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hrjI'm still in the middle of edits on Mother of Souls with nothing much new to talk about in that direction, so here's a reprise of a string of posts I tweeted this morning. Somewhat expanded and explained, given that I don't have to worry about character counts.
Or...hmm..."character counts" just might be what this is about.
By random coincidence, the topic of having book blurbs overtly signal characters as queer came up in various of my social media today. That is, the question of whether your up-front advertising unambiguously lets the potential buyer/reader know that a character is LGBTQ, regardless of how significant that is to the action of the story.
It's a complex question, and one that must take into account that authors may have little or no input on the book blurb, depending on publisher policy. But when you hear reasons for why this aspect is omitted from a blurb, you often get things along this line: "The book isn't about being queer." "It would be a spoiler to include that." "I'm not writing a romance, so sexuality and orientation don't matter." "If the blurb indicates the main character is LGBTQ, then a lot of potential readers/buyers won't even consider picking it up."
And at the other end of the scale, when blurbs do explicitly mention the sexuality/orientation/gender-identity of the characters, it can sometimes seem as if that aspect overwhelms the other aspects of the book. A potential reader can be left thinking, "OK, I know who this character is, but I don't know why I should care about their story."
One of the reasons that happens is "markedness". That is, if a characteristic is mentioned explicitly, there is a cognitive expectation that it is highly relevant (and unexpected). I.e., that queerness is What The Book Is About. After all, if the story is a thrilling quest to obtain the McGuffin and save the empire, then why would you mention the sexuality of a character unless it's an important plot point?
The thing is, the default is not neutral. It would be nice if it were, but the unmarked default has very specific and narrow characteristics.
If the default were, "The characters in this book may or may not be queer, just like any random person you meet may or may not be queer," that would be one thing. If I could pick up a book based purely on the description of the genre, setting, and plot and have a reasonable expectation that it might feature queer characters, we wouldn't have this dilemma. But the default is, "This book will exclude queer characters and topics completely unless either they are being used to Make A Point or they are being used to signal negative character traits." (Although the latter is becoming a little less of a default, thank goodness.) The default says to me, "You don't even exist in this world with respect to your sexuality. And it won't even be for an explainable reason; you just don't exist."
The default is not neutral. If I pick up a book that doesn't explicitly acknowledge non-default sexuality/orientation/gender-identity characteristics in its description, it is a reasonable assumption that it will not include them. That it won't even have considered including them. The default will exclude the possibility that a character whose sexuality has not previously been relevant will "just happen" to turn out to be queer.
Please note that I'm not saying "the universal case", but "the default". The thing that is is reasonable to assume on a statistical basis, and the thing that people will react to if it is violated.
Life is short. Reading time is shorter. When I look for books to read, I'm not going to prioritize ones that give me no clue that they go beyond that default. And given that the default is "no queer content", when a book does have queer characters but makes no mention of that in the official publicity, I feel like my interest is being taken for granted. That publishers can assume that I'll do all the work of discovering that aspect through the rumor mill (and will also do the work of publicizing that aspect to other interested readers) without them having to endanger their mainstream readership by actually including it in the blurb.
For the last several years, I've been paying attention to which mainstream SF/F/H books get submitted for consideration in the Lambda Literary Awards. And to the best of my knowledge, no "big publisher" book in that list has provided any clue in its official publicity materials as to why the book would be suitable for an LGBTQ book award. That's the level of "taken for granted" I'm talking about--when a book with sufficient queer content to be considered for a queer book award conceals that aspect in its publicity.
And I do get it. Because the nature of an "unmarked default" is that if you do mention that book has queer content, then that aspect will be assumed to be more prominent in the story that it may actually be. Because otherwise, why would you bother to mention it? But that means that it is conceptually impossible to publicize a book with the message, "Oh, and by the way, this book has queer content that is exactly as relevant--no more, no less--as the straight content is in all the hundreds of book blurbs that don't explicitly mention that the characters are straight."
I run into the problem of markedness all the time when trying to promote the Alpennia books. Within the lesbian fiction community, the simple fact that my publisher is Bella Books would adequately communicate that the books have lesbian content, even without any indication in the blurb. (I have different marketing problems within that community.)
But when promoting to general readers, I've had a struggle to get the books to be taken seriously as "mainstream" fantasy. Because the fact that the blurb explicitly communicates the lesbian content means that people who actually would enjoy reading my books[*] may instead reject them out of hand. Oh, they'll couch it in vague terms. "It doesn't really look like my sort of thing." "I'm not that into romance." But the message is clear enough: "I have made an unwarranted and inaccurate assumption about this book based solely on the fact that you've made certain that I know the characters are queer." That assumption has kept my books out of some SFF bookstores. It has resulted in being rejected by some reviewers and excluded from potential marketing opportunities. In some cases, I know this because I've been told so in as many words; in other cases it's just a reasonable guess.
So I get it, I really do. Publishers want to sell books, not give potential buyers a reason to put the book back on the shelf. And publishers can rely on readers to do all the leg-work of making sure that other readers know about queer content. But that isn't going to change unless non-queer publishers stop treating queer content as some sort of dirty secret.
[*] I know this, because sometimes those people have been convinced to read them anyway, and have discovered they love them, and tell me so.
Or...hmm..."character counts" just might be what this is about.
By random coincidence, the topic of having book blurbs overtly signal characters as queer came up in various of my social media today. That is, the question of whether your up-front advertising unambiguously lets the potential buyer/reader know that a character is LGBTQ, regardless of how significant that is to the action of the story.
It's a complex question, and one that must take into account that authors may have little or no input on the book blurb, depending on publisher policy. But when you hear reasons for why this aspect is omitted from a blurb, you often get things along this line: "The book isn't about being queer." "It would be a spoiler to include that." "I'm not writing a romance, so sexuality and orientation don't matter." "If the blurb indicates the main character is LGBTQ, then a lot of potential readers/buyers won't even consider picking it up."
And at the other end of the scale, when blurbs do explicitly mention the sexuality/orientation/gender-identity of the characters, it can sometimes seem as if that aspect overwhelms the other aspects of the book. A potential reader can be left thinking, "OK, I know who this character is, but I don't know why I should care about their story."
One of the reasons that happens is "markedness". That is, if a characteristic is mentioned explicitly, there is a cognitive expectation that it is highly relevant (and unexpected). I.e., that queerness is What The Book Is About. After all, if the story is a thrilling quest to obtain the McGuffin and save the empire, then why would you mention the sexuality of a character unless it's an important plot point?
The thing is, the default is not neutral. It would be nice if it were, but the unmarked default has very specific and narrow characteristics.
If the default were, "The characters in this book may or may not be queer, just like any random person you meet may or may not be queer," that would be one thing. If I could pick up a book based purely on the description of the genre, setting, and plot and have a reasonable expectation that it might feature queer characters, we wouldn't have this dilemma. But the default is, "This book will exclude queer characters and topics completely unless either they are being used to Make A Point or they are being used to signal negative character traits." (Although the latter is becoming a little less of a default, thank goodness.) The default says to me, "You don't even exist in this world with respect to your sexuality. And it won't even be for an explainable reason; you just don't exist."
The default is not neutral. If I pick up a book that doesn't explicitly acknowledge non-default sexuality/orientation/gender-identity characteristics in its description, it is a reasonable assumption that it will not include them. That it won't even have considered including them. The default will exclude the possibility that a character whose sexuality has not previously been relevant will "just happen" to turn out to be queer.
Please note that I'm not saying "the universal case", but "the default". The thing that is is reasonable to assume on a statistical basis, and the thing that people will react to if it is violated.
Life is short. Reading time is shorter. When I look for books to read, I'm not going to prioritize ones that give me no clue that they go beyond that default. And given that the default is "no queer content", when a book does have queer characters but makes no mention of that in the official publicity, I feel like my interest is being taken for granted. That publishers can assume that I'll do all the work of discovering that aspect through the rumor mill (and will also do the work of publicizing that aspect to other interested readers) without them having to endanger their mainstream readership by actually including it in the blurb.
For the last several years, I've been paying attention to which mainstream SF/F/H books get submitted for consideration in the Lambda Literary Awards. And to the best of my knowledge, no "big publisher" book in that list has provided any clue in its official publicity materials as to why the book would be suitable for an LGBTQ book award. That's the level of "taken for granted" I'm talking about--when a book with sufficient queer content to be considered for a queer book award conceals that aspect in its publicity.
And I do get it. Because the nature of an "unmarked default" is that if you do mention that book has queer content, then that aspect will be assumed to be more prominent in the story that it may actually be. Because otherwise, why would you bother to mention it? But that means that it is conceptually impossible to publicize a book with the message, "Oh, and by the way, this book has queer content that is exactly as relevant--no more, no less--as the straight content is in all the hundreds of book blurbs that don't explicitly mention that the characters are straight."
I run into the problem of markedness all the time when trying to promote the Alpennia books. Within the lesbian fiction community, the simple fact that my publisher is Bella Books would adequately communicate that the books have lesbian content, even without any indication in the blurb. (I have different marketing problems within that community.)
But when promoting to general readers, I've had a struggle to get the books to be taken seriously as "mainstream" fantasy. Because the fact that the blurb explicitly communicates the lesbian content means that people who actually would enjoy reading my books[*] may instead reject them out of hand. Oh, they'll couch it in vague terms. "It doesn't really look like my sort of thing." "I'm not that into romance." But the message is clear enough: "I have made an unwarranted and inaccurate assumption about this book based solely on the fact that you've made certain that I know the characters are queer." That assumption has kept my books out of some SFF bookstores. It has resulted in being rejected by some reviewers and excluded from potential marketing opportunities. In some cases, I know this because I've been told so in as many words; in other cases it's just a reasonable guess.
So I get it, I really do. Publishers want to sell books, not give potential buyers a reason to put the book back on the shelf. And publishers can rely on readers to do all the leg-work of making sure that other readers know about queer content. But that isn't going to change unless non-queer publishers stop treating queer content as some sort of dirty secret.
[*] I know this, because sometimes those people have been convinced to read them anyway, and have discovered they love them, and tell me so.
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The Default For Genre Fiction should include LGBT+ content.
Date: 2016-06-14 10:12 pm (UTC)I took out the swears. Please insert your favorite emphatic vulgarities wherever it pleases you most.
In speculative fiction, especially science fiction, it should be default that there be gender and sexuality diversity. Maybe it's not part of a particular plot or character arc and the author treats it as just background noise, but man. If you're going to have aliens or AI or magical beings you should probably make sure you're adequately covering humanity as well. It's like when alien planets default to one language, or future space people only have one language; it makes me want to pull out my hair and say IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY. If you don't understand current humanity, I cannot trust you to show me a possible future version of it.
I would in fact like some kind of warning system for this. Possible ratings as follows:
Level -3: WARNING AUTHOR HAS ERASED SIGNIFICANT CHUNKS OF HUMANITY WITH NO EXPLANATION WARNING DO NOT TOUCH
Level -2: HURR HURR LOOK IT'S GIRLS KISSING style work. Avoid.
Level -1: Oh sweetie no. The author tried to deal with these concepts but characters or situations are shown as one dimensional or caricatured.
Level 0: Author teases that a character may be gay or otherwise in the LGBT+ community but refuses to explicitly say/show it. Thousands of fanfics will be written because of this book.
Level 1: LGBT+ beings are evident, in the background. Behaviors and identities are normalized and not used for plot or character arcs.
Level 2: LGBT+ issues are dealt with in an interesting way and are at least part of the focus of the book.
Level 3: LGBT+ issues are dealt with and author is member of said community.
I'm saying this with a lot of sad self-awareness, looking at my own bookshelf at what I have and have not supported through inattention over the last few years.
Re: The Default For Genre Fiction should include LGBT+ content.
Date: 2016-06-15 12:14 am (UTC)Or as I put it in a previous blog: It's easy to write stories that don't involve queer tragedy, just make sure your story involves multiple, interesting, relevant queer characters who don't experience tragedy because of their queerness -- and if your setting doesn't include multiple interesting non-tragic queer characters, WTF is wrong with your world-building?
Re: The Default For Genre Fiction should include LGBT+ content.
Date: 2016-06-15 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-15 01:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-15 03:55 am (UTC)