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Is no one watching the numbers?
Sep. 12th, 2011 11:31 pmSo if you've spent any time around Livejournal/Twitter the past few days, you've heard the excitement about the agent who told two authors that their jointly written YA book would sell just fine if they just dropped the gay character. Or made him heterosexual for the first book. For a number of reasons I'm not at all surprised by this, but it does make me rather wonder just how much attention some book industry people really pay attention to trends other than glittering vampires, boy wizards and specific name authors.
I say this because Mercedes Lackey? Shot to bestsellerdom with novels featuring gay protagonists – in the early 1990s; strong sales of Magic's Pawn, Magic's Promise, and Magic's Price were one reason why her later books could be published in hardcover. (I'm just going to leap over her subsequent career for the purposes of this post, k?) Somewhat more recently, we have Jacqueline Carey, featuring bondage sex, lesbian sex, gay sex, threesomes, orgies, and even the occasional and shocking just as a contrast vanilla sex in the various Kushiel/Naamah novels, which, again, bestsellers. (I think the latest Naamah novel got a bit overshadowed in sales by the latest George RR Martin novel, but the series is still selling well and the first novels are still in print, outselling Carey's other considerably less sexual and (in my opinion) considerably better written work.) Still more recently in the YA field we have Malinda Lo's Ash, which, to drive home this point, sold. The field is literally littered with several more examples, some of which naturally have sold better than others, but, again, they sold.
(I just popped on to Amazon to check. Interestingly, Carey's first book Kushiel's Dart, which had the greatest amount of queer sex, and the rest of that first series, continues to outsell Carey's latest trilogy in that series. Hmm.)
And before this Ursula Le Guin and Marion Zimmer Bradley gave us plenty of queer and gay and bi characters and neither one's career died. Le Guin even managed to garner a few awards and Bradley lived to terrify new writers through her Sword and Sorceress anthologies and later magazine. (And she also helped encourage Mercedes Lackey, Jennifer Robertson, and Charles de Lint and many others, but, another post.)
Meanwhile, the other little book people have been chatting about this week, by Orson Scott Card, featuring, according to two critics, strong homophobia (Card denies the charge, and I have not read the book) apparently managed to sell, at a very generous guess, about 500 copies on its first hardcover and paperback editions even when bound up with works from Brian Lumley and Tanith Lee. Even assuming these guesses (based on Bookscan numbers) are too low, given that this book just went completely under the radar until Subterranean picked it up for a reprint, it's safe to say it didn't sell well. (Although the current attention paid to it may well end up helping sales.)
My point is this: if I were into this science fiction/fantasy writing gig just for the money –- (I pause for the hysterical painful laughter from my fellow writers at this sentence) -- I would be writing gay characters. They sell. They sell big. They sell New York Times big.
Now, this may be true only for the science fiction/fantasy genres. I read a lot – and I do mean a lot of mysteries, and although they certainly contain queer characters, often done quite well, these are usually side characters and/or victims/suspects/murderers. So not quite the same, but, again, sold. I don't read many romances, so, no clue there, and my dabblings into general fiction are not enough to give me a sense of what's going on there. And I will grant that in some geographical areas -- the county right next to mine, for instance -- gay characters in YA fiction may not be good for library sales (although somehow or other those gay characters in YA fiction manage to sneak through anyway whatever the protests of Lake County parents, but, again, separate post.) But in fantasy/science fiction? This sells.
I say this because Mercedes Lackey? Shot to bestsellerdom with novels featuring gay protagonists – in the early 1990s; strong sales of Magic's Pawn, Magic's Promise, and Magic's Price were one reason why her later books could be published in hardcover. (I'm just going to leap over her subsequent career for the purposes of this post, k?) Somewhat more recently, we have Jacqueline Carey, featuring bondage sex, lesbian sex, gay sex, threesomes, orgies, and even the occasional and shocking just as a contrast vanilla sex in the various Kushiel/Naamah novels, which, again, bestsellers. (I think the latest Naamah novel got a bit overshadowed in sales by the latest George RR Martin novel, but the series is still selling well and the first novels are still in print, outselling Carey's other considerably less sexual and (in my opinion) considerably better written work.) Still more recently in the YA field we have Malinda Lo's Ash, which, to drive home this point, sold. The field is literally littered with several more examples, some of which naturally have sold better than others, but, again, they sold.
(I just popped on to Amazon to check. Interestingly, Carey's first book Kushiel's Dart, which had the greatest amount of queer sex, and the rest of that first series, continues to outsell Carey's latest trilogy in that series. Hmm.)
And before this Ursula Le Guin and Marion Zimmer Bradley gave us plenty of queer and gay and bi characters and neither one's career died. Le Guin even managed to garner a few awards and Bradley lived to terrify new writers through her Sword and Sorceress anthologies and later magazine. (And she also helped encourage Mercedes Lackey, Jennifer Robertson, and Charles de Lint and many others, but, another post.)
Meanwhile, the other little book people have been chatting about this week, by Orson Scott Card, featuring, according to two critics, strong homophobia (Card denies the charge, and I have not read the book) apparently managed to sell, at a very generous guess, about 500 copies on its first hardcover and paperback editions even when bound up with works from Brian Lumley and Tanith Lee. Even assuming these guesses (based on Bookscan numbers) are too low, given that this book just went completely under the radar until Subterranean picked it up for a reprint, it's safe to say it didn't sell well. (Although the current attention paid to it may well end up helping sales.)
My point is this: if I were into this science fiction/fantasy writing gig just for the money –- (I pause for the hysterical painful laughter from my fellow writers at this sentence) -- I would be writing gay characters. They sell. They sell big. They sell New York Times big.
Now, this may be true only for the science fiction/fantasy genres. I read a lot – and I do mean a lot of mysteries, and although they certainly contain queer characters, often done quite well, these are usually side characters and/or victims/suspects/murderers. So not quite the same, but, again, sold. I don't read many romances, so, no clue there, and my dabblings into general fiction are not enough to give me a sense of what's going on there. And I will grant that in some geographical areas -- the county right next to mine, for instance -- gay characters in YA fiction may not be good for library sales (although somehow or other those gay characters in YA fiction manage to sneak through anyway whatever the protests of Lake County parents, but, again, separate post.) But in fantasy/science fiction? This sells.
