So, I conducted an experiment…

I should be going to sleep, but between depression and heat, I’m not able to shut off my brain. On Twitter, I decided to try and make a promotional push for Sandy Morrison & the Pack of Pussies. My intent was to keep tweeting until I had at least one sale. I got many retweets, and my store stats went from 4 page views to 131. But no one bought a copy. To put that in perspective, most of my my other books get around 1 sale for every 20-30 page views. This book has had a lot of page views since it was first released, and it’s still only sold single digits.

The book has a professional cover, and the blurb was put together with help from a blurb doctor. The story is YA adventure, and when I put the manuscript on InkPop, the response from teen readers was positive. And yet, even promoting the story in a trans support forum, I couldn’t sell it. Even if I have 1,000 followers, plus RT going out to a wide cross section of avid readers from every walk of life, no one wants to read my story. I’ve sold more copies of books about lesbian vampires, gay zombie hunters, and even a sexual predator with an underage girlfriend.

I…I don’t know what to do with my depression over this constant failure. I’m transsexual. More than anything else, I want to show people that we can have interesting stories worth reading. I wanted to offer a story about a character without making it preachy, and without making her trans condition the central theme of the story.

In the past, and even tonight, I’ve had straight people tell me, “Oh, it’s a niche market book, so you should market that to trans people instead.” What this says, whether people realize it or not is, “We don’t care about you. Go back to your own kind with this crap.” And what makes this even more sad is, I can’t get any of “my own kind” to read it either.

So right about now, just like Sandy, I feel dirty and unwanted. This hurts because if I sold bondage porn or incest or rape erotica, I’d have an audience. So how do I come to terms with being this unwanted? Do I just not do anymore trans stories because nobody, not even my own people will read them? Do I give up on writing stories that mean something to me because my characters aren’t good enough?

Things like this are why, even when people tell me how “cool” I am, I just feel broken and filthy. Because I’m a transsexual writer, and nobody will read my story with a transsexual character.

So much for “write what you know.”