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20/5/16 10:52I would pay someone actual cash money if they could prevent me from ever hearing again "There is obviously not a market for YA with LGBT characters which I know because of statistics and demographics and MAGIC" from people with WAY LESS KNOWLEDGE OF THE YA MARKET THAN I HAVE.
(I am lucky in that actual professional industry people have never been less than supportive of me on this subject. I'm just talking about random people on message boards.)
It is true that swooniness is a definite factor in the popularity of the most popular YA books. I personally don't find the gender of either love interest to be a factor in whether I find a book to be swoony, but probably some people do, OK, cool. If you advance 'demographics and statistics and MAGIC' as a reason why a book with a lesbian relationship isn't going to sell 8 million copies, well, I'll point out that going by demographics and statistics and MAGIC, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' shouldn't have had millions and millions of sales outside the BDSM community -- but I also won't think you're 100% wrong. (Actually my favorite love stories tend to be the ones where I really believe in the emotional arc of the relationship, whether or not I find any character in the book dreamy, which is GOOD, because I am an OLD, and I should not be swooning over any YA book character.) All right. So there's still room for thousands and thousands of books that are not ultra-bestsellers, that you hear of if you're paying attention and maybe don't hear about otherwise. To say 'there is no market' erases all the people who see that not as something carved on a stone tablet, but something that can be changed -- that they are working hard to change by reading, and writing, and talking about books.
Bookstores and publishers and agents and librarians and bloggers have a lot of room to do better, with regard to all the books that fall under the radar. But I don't think that writers can react to the realities of the market with the kind of glib despair that says 'It is what it is, I will only write the kind of books that I assume will sell well.' I'd rather acknowledge that it might be an uphill path at times and say 'Hey, I'm not afraid of walking up a hill.'
(I am lucky in that actual professional industry people have never been less than supportive of me on this subject. I'm just talking about random people on message boards.)
It is true that swooniness is a definite factor in the popularity of the most popular YA books. I personally don't find the gender of either love interest to be a factor in whether I find a book to be swoony, but probably some people do, OK, cool. If you advance 'demographics and statistics and MAGIC' as a reason why a book with a lesbian relationship isn't going to sell 8 million copies, well, I'll point out that going by demographics and statistics and MAGIC, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' shouldn't have had millions and millions of sales outside the BDSM community -- but I also won't think you're 100% wrong. (Actually my favorite love stories tend to be the ones where I really believe in the emotional arc of the relationship, whether or not I find any character in the book dreamy, which is GOOD, because I am an OLD, and I should not be swooning over any YA book character.) All right. So there's still room for thousands and thousands of books that are not ultra-bestsellers, that you hear of if you're paying attention and maybe don't hear about otherwise. To say 'there is no market' erases all the people who see that not as something carved on a stone tablet, but something that can be changed -- that they are working hard to change by reading, and writing, and talking about books.
Bookstores and publishers and agents and librarians and bloggers have a lot of room to do better, with regard to all the books that fall under the radar. But I don't think that writers can react to the realities of the market with the kind of glib despair that says 'It is what it is, I will only write the kind of books that I assume will sell well.' I'd rather acknowledge that it might be an uphill path at times and say 'Hey, I'm not afraid of walking up a hill.'