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hrj“I don’t want to be pigeonholed as ‘an X writer’, I just want to write good stories.”
“I’ve never been comfortable with labels. Why should I label my work?”
“I don’t write about [category], I write about people.”
“If I label my books as [category], there are lots of readers who would never pick them up in the first place.”
“If bookstores put my book on the [category] shelf, no one will ever find it there in the back of the bookstore.”
These are all quite valid points. I’ve had several of them myself. In the (rare) case that you ran across Daughter of Mystery in a general bookstore, it would most likely be on that single shelf tucked away in a back corner labeled “LGBTQ Fiction”, right under the shelves on Sexuality and LGBTQ Celebrity Biography. Because of its marketing category, you aren’t going to find it in the general romance section and you aren’t going to find it in the general SFF section, which means that my chance of picking up casual new readers from bookstore browsing is essentially nil. For that matter, my chance of picking up casual new LGBTQ readers in a general bookstore is also essentially nil because who goes looking for new books in your favorite category in a store that only devotes a fraction of a single shelf to the entire category: classic, backlist, and new releases combined?
But I’m going to argue for the usefulness of narrow marketing categories even so.
Back in the ‘90s when I was in grad school and involved in the greater Celtic Studies community in California, I heard a conference paper on the function and development of categories and bin-labels in music stores with respect to “Celtic Music” and how that affected the availability and popularity of particular bands and genres. (And I apologize for not being able to retrieve the name of the scholar in question from memory, nor being able to track down a clue online.) To grossly over-summarize the conclusions: when you have a marketing category, you increase the market for things falling in that category. You increase both visibility and fan-identification for the category and its members. But simultaneously, you create the illusion of inclusivity within the category while erasing the existence of non-default members. And you also create a tendency for default members to drive re-labeling of the category. So, for example, you create a music store bin labeled “Celtic Music” and move into it all albums created by bands and musicians with some connection to the various Celtic-speaking cultures. Albums that might previously have ben scattered across “World Music”, “Folk Music”, and so forth. Now people who are familiar with one member of the category will automatically be exposed to other similar material that they might not otherwise encounter. And very likely they'll buy more albums in that general cateogory than they would have otherwise. And now when the store orders new albums that they perceive to be similar to the category, they have an automatic place to put them. (All of this is going to sound like ancient history in this day of iTunes and online shopping, but bear with me because it’s still relevant.)
But (and I hear some of my readers frothing at the mouth on this topic already) “Celtic Music” isn’t really a natural category or event an internally consistent one. It’s a marketing device. And in US music stores, “Celtic” has always defaulted strongly to “Irish” with a very minor admixture of “Scottish”. So if you were looking, say, for a particular Welsh band, your chances of finding their albums in the Celtic bin were small, and if you were browsing for “more like this band I like” you wouldn’t be offered very many (if any) Welsh artists. But, on the other hand, the existence of a “Celtic Music” bin still increased your chances of finding anything Welsh far above what they’d be if that bin didn’t exist. But then some music story employee notices that 99% of the “Celtic Music” bin is Irish and decides it makes more sense to relabel the bin “Irish Music”. There will be very minor changes, perhaps, to the contents – except for the consumer who was specifically looking for non-default members of the previous category. Or perhaps, they won't bother to re-label the bin, but having noticed that 99% of what they sell is Irish (because ... duh! ... that's 99% of what they stock), they quietly stop ordering anything but Irish artists. And you keep going back to that bin and thumbing through the albums hoping for "more of the stuff I like" and it's never there and you're not quite sure why.
But, you say, with on-line shopping, we don’t have to worry about stocking preferences of stores with limited bin space. And you can search on any specific category you want! So let’s switch back to the topic of LGBTQ fiction and consider this question.
If I go to a romance book review site looking for recommendations for new lesbian romances that hit all my sweet spots, what are my chances? First, I have to determine whether the review site even includes LGBTQ romance at all. Chances are, if they don’t say anything – if they don’t explicitly advertise “here is a special-interest category that we include” – then they don’t. They won’t feel a need to advertise that lack. Just like that music store didn't feel the need to label the bin "Celtic Music but we really mean only Irish music." So if you’re a romance book review site and your approach is “we don’t like pigeonholing books; you should evaluate each book on its own merits” then I’m not going to waste my time using your site to find new reads. Because my time is too precious to wade through 99 straight romances for every single book that meets even my first minimal criterion. Give me a label, a pigeonhole, a filter criterion so I can skip that first step, and then I might find the site useful.
And you know what? The same thing holds for a book review site for LGBTQ books in general. Because the cold hard facts are that gay male romance is the Irish Music of the LGBTQ world. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but if you go to a site like Rainbow Book Reviews which advertises itself as “dedicated to GLBTQ-related books, reviews, and authors” a random survey of recent review postings shows less than 1 in 10 as being anything other than gay male stories. And there’s no way to filter for categories so you still have a lot of slogging to do before you can start evaluating for any other criteria. (There’s a keyword search, but my experience is that it’s not useful for this purpose. But like I say, I’m not trying to pick on this particular site.)
When your interest is a minority of a minority (and we haven’t even touched yet on my interests narrowing to sff and pre-20th century historicals, and my insistence on competent writing), any approach that disdains or eschews category labels will tend to either silently erase your existence or dilute it down to homeopathic levels within the silent defaults. So when an author says, “I don’t want to pigeonhole my work; I don’t want it to be labeled as a [category] book,” what I hear them saying is, “I don’t care about my core audience being able to find my book easily because they’re already used to doing all the hard work and I can count on them doing it anyway. I’d rather gamble on some mainstream reviewer saying, ‘Hey, even though this book is about [category] it’s a worthwhile book anyway.’” It’s the same as the “literary” writer shuddering at the thought of being labeled “sci-fi” or the male author of “a story about relationships and the human condition” sneering at “romance readers”.
Categories validate existence. Categories say “We recognize this as A Thing that people are interested in.” And categories make it possible for producers and consumers to connect with each other efficiently for a mutually satisfactory transaction. Should we read outside our favorite categories? Of course we should! We all should! I read outside my favorite categories 99% of the time. But I don’t have any difficulty in finding good books in that 99% to read. They’re stacked on the front tables at the bookstore. They’re tweeted by all my friends and acquaintances on Twitter. They’re reviewed by major publications and web sites. I’m swimming in them. I’m drowning in them. I have to work ten times as hard to find a single book that hits my sweet spots as I do for all my other reading.
And do I want readers outside my narrow favorite categories to read my work? Absolutely! But whether or not my books carry the marketing label “lesbian” is going to make very little difference in whether they do. Someone who is browsing for new reads on a LGBTQ or lesbian review site is hardly going to be put off by the label -- but without that label they might not find it at all. If I set my books adrift in the larger “general fiction” world uncategorized, the chances of a random reader coming across it and finding it appealing are statistically negligible. The lack of a “lesbian” label makes no difference there. Outside the narrow lesbian fiction market, I have to rely entirely on personal individual word-of-mouth. About the only way I could hope to “break out” would be if at least a handful of cross-over reviewers picked up my work and started saying, “Hey, you know? If you like such-and-such, you’re really going to love this book!” making the intersectional connections in all the other filter-axes beyond sexuality. (And believe me, I would love it if this happened. I believe I have a much larger audience out there who would love my books but currently have little chance of stumbling across them. And the biggest frustration of being a niche author is knowing that and knowing I can do nothing about it.)
People who operate within the dominant paradigm (or who aspire to), people who intersect a lot of “default” categories – they can afford to disdain marketing categories. And their target audiences can afford to disdain marketing categories. But I can’t. Not as an author. Not as a reader. Those categories tell me I exist and that I matter. And that’s incredibly important.
“I’ve never been comfortable with labels. Why should I label my work?”
“I don’t write about [category], I write about people.”
“If I label my books as [category], there are lots of readers who would never pick them up in the first place.”
“If bookstores put my book on the [category] shelf, no one will ever find it there in the back of the bookstore.”
These are all quite valid points. I’ve had several of them myself. In the (rare) case that you ran across Daughter of Mystery in a general bookstore, it would most likely be on that single shelf tucked away in a back corner labeled “LGBTQ Fiction”, right under the shelves on Sexuality and LGBTQ Celebrity Biography. Because of its marketing category, you aren’t going to find it in the general romance section and you aren’t going to find it in the general SFF section, which means that my chance of picking up casual new readers from bookstore browsing is essentially nil. For that matter, my chance of picking up casual new LGBTQ readers in a general bookstore is also essentially nil because who goes looking for new books in your favorite category in a store that only devotes a fraction of a single shelf to the entire category: classic, backlist, and new releases combined?
But I’m going to argue for the usefulness of narrow marketing categories even so.
Back in the ‘90s when I was in grad school and involved in the greater Celtic Studies community in California, I heard a conference paper on the function and development of categories and bin-labels in music stores with respect to “Celtic Music” and how that affected the availability and popularity of particular bands and genres. (And I apologize for not being able to retrieve the name of the scholar in question from memory, nor being able to track down a clue online.) To grossly over-summarize the conclusions: when you have a marketing category, you increase the market for things falling in that category. You increase both visibility and fan-identification for the category and its members. But simultaneously, you create the illusion of inclusivity within the category while erasing the existence of non-default members. And you also create a tendency for default members to drive re-labeling of the category. So, for example, you create a music store bin labeled “Celtic Music” and move into it all albums created by bands and musicians with some connection to the various Celtic-speaking cultures. Albums that might previously have ben scattered across “World Music”, “Folk Music”, and so forth. Now people who are familiar with one member of the category will automatically be exposed to other similar material that they might not otherwise encounter. And very likely they'll buy more albums in that general cateogory than they would have otherwise. And now when the store orders new albums that they perceive to be similar to the category, they have an automatic place to put them. (All of this is going to sound like ancient history in this day of iTunes and online shopping, but bear with me because it’s still relevant.)
But (and I hear some of my readers frothing at the mouth on this topic already) “Celtic Music” isn’t really a natural category or event an internally consistent one. It’s a marketing device. And in US music stores, “Celtic” has always defaulted strongly to “Irish” with a very minor admixture of “Scottish”. So if you were looking, say, for a particular Welsh band, your chances of finding their albums in the Celtic bin were small, and if you were browsing for “more like this band I like” you wouldn’t be offered very many (if any) Welsh artists. But, on the other hand, the existence of a “Celtic Music” bin still increased your chances of finding anything Welsh far above what they’d be if that bin didn’t exist. But then some music story employee notices that 99% of the “Celtic Music” bin is Irish and decides it makes more sense to relabel the bin “Irish Music”. There will be very minor changes, perhaps, to the contents – except for the consumer who was specifically looking for non-default members of the previous category. Or perhaps, they won't bother to re-label the bin, but having noticed that 99% of what they sell is Irish (because ... duh! ... that's 99% of what they stock), they quietly stop ordering anything but Irish artists. And you keep going back to that bin and thumbing through the albums hoping for "more of the stuff I like" and it's never there and you're not quite sure why.
But, you say, with on-line shopping, we don’t have to worry about stocking preferences of stores with limited bin space. And you can search on any specific category you want! So let’s switch back to the topic of LGBTQ fiction and consider this question.
If I go to a romance book review site looking for recommendations for new lesbian romances that hit all my sweet spots, what are my chances? First, I have to determine whether the review site even includes LGBTQ romance at all. Chances are, if they don’t say anything – if they don’t explicitly advertise “here is a special-interest category that we include” – then they don’t. They won’t feel a need to advertise that lack. Just like that music store didn't feel the need to label the bin "Celtic Music but we really mean only Irish music." So if you’re a romance book review site and your approach is “we don’t like pigeonholing books; you should evaluate each book on its own merits” then I’m not going to waste my time using your site to find new reads. Because my time is too precious to wade through 99 straight romances for every single book that meets even my first minimal criterion. Give me a label, a pigeonhole, a filter criterion so I can skip that first step, and then I might find the site useful.
And you know what? The same thing holds for a book review site for LGBTQ books in general. Because the cold hard facts are that gay male romance is the Irish Music of the LGBTQ world. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but if you go to a site like Rainbow Book Reviews which advertises itself as “dedicated to GLBTQ-related books, reviews, and authors” a random survey of recent review postings shows less than 1 in 10 as being anything other than gay male stories. And there’s no way to filter for categories so you still have a lot of slogging to do before you can start evaluating for any other criteria. (There’s a keyword search, but my experience is that it’s not useful for this purpose. But like I say, I’m not trying to pick on this particular site.)
When your interest is a minority of a minority (and we haven’t even touched yet on my interests narrowing to sff and pre-20th century historicals, and my insistence on competent writing), any approach that disdains or eschews category labels will tend to either silently erase your existence or dilute it down to homeopathic levels within the silent defaults. So when an author says, “I don’t want to pigeonhole my work; I don’t want it to be labeled as a [category] book,” what I hear them saying is, “I don’t care about my core audience being able to find my book easily because they’re already used to doing all the hard work and I can count on them doing it anyway. I’d rather gamble on some mainstream reviewer saying, ‘Hey, even though this book is about [category] it’s a worthwhile book anyway.’” It’s the same as the “literary” writer shuddering at the thought of being labeled “sci-fi” or the male author of “a story about relationships and the human condition” sneering at “romance readers”.
Categories validate existence. Categories say “We recognize this as A Thing that people are interested in.” And categories make it possible for producers and consumers to connect with each other efficiently for a mutually satisfactory transaction. Should we read outside our favorite categories? Of course we should! We all should! I read outside my favorite categories 99% of the time. But I don’t have any difficulty in finding good books in that 99% to read. They’re stacked on the front tables at the bookstore. They’re tweeted by all my friends and acquaintances on Twitter. They’re reviewed by major publications and web sites. I’m swimming in them. I’m drowning in them. I have to work ten times as hard to find a single book that hits my sweet spots as I do for all my other reading.
And do I want readers outside my narrow favorite categories to read my work? Absolutely! But whether or not my books carry the marketing label “lesbian” is going to make very little difference in whether they do. Someone who is browsing for new reads on a LGBTQ or lesbian review site is hardly going to be put off by the label -- but without that label they might not find it at all. If I set my books adrift in the larger “general fiction” world uncategorized, the chances of a random reader coming across it and finding it appealing are statistically negligible. The lack of a “lesbian” label makes no difference there. Outside the narrow lesbian fiction market, I have to rely entirely on personal individual word-of-mouth. About the only way I could hope to “break out” would be if at least a handful of cross-over reviewers picked up my work and started saying, “Hey, you know? If you like such-and-such, you’re really going to love this book!” making the intersectional connections in all the other filter-axes beyond sexuality. (And believe me, I would love it if this happened. I believe I have a much larger audience out there who would love my books but currently have little chance of stumbling across them. And the biggest frustration of being a niche author is knowing that and knowing I can do nothing about it.)
People who operate within the dominant paradigm (or who aspire to), people who intersect a lot of “default” categories – they can afford to disdain marketing categories. And their target audiences can afford to disdain marketing categories. But I can’t. Not as an author. Not as a reader. Those categories tell me I exist and that I matter. And that’s incredibly important.
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no subject
Date: 2014-06-20 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-20 09:33 pm (UTC)(I'd never have picked up your book if it wasn't yours, because a) I would not have found it, ever, and b) the romance marketing would have put me off.)
So short of having either two places for those books - a dedicated section *and* a mainstream one, or having a different way of accessing that content (so you *can* search for f/f but aren't condemned to a tiny shelf at the back of the store) I don't see how this can be resolved.
Also, more Welsh Music: Bring it On. My last discovery was Meinir Gwylim.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-20 10:21 pm (UTC)I get what you're saying about not picking up my book, but there are limitations to what it would have been possible for me to do about it. The first of your points is really the important one: you never would have encountered it if I hadn't been "hand-selling" it to people I know. Even if it weren't framed as a romance, that would have been the case.
Because marketing to "lesbian romance" readers is already fairly well covered by the simple fact of who my publisher is, I've tended to focus on getting the word out to historic fantasy readers in general, with a slight hint of "and if you're looking for LGBTQ themes, I have that too". It's a fairly uphill battle, more (I think) because there's a knee-jerk refusal to see lesbian presses as a source of good SFF than because of the lesbian content specifically. (And that knee-jerk reaction is not entirely without rational basis, which is another minefield.) It's not only an uphill battle but a singlehanded one as well because my publisher has no real framework for dealing with that particular genre cross-over.
But (getting back to the theme of my post) if I hadn't gone with the "pigeonhole" the book most likely would never have been published at all. So I'm just digging for the long slog and figuring that maybe by the time I have five books out, more than one or two reviewers in the larger SFF world will decide to take them seriously.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-21 03:30 pm (UTC)*waves*
no subject
Date: 2014-06-21 04:22 pm (UTC)I don't always follow Good Author Protocols. Sometimes I do jump in on threads and say, "You know that type of book you're asking for recs on? Mine matches it perfectly." But I know in my heart that this is counterproductive in the long run. Every author thinks their book is the best thing since sliced bread, so nobody pays any attention to what an author says. And I don't yet have a critical mass of people who aren't me saying, "That type of book you're asking for recs on? This one matches it perfectly!" It's frustrating. My book has been out for five months now; why am I not famous yet????" :)
no subject
Date: 2014-06-21 06:17 pm (UTC)I try my best to keep up with what's coming out SFF-wise of lesbian presses, or queer female SFF-wise independently, and I have to say it's hard as hell: none of it gets any buzz anywhere - and alas a significant percentage of it, not yours, is not top-quality work either.
...Speaking of, I should probably see if I can't bully Stefan and Jenny into reading Daughter of Mystery.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-21 09:15 pm (UTC)Refusing to put a category/label/meta-tag on your content is saying "please don't let anyone find me thru Google."