Before you go and get excited, you should know that this book isn’t marketable.
That’s what I’ve been told, at least, by many serious, professional people in the literary industry. After several years of querying literary agents, I got a lot of interest and fielded a lot of manuscript read requests for this book, only to be told that they liked the writing, the characters, the plot, but that it wasn’t marketable.
It happened several times, and it took me a while to decode what they meant. When they said I love it, but I’m not sure it’s marketable, what they meant was YOUR CHARACTER IS GAY, AND THAT DOESN’T SELL.
See, books about gay characters being gay is okay. Bonus points if the world punishes them for it somehow. But a mainstream fantasy novel where queerness and same-sex relationships are absolutely normalized and are not a significant part of the conflict? Not marketable. Straight people want to cry about how mean the world is to queer people, but they don’t want to read about them killing demons or saving the world from a capricious god. That’s not marketable.
So I published it myself. I hope we can all agree that this book is not at all marketable and no one would buy it. If you could reblog this just to prove how not marketable this book is, I’d really appreciate it.
I know that this is an official novel and not fanfic, but is it possible to ask for warnings? Like, the bad and good things that I can expect from this?
This is personal and all, but often I see that there’s queer main character and jump in only to find out it’s yet another unhealthy relationship, and who am I to blame, even I write like that without thinking and have to go back to edit it into something more nuanced, but if possible I’d like to see healthier relationships? Like Crowley and Aziraphale from Good Omens or better. Like Cecil and Carlos.
I’m not too worried about the execution of the ideas, considering the quality of your fanfics at AO3, I’m more worried about the ideas themselves.
I wouldn’t say the main romantic relationship is healthy, no. But it’s also not really presented as healthy, either, and doesn’t try to be. There’s nothing abusive about it (although there is a lot of gore in it, related to other things, so TW for that), and there are other platonic relationships that run the gamut from loving and supportive to emotionally abusive.
I’d say the big trigger warnings in GODSPEAKER are for heavy emotional angst, explorations of familial abuse, and unbalanced power dynamics in romantic relationships.
(And no, it’s not on iBooks, Amazon owns exclusive digital distribution. You can download the Kindle iOS app or buy the paperback.)
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