On the ‘discoverability’ of diverse books
It’s up, it’s up! My article: “On the Discoverability of Diverse Books” is up at Queer Sci Fi and Fantasy!
A brief preview: Lots of readers and publishing industry players say they crave books about LGBT characters who happen to be gay, but how do you market those books? If there’s no major romance storyline or coming out storyline, how will fans of LGBT fiction know it’s a story about LGBT people from the back cover blurb? How will they know from the cover? Small presses publish a lot of these kinds of books, but with limited resources, they often can’t do much to help authors in that regard.
Sound worth checking out? I hope you will. You can read the article and discussion here.
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Jesse wrote: "Interesting read, and I agree with your eventual assessment: in these situations the author her/himself often has to stand in as the indicator that possible queer dimensions lurk within a text. I p..."Hi Jesse!
Thanks for your comment, and yeah, I agree, "eager for friendship" is a pretty weak nod to homosexuality.
The article received some interesting feedback about cover art on Queer Sci Fi's Facebook group, and more generally, the suggestion that being more overt about gay characters, even if the book is not romance or coming out, is probably the best way to go.
One cover art response that resonated with me is that books that feature two guys on the cover, even if they're not kissing or staring longingly at each other, catches the queer eye and might encourage a reader to take a look. I'm totally guilty of that, and it came up that it's a pretty good indicator of queer content since how many books about a straight guy has two men on the cover? (unless they're fighting, like superheroes).
So I'll take that into consideration in the future. It still goes against the grain with me a bit since I like more conceptual covers, and don't like an image telling the reader (or me) what the characters should look like.
And as LGBT/queer has become overtly marketable terms, I suspect that "reading between the lines" or inference such as the type you cite (“eager for friendship") is quickly becoming a lost skill. Or maybe it's context? I can imagine immediately honing in on that reading a blurb for a book published in 1950; not sure if I'd do the same for a book published last year.
Thanks for sharing this!