So yesterday the internet (specifically Twitter and Blogs) spun into a frenzy over this PW article: http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519 that talked about two writers who were asked to change their gay characters to straight ones, or cut them out of the story entirely.
While being asked to cut the characters out is pretty ridiculous, I think what’s more concerning is the agents who rejected their book, but didn’t specifically say it was because of the gay characters. I think that is probably a far more widespread phenomenon. It’s easy to point fingers and cry out when someone has the balls to say that you need to change a character to make it more marketable, but how many people rejected their book without giving an honest reason why?
How many books is this happening to every day? How many form rejections of “This doesn’t seem like the right work for us at this time” really mean “Sorry, gays don’t sell”? It’s a lot harder to pin down those rejections for what they really are. No one asked me to straighten up my girls in Morning Rising but none of the agents I sent it out to (even ones who were looking for diversity and actively seeking clients) seemed to be able to look past the lesbian fact.
Now, perhaps I just wrote a pile of crap, I’m completely aware that that could be the case. That doesn’t change the fact that when rejections come in for a GayYA, you can’t help but wonder in the back of your mind if it’s the story they don’t like or the characters. That sucks for authors. It sucks that this book which I love almost more than any other one I have written because it’s exactly what I wanted to read as a teen, will never reach as many teens as I want it to.
I self-published through Amazon and Barnes & Noble because I wanted to see what the self-publishing hype was about. I chose to publish this book through them because I knew it was going to be the hardest to sell to an agent. Sad, but true.
If you are interested in supporting GayYA check out some of the books from this list http://tanuki-green.livejournal.com/329393.html or visit http://www.gayya.org/