Earlier this week, I decided to set up some Goodreads ads. Some writers say that the ads are worth the investment; others report that they’re a waste of money. I decided to experiment with the ads myself.
When you create a Goodreads ad, you can target readers based on the genres they’ve shelved. I thought, “Great, for the Rymellan Series, I’ll target lesbian fiction readers.”
But I couldn’t do that.
Goodreads lumps gay fiction and lesbian fiction together under “Gay and Lesbian.” That sucks. I’m sure there are some people out there who read both genres, but I’m betting they’re a minority.
You can also target by gender, but that doesn’t help. First, Goodreads informs you that only 50% of its members have set their gender, so if you target by gender, you’re eliminating 50% of readers right off the bat.
Second, straight women read gay fiction, so my ad would still be presented to readers who aren’t interested in lesbian fiction. I’m not saying that straight women never read lesbian fiction, but that many women who have shelved books under gay or lesbian will be straight women who read gay fiction, but not lesbian fiction.
So…my only choice was to go with Gay and Lesbian, which isn’t ideal. I wrote to Goodreads and suggested that they split those genres, and received a canned, “Great suggestion!” reply. I won’t be holding my breath.
I don’t mean to single out Goodreads, because it’s not the only outfit that lumps the two genres together, or worse, completely ignores one of them. Bowker is the US ISBN agency. It also puts out Books in Print, and some online bookstores use its database to retrieve book information. Because of that, I always add my books to the Bowker database. I’m allowed to select two genres. Here are my fiction choices. Notice anything?
Now, you might be thinking, “Oh, you have to put lesbian fiction under FICTION_GAY.” You don’t have to do that. There is a FICTION_LESBIAN genre. But if you want it, you have to take the extra step of writing to Bowker and asking that it be added to the book. In this case, lesbian fiction is completely invisible.
I could see someone making the assumption that they should put a lesbian book under FICTION_GAY. Unfortunately, that could lead to their book being put into the wrong category at places that do have separate buckets for gay and lesbian.
Over to the bookstores: Yesterday I went to Amazon.com and pretended to be a naïve shopper who wants to browse the Kindle Store for lesbian fiction books. When I asked to browse Kindle fiction books, I was presented with this:
Wow, that’s helpful—not. You have to drilldown into “Genre Fiction,” and then you see, “Gay & Lesbian.” Why? You don’t have to do that for other genres. Grrrr. And when I clicked on “Gay & Lesbian,” the entire first page consisted of gay fiction. There’s nothing wrong with gay fiction, but that’s not what I was looking for.
The funny thing is, you can easily find lesbian print books by browsing “Books.” It’s a long trail, though. Here are the categories for The Salbine Sisters:
I don’t know why “Gay” and “Lesbian” don’t appear as choices directly under “Gay & Lesbian.” Better yet, split them up and have more granular choices under each. Putting a ton of books under a monolithic lesbian category doesn’t work well, but that’s a subject for another post.
Over at Smashwords, Gay and Lesbian are also lumped together. And check out Rymellan 1’s iTunes page. Yep, it’s under “Gay,” which I guess includes lesbian fiction, because here are the choices you get when you expand the fiction genre:
Lumping Gay and Lesbian together makes as much sense as lumping Mystery and Science Fiction together, or Fantasy and Poetry. It’s more difficult for readers to find what they’re looking for, and writers have a tougher time getting their books in front of their target audiences.
And that sucks, eh?
About Sarah Ettritch
I have noticed that. And there are so many GAY books to weed through for a small amount of LESBIAN. And I love your books that are so different. They are refreshingly sci-fi much better than the male dominated sci-fi generated by Heinlein, etc.
And another aspect is that if you look for LESBIAN, you often get porn for men. Ergh!
Yep, we need categories under lesbian (science fiction, fantasy, romance, erotica, etc.), so we can find what we’re looking for without having to wade through a bunch of stuff we don’t want. And the p*rn thing is annoying.
I’m glad you enjoy my sci-fi.
Thanks for dropping by.
So glad I’m not the only one annoyed by the categories not being split. Agree about having subcategories under separate Gay and Lesbian categories for sci-fi, alternate history or contemporary (for eg) like all the other fiction. It makes it extremely hard to find genre fiction within lesbian-lit. In my case, it’s steampunk (which doesn’t have it’s own category anyway) and paranormal.
I have found a long way round for finding lesbian ebooks on amazon. You need to start with books (instead of kindle books) then go Gay & Lesbian – Lit & Fiction – Fiction – Lesbian and then select Kindle Edition. Annoys the bejeesus out of me that it has to be so hard though.
I blogged about the lesbian-is-porn connection just this week. As my wife says “Why does it always have to come back to the sex?”
How to get to lesbian books is more obvious by starting with Books, but it only works for Kindle books that also have a print edition. Not all do, and sometimes the print and Kindle editions aren’t linked.
If we had subcategories, readers wouldn’t have to wade through books bordering on p*rn to find lesbian fiction.
Thanks for stopping by.
Totally agree. I log on to see what’s in the top 10 or 20 books every now and then and it annoys me that I have to go through at least a couple of pages to get past the gay mens fiction.
Trying to find lesbian genre fiction is hard as well. I do read contemporary fiction when the want arises, but I love light sci-fi, fantasy and steampunk. Very hard to track down, even on a google search.
Are tags on amazon one answer do you think?
I feel your pain. It’s difficult to find lesbian fiction that doesn’t revolve around romance.
If you haven’t read any of my books, you might want to give one a try. Based on what you wrote (here and on your blog), I’d suggest The Salbine Sisters or The Atheist. The Rymellan Series might work for you too, but I’m not sure I’d call it “light.” It’s sociological science fiction.
From what I’ve heard, Amazon is phasing out tags, so they won’t be the answer. We need better categories (for a start).
Sarah, you’re absolutely right that very few, if any, gay man reads lesbian fiction. I know several and have attended events with my two very best gay friends, and none of them professed an interest in lesbian fiction, especially if it contained sex. LOL. I suspect we lesbian readers and authors feel the same way.
It would be very beneficial to have separate categories but the chances of that are slim. We will have to come up with workable solutions on our own.
Patty
Eventually we might get separate categories. Other genres suffer from a similar problem, in that they’re not granular enough. Lesbian fiction is in worse shape than others, though.
But I agree that we’ll have to come up with our own solutions for now, which is why I’m trying to gauge interest in a site like the one I’m proposing at http://www.lesbianfictionbooks.com .