Say Yes to Gay YA

[rachelmanija]

Sherwood Smith and I have a post up at Genreville, about how an agent offered to represent a YA novel we'd written on the condition that we make a gay character straight or remove him from the book

Comments

[mount_oregano]

Rachel and Sherwood, you are heroes!

[rachelmanija]

I thought you would be interested to hear that we sold Stranger (aka "the Yes Gay YA novel") to Viking. Click on this link for a post with more details. Thank you so much for your support!

[achinhibitor]

Well, it does seem to me to make commercial sense. Once you get out of the "art" segment of the market, everyone is asking the question "How much of this can we sell?" One well-published author tried the cynical experiment of sending her manuscript under a pseudonym and couldn't get agents interested in it, while under her own name, it was published without hesitation. But that is just derivative of the fact that the book buyers will buy a known author with little persuasion.

If you get a series really rolling, so that the buyers/readers are drooling for the next instalment, a gay character isn't going to make them pause nearly as much, and they're likely to push back much harder against guardians who want to protect them from such contamination...

Say Yes to Gay YA

[pingback_bot]

User sartorias referenced to your post from Say Yes to Gay YA saying: [...] Here is where Rachel Brown and I [...]

[mermaiden]

This is pure bullshit and should have never, ever happened. I am spreading this link far and wide, Rachel--this needs to stop happening.

Support and good thoughts to you!!!

[asakiyume]

Excellent article. I posted the link.