You SHALL go to the ball ...

"We're the Cinderellas of the mainstream publishing industry, the ones who never get to go to the ball!" So said Sylvia Daly at an informal meeting of LGBTQ female authors recently. "And it's not because we're not good!" I added, just in case there should be in any doubt on that point; "it's because publishing today is all about marketability rather than talent."

I know this to be true because it was so different back in the day, when as a total unknown I had a breeze getting my debut novel, My Dearest Holmes, published, marketed and advertised by the Gay Men's Press. It made tabloid headlines and generated radio interviews, book signings and a lot of outrage from the mainstream media and the Conan Doyle Estate, all without me having to lift a finger. It was so friggin' EASY to get published back in the 1980s, as long as your writing was up to scratch. I was given an advance for my second novel, The Coward Does it with a Kiss, without question even though on publication it failed to generate the same level of interest (well let's face it, a gay male readership weren't going to be fascinated by the reminiscences of Oscar Wilde's wife – many of them didn't even want to be reminded that he had one). Yes, I did get a dance or two at the ball back then - but twenty-odd years later it was a very different story. It took me a while to cotton on, what with having been immersed in the responsibilities of single motherhood for so long, but it soon became apparent that it didn't actually matter any more whether your writing was good – if neither your name, your connections nor the content of your manuscript (80k+ words, bursting at the seams with sex) guaranteed sales in advance, it wasn't going to get published. I think it was Fifty Shades of Grey that finally rammed the message home ....

Fortunately, an alternative method of getting into print was emerging – self-publishing. Fairly easy to do, too, if you owned the rights to your work and were prepared to do your own editing (or rope in the services of a discerning friend). That's how MDH got back into circulation, and in the wake of the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films and the BBC's 'Sherlock' series it did enjoy a second bout of success. The problem, however, was marketing and publicity – if you're a self-published author you have to do your own, and for a technophobe with no financial nous whatsoever that's easier said than done. Emily Dickinson wouldn't have stood a chance. I do what I can, of course – I've managed to get copies of my stuff into a couple of independent bookshops, and secured some guest blogs and nice reviews (thank you Narrelle M. Harris, Dan Andriacco, Richard Gough-Buijs and everyone else who's been kind enough to put in a favourable word!) - but a businesswoman I am not, and it's good marketing that sells books nowadays.

The 'Cinderellas' gathered over coffee and biscuits that day have enjoyed various levels of success. Like myself, Maggie Redding was initially published conventionally (see The Life And Times Of Daffodil Mulligan, Brilliance Books, 1984), but has subsequently had to self-publish; Charlie Raven's first novel A Case of Domestic Pilfering would have appeared alongside MDH had the mainstream reaction not been so opposed to any suggestion of a romantic attachment between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson – as it was, it had to wait thirty years to see the light of day and her second novel The Compact was brought out under out own imprint (www.theravensbunker.com). Jane Traies has had the best success of all of us so far, with her ground-breaking doctoral research into the lives of older lesbians published in user-friendly form as Now You See Me: Lesbian Life Stories; but as she points out, her fame is limited to the LGBTQ community, and the three novels published by Onlywomen Press back in the 1990s when she was one half of the Jay Taverner partnership - Rebellion, Hearts and Minds and Something Wicked- have fallen into obscurity.

So, what to do? How to get to the ball? Well, we've decided to magic up our own coach and horses in the form of WYRD SISTERS, INK - a brand new e-zine featuring the writing of 'extraordinary women'. It'll be packed with articles, poetry, excerpts and interviews and it'll be available for free online – watch this space for news, announcements and invitations to the ball, all coming your way soon!