Can a book like this be published today? I sure hope so...
Update – Not so good, but getting better. After a week-long
descent into video game addiction, I finally got my shit together and started
writing again. Not much, but I’m building momentum. I actually took the laptop
to one of the county libraries and wrote a couple paragraphs in public. It’s a
little exercise I came up with to spur creativity and, frankly, get out of the
house. If I get stuck, I can pick a book off the shelf and read for a while.
Wins all over the place.
November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, so
I’m going to attempt what I was going to attempt last month, and write the
first draft of a book over the course of the next thirty days. I haven’t fully
decided which book, so I picked a contender at random from my list of
possibles. If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll try another and maybe another until
something sticks. Pity there’s no Start a Book in a Month program. I’d be a
whiz at that.
Whichever book I end up on, it’s going to written longhand.
This will keep me away from the internet and all its enticing distractions.
That’s how I wrote the detective book, and that turned out okay. Anyway, I
can’t type with my fingers crossed but I can still hold a pen. I’ll let you
know how it worked out next week.
$$$$
Meanwhile, back at the writer’s block…
Recap: I wrote a book I had hopes for, until I looked at the
markets. At the moment, my target market (SFF) is caught up in the throes of
diversity. Straight, white characters, especially men, are anathema right now.
So are male authors, and not just in genre. I recently made the mistake of
watching a YouTube post about how women have taken over publishing in general
and are making the decisions on who and what gets accepted and published, to
the point that straight white male authors like Brandon Sanderson, in spite of
an impressive sales record, have moved on to self-publishing. The upside for
him is, he doesn’t have to share his sales profits with a publisher any more.
Other, less popular authors, regardless of skin tone or gender leaning,
probably won’t be as fortunate.
I, of course, insisted on writing a book about a straight
white male in a straight white male profession, with the added red flag of
choosing a male Anglo-Saxon pen name to keep impressionable kids from hunting
up the erotic romance books I stupidly signed my real name to. I did manage to
work in a Black character, but these days simply being Black isn’t enough, any
more than my being simply female will help me get my foot through a publisher’s
door. I should have published the sexy romance with the bisexual
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander vampire slayer heroine. That was over-the-top when I
wrote it; today she’d just be another face in the crowd.
Then, as a finishing touch, I had the only contender for
Token Lesbian come out as straight with a vengeance, when she hooked up with a
literal caveman. Let’s just pound those nails into the book’s coffin with a
sledgehammer, shall we?
With all this going against me, added to my many
insecurities, is it any wonder why I went on a writer’s block? (It’s no excuse
for the video gaming, though. That’s on me.)
But there is hope. The SFF genre may be out of reach at the
moment, but trends do change. Tastes change. The pendulum swings one way, and
then it swings the other. In a market glutted with diversity books, some small
publisher might be willing to take a chance on something new/old with a twist.
It doesn’t have to be SFF anyway; my book can still be classified as mystery,
although with a touch of the fantastic. If necessary, I’ll try querying
mainstream publishers. As far as I know, they still publish anything and
everything. With women running the industry, I may have a shot in spite of the
male lead and byline, because at the ultimate heart of the book is a love
story. (And how writers of all stripes get shafted by publishers. I'm hoping nobody notices that.) The Bridges of Madison County was written by a man, after all. Is
Nicholas Sparks still publishing? I’ll have to check that out.
And if all else fails…I think for Christmas I’ll treat
myself to the latest edition of Self-Publishing for Dummies. Maybe ask
Brandon Sanderson for marketing tips. You only fail when you stop trying. In
the meantime, it’s back to writing smut romance and hope I can garner enough
income to offset the drop in my paid job. Failing that, it’s back to my scheme
to blackmail the Pope. That one’s a long shot, but whatever happens I can
always write about it. See y’all next week.
