YA Publishing Industry De-Gays Books: What Are The Options?

More to the story– see the agent’s response here: http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2011/09/guest-blogger-joanna-stampfel-volpe.html

It should be noted that this morning there was a rebuttal to that blog post from the agent in question. It’s important to consider this information as part of the larger debate. http://ow.ly/6viFw

Not that I’m contradicting the writer or anything, but Cassandra Claire, in her Mortal Instruments series, has a gay main character (though he does kind of play a secondary role), a few other minor ones, and boys that kiss because they have a romantic relationship.  Though there is only a minor gay character in Claire’s other series, the Infernal Devices, only the first book in the series has gone out, so I won’t be surprised if she has more gay characters in the coming books. Cassandra Claire was published by Simon & Schuster. Then there’s “Freaks and Revelations” by Davida Willis Hurwin, published by Little, Brown Young Readers. I’m not saying that big publishers are rushing to publish LGBT stories in YA Lit, but there are publishers out there who would publish stories with LBGT protagonists. However, the ratio is, of course, greatly one-sided.

This is why I really love Tamora Pierce’s books:
1) I grew up reading them, so they’re kind of nostalgic for me.
 2) she purposfully made her main characters female, and not just female, but not your stereotypical beautiful/thin/delicate girls.
3) She does have characters who are queer.
4) She’s sex-positive

Granted, some of these points (3 & 4) are more subtle than I would like, but she also wrote them for YA in the 80s, which goes into your point about the Publishers.

This is one of the reasons I really enjoyed reading John Green and David Levithan’s ‘Will Grayson, Will Grayson.” It is the first time I had ever read a book that spent so much of it’s focus on a gay character. And it was an awesome book!

What if you took any profits from the sale of your book, and used them to support other YA SF/F authors hoping to self-publish books with minority main characters? I recently read about a woman in another genre (real life outdoor adventure writing) who started a self-publishing collective. I thought it seemed like an interesting alternative to mainstream publishing, and a step beyond individual self-publishing.

Also a big Tamora Pierce fan, here! :)

“Because I write fanfiction, to me the idea that legitimacy as a writer comes from the size and nature of your platform is bupkis.”

Legitimacy? No. Popular consumption? Absofuckinlutely. How many people would have read Harry Potter if it was published on FanFiction.net? A few hundred thousand? Maybe even a couple million if every single current user on the site read it? I don’t know about you, but I can see why JK Rowling might prefer that 400 million people read her words and connect with her imagination. God knows it would have inspired a lot less fanfic without that monumental reader base. By the way, that’s not really how “bupkis” is used. Perhaps “bunk” or “bullshit” would be more applicable.

“maybe there are more important things than being able to profit in traditional, direct ways from those books. Maybe putting representative characters out there, any way you can, is more important than upholding a failing institution and being able to make money from it. Maybe I’m helping to put queer characters in the mainstream right now, just by doing what I’m doing and queering existing canons in front of a small audience of several thousand people. Sure, it’s not much–but it’s definitely not nothing. And it’s more something than someone who sticks with traditional publishing and then has their book de-gayed.”

I don’t like the air of moral superiority here. If you wanna write for free, using characters and worlds developed painstakingly by other authors, and yes, sad but true, printed and distributed and promoted and protected by publishers, that’s your business. A fulfilling and rewarding endeavor may it be. But don’t act like that makes you better than people who want to be paid for the thousands of hours they put into their work.

“I would suggest that maybe the time has come to start thinking of “profit” in different ways. I think there is as much power, and profit, in disseminating ideas through free exchange…”

When people can get food, shelter, transportation, amenities, medicine, higher education, and the occasional thing they just fucking want to buy with audience adoration and egalitarian righteousness, then maybe you can say they should work for free, or severely diminished returns.

You can’t understand how much this situation depresses me. As a kid, I adored books more than life itself. I would devour anything and everything in a matter of days and I was almost never without a book in my hand. (In fact, I have a very clear memory of my Dad taking me out for a curry when I was about ten and me bringing my copy of Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men along to read when he went to the bathroom. I was an odd kid.)
Years passed and suddenly my friends went from coming round my house on a Saturday afternoon to play with my rabbit and watch Art Attack to smoking on the back field and gleefully recounting stories of going out the night before and drinking so much they pissed themself. Worse than that, though, was their sudden, inexplicable interest in chasing boys. I tried to feign interest in their debates over the guys in the year above who caught their eye and tried far, far harder to ignore the fact that it was the girls that caught mine.
Either way, with less and less in common with them everyday, I soon found abandoned by my friends and terrified that I might be a lesbian when the greatest exposure to gay culture I had was taking the piss out of my PE teacher and watching Torchwood through my fingers.
I turned to books, like I’d always done before, but it wasn’t the same. All I wanted was a book that spoke to me like they always used to, and all I got was pretty straight girls whining over boys. I can tell you the exact moment I gave up – halfway through the final Georgia Nicholson book, when I finished a chapter, looked down at what I’d been reading and thought: ‘What the hell does this have to do with me?’
I shut that book and I don’t think I opened another for at least two years, ending up turning to fanfiction in desperation for something – anything – that reflected queer life, no matter how distorted.
So, yeah, YA publishers – thanks to you, I was forced to spend my teenage years reading horrible, horrible Janto fanfic. At least I’ll know who to charge the inevitable years of therapy I will need to mentally recover to.

Wait I’m not tracking here.
1 – An author submits his/her works to be published by YA publishers
2- They in turn alter the author’s work to remove gay characters, etc, and make them tea party friendly?

Is that it in a nutshell?

How do authors stand for this? How is there not mobs of authors with torches and pitchforks outside of these publishers offices demanding that this practice stop?

I’m not an author but if I were and there was publisher out there altering my works without my permission, heads would roll!

I’ve recently come to realise that in all the creative industries there has been a shift. You are not worthy because the establishment recognises you but because you have an audience. In music, people like Amanda Palmer tour and release albums despite not being on a record label. Her fans sustain her. I’d love to see the publishing industry go this way and I think it’s starting to.

I write short fiction and am interested in writing some fanfic. Where would you recommend I start out?

No. The authors asked an agent to represent them. The agent said she would represent them if they made certain changes to the text.

According to the author, the recommended change was to remove gay characters and or turn them straight.
According to the agent, the recommended change was to skew the book toward a younger audience, remove the hetero and homo sexual scenes, and remove the POV sections of three characters, one of whom was gay.

I LOVED Tamora Pierce’s books when I was a girl….still do actually. I always searched for sci-fi books that featured strong women protagonists. I think that the desire to find more books that involved women actually forced me to read adult sci-fi and fantasy, which was fine because I already read way above my peers’ reading level anyway. Mercedes Lackey is another good author for strong ladies and queer characters….not so much YA fiction though.

If you’re interested in writing fanfic, I’d recommend the AO3 (archiveofourown.org), which is a multifandom archive like Fanfiction.net but much, much better.  Also, maybe think about getting a LiveJournal and investigating fandom-specific fic communities there.

p.s. I love Amanda Palmer!  She’s an amazing lyricist.

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What shows/books/comics etc are you a fan of?

One of the main aspects of good fanfiction is getting the world and characters right, which is kinda impossible for a random show that you know few things about.

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There’s a couple of frustrating things about this post…

The constant repetition that the publishing industry is dying. Based on what? Kidlit is making money, and managed to make money throughout the recession. Genre is still going pretty strong as well. And what does the emergence of e-readers have to do with the industry dying? I buy all my books digitally when I can now. Those books still come from traditional publishing. Linking traditional publishing with paper just isn’t accurate.

And let’s not forget that most kids still read paper books, and will continue to do so as long as the price of entry is anything but trivial. That means paper books in MG and YA still matter if you’re writing for kids. Maybe it won’t in 10 years… but for today’s kids, it does.

The industry is slower to respond than people would like, sure. But the article seems to just assume it doesn’t want to change, can’t change, won’t change. It can, and it will. Was the whitewashing of covers incredibly frustrating? YES. But it still says something that while the covers were all sorts of screwed up, the books themselves — many books — had non-white characters, and continue to have non-white characters. These books are being bought, even if down the line someone screws up on the cover. (And at this point I think everyone is getting MUCH more careful about covers, now.)

The assumption (and I see this all over) that editors and agents are only there to stifle creativity and censor good works. They can, sure. But that means they’re doing it wrong. A good agent fights for your work. A good editor helps you make your work better by pushing you to improve it. These are awesome things. (Good editors and agents really don’t get enough credit. When they do good work, they just disappear into the background, silent and ass-kicky. Like Batman.)

There are good books out there with queer characters. There are good books with non-white characters. There’s good books with women. And books with any mix of any of these things. Enough of them? No. But it will get there. (I don’t have proof of this. I’m just hopeful.)

 http://www.lovetoshopping.org

It kinda comes across as the old “pro bono lawyer vs defense attorney” argument. Just because you work for free does not make you ethically better than another.

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If you were Publisher Gordon, what signal would you use to contact Editorman?

Let me see if I’ve understood the “facts” in this “article” correctly.
 
1. Publishers are outdated, stupid, and exist only to suppress all forms of real-world creativity. This is evident because many books are now selling in electronic format as well as print format.
 
2. Many authors are self-publishing so that their work isn’t censored. There’s no actual evidence of this, but anyone with any common sense (ie. not in league with the evil publishing industry) can see that it’s true.
 
3. The publishing industry is actively seeking to hurt and oppress you. Down with the man. Yeah.

4. The only thing you need to do to legitimise your writing is to use other people’s hard work, characters and settings, and then post derivative stories online where a few hundred people can see them and tell you how great you are.

5. Being paid for the hundreds (or thousands) of hours it takes to write a novel means you’ve sold out. If you were a *real* writer, you’d throw away everything else you were working on, write derivative stories about the GLBT community, and post them online for free. That’ll teach the stupid publishing industry who’s boss.

Have I captured the essence of your point here? 

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I was really interested in reading a factual article about de-gaying books…. instead all I got was a rant about rumors.  Disappointing.

Sorry for the double-comment on this, but I have to agree with the editor.  This smacks of the author simply whining because they aren’t being published as is.  Furthermore I have to disagree with your assessment of readers.  I mean, honestly, let’s take away the guilt/prejudice-inducing words, and replace them with neutral words….
“People think triangles won’t read books about circles, because they can’t relate to circles, but that’s not true – triangles want to read about circles!  And thinking circles will buy books about triangles is just ignorant – why would a circle buy a book about something they can’t relate to!?”  You are condemning editors for producing books that excludes a subset of the population and, as a solution, suggest they produce books that exclude an alternate subset of the population, basically stating that the first group minds being excluded but the second one totally won’t!

I think it’s silly.  I would like to see more people like me in books and on television, but I don’t – and shouldn’t – expect it, because the majority of people are NOT like me.  All people want to read books and watch shows with people like them in them, and those people are not like me.

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Thanks for clearing that up.

This blog post by Seanan McGuire clarifies why paper books are still very important:

http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/390067.html

De-gaying books is awful. But that doesn’t mean that leaving kids for whom paper books are the only option with *no* gay books is a good option. Giving up on print publishing means giving up on reaching a *lot* of people.

I’m a writer who would like to be paid for her work, and thinks her work is as worthy of being paid for–with money–as being an accountant, or another job–saying it isn’t feels pretty insulting. Which doesn’t mean I think being paid is the most important thing–I’d never straighten a character in order to get paid, for instance. My job’s important to me, and one of the most important parts is the reaching out–communicating and connecting with as many people as possible, with a story that’s the best I can make it, for them and me.

Sorry, I really don’t want to be rude or anything, but there are actually a lot of LGBT books out there. A friend of mine who’s into them actually dragged me to the bookstore to prove it. Now, just because they exist doesn’t mean that they’re automatically best sellers. In fact, most of them remain unpopular. But there are certain people who like these, which is why they get published in the first place. The problem is that a lot of them focus solely on the fact that they’re LGBT. There are no other plot points. They have a lot that they could do if they tried to branch out a bit. I mean, I’ve read this really good fantasy novel (forgot the name) But it the main character was a girl who was on the chubby side with bright, poofy, curly red hair, it is mentioned in passing that she isn’t very good looking many times, and they described her. But she was sarcastic, witty, likable, and easily humiliated. And her best friend…yeah…I’d swear he’s guy if he didn’t have a girlfriend. (I’m considering that she might be his beard.) But yeah, if they actually tried to make their characters unique and interesting, it would be great! 

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I would also like to point out that there is alot of gay and mixed race fiction from Mills and boon (Haraquin press and their subsibuary Carina Press) but they are kept in a separate section to historical/triller etc romance sections which still makes it ‘specialist’ but at least they are trying to reach this audience and make it more readily available and socially acceptable.
 
Also what about Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller? It has just come out here in the UK but that has a gay relationship in it and is aimed at a female audience?
 
I suppose as young person I read adult books until the recent crop of YA books came out so once the adult markets accept ‘alternative’ life styles then YA will follow as publishers will need to reflect their audience and age related crossover.