’re
homophobic! the conventional wisdom goes. We can’t send our books to those
publications because they’re not ready for LGBT books! Sound familiar? It’s
also not true.
The real
issue is that almost all LGBT romance is still being put out digital-first.
Even at the Big Five, LGBT romance is mostly relegated to the digital imprints.
It’s progress, yes, but we’re not really there until there are two men
clutching each other on the cover of a mass market paperback, you know?
One drawback
of the digital-first model—with some exceptions—is that it operates on a
compressed schedule. Books typically take about six months from contract to
publication, in my experience, and cover and editorial changes are still being
made in the weeks leading up to the pub date in some instances. But the trades,
in order to commission reviews, edit those reviews, lay them out in the
magazine, and get the magazine printed, need about four months lead time. Very
few digital-first publishers can or will accommodate that need. Thus LGBT
romance isn’t getting reviewed much in the trades because the publishers aren’t
able to get them books in time to be reviewed.
This is
changing. Some digital-first publishers are already working with schedules that
allow them to send books to RT and the other trades. To me, this is an
important step in getting more LGBT romance into brick-and-mortar spaces. But
we’re living in an Amazon world, I hear you arguing. Who cares if the books are
in print? Well, sales numbers indicate that print and e-books help sell each
other. That, and we’re not living in an all-digital world (yet). There are
still a lot of readers we’re not reaching by not making print books available.
And buying a POD paperback from an online store is one thing, but it means your
book can’t be discovered by library and bookstore browsers.
Don’t
assume the old ways are still true, in other words. Talk to your publishers
about your book’s schedule if you want a review in one of the trades. See what
they’re already doing to get word about your book out there.
To be
clear, I’m not expecting LGBT romance sales to rival Nora Roberts’. And, sure,
there are plenty of conservative romance readers. I have an acquaintance who
still won’t read my books because—no offense, she always says—but she’s pretty
squicked out by gay sex. Lesbian romance has this problem as well; I can’t tell
you how many blog posts I’ve seen that ponder why lesbian romance isn’t
catching on the same way gay male books are, only to get a dozen comments that
are basically, “Two girls together are gross” or variations on the same. (That
is a whole other side rant, but suffice it to say, I disagree, and also I think
we just haven’t had a big breakout book yet, but it’s coming. And there is
great lesbian romance available already if you know where to look.) Some
readers will never be interested in LGBT romance, and that’s fine. I’m not even
trying to put a book in everyone’s hand. I just want to get books distributed
through as many channels as possible so that all readers who want these books
can have access to them.
I talked in
my very first column about people at parties who tell me I’d make more money
writing heterosexual romance. This just happened again last weekend when I was
at a bar. “You’d be so much more successful if you wrote heterosexual
characters,” a friend argued. Sure. And maybe Michael Sam would get less grief
if he stayed in the closet. I don’t think I’m even doing anything nearly so
subversive or risky as Michael Sam. I’m a (mostly) straight white lady who
likes writing books where men fall in love with each other. Personally? I’m
just trying to carve out a writing career for myself.
But I
believe that these stories, even the less potentially-lucrative ones, deserve
to be told, and that the writers who choose to write them should be able to
make a career of it if they so choose. That means we still have some work to do
to get our books into the marketplace.♥
Kate McMurray is an award-winning author of gay romance and an
unabashed romance fan. When she’s not writing, she works as a nonfiction
editor, dabbles in various crafts, and is maybe a tiny bit obsessed with
baseball. She’s currently serving as President of Rainbow Romance Writers, the
LGBT romance chapter of Romance Writers of America. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Visit her at www.katemcmurray.com.
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