Ideally, on-line marketing would allow for multiple categories, either individually or in intersection. In practice, I tend to find that either there isn't enough nuance in the categories or there's no way to apply more than one category at a time.
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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.