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| We are here. |
The Rainbow Reader is primarily a blog that features book reviews, but as the evil
mastermind behind the Pretty, Witty & Gay brand, I like to think it
serves a wider purpose: to get readers to think more critically about what
they are reading, to get authors to write more readable books, and to get
publishers to offer a higher quality of product.
It was not so many years ago that we, as
lesbians, were thankful to have a whispered voice in literature.
It came wrapped in brown butcher’s paper with
no return address. It sat on the bottom bookshelf on the back wall of
some small, nondescript bookstore somewhere. It rarely dared to view the
bright light of day, much less dream of a life lived within the hallowed halls
of small town libraries or college classrooms across the land.
With all due respect to Bob Wills
and The Texas Playboys, “…time changes everything.”
Today, lesbian fiction is a thriving art and
commerce, and it’s once whispered voice has become a full-throated
warble—authors are bursting out of the proverbial closet, readers are gleefully
buying books in bushel baskets, and publishers are releasing unprecedented
volumes of titles in every size, shape, and flavor imaginable. Colleges and universities
the world over are offering classes in queer literature, and companies like
Follett Library Resources and Ingram Content Group are providing physical and
digital lesbian content to more than 40,000 retailers, libraries, schools and
distribution partners in 195 countries.
Heck, lesbian fiction has become
such a hot commodity, that even straight writers are cashing in on the
voracious appetite of the fiction-starved lesbian reader.
However, this is a cautionary tale…
Growth is a good thing. But too much growth
too quickly can easily overwhelm an industry, and put it at high risk of
collapsing (with all due credit to Eddie Izzard) like a flan in a
cupboard.
Simply put, unchecked expansion can cause big problems. Think "too much change, too fast," the prophetic thesis set forth in the bestseller, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. A huge rise in product demand combined with overly ambitious
plans to forge new sales markets, expand production, and offer new product
lines—can easily compromise or topple any number of entities within that
expanding industry.
Take for instance, the case of how mighty
Toyota Motor's unchecked growth led to safety issues and massive recalls, which then resulted in a significant and ongoing loss of market share. Toyota had
traditionally focused on safety, quality and volume, in that order. Yet, by their
own admission, those priorities became skewed, and corporate decision-makers
were not able to stop, think, and make improvements as much as they were able
to before. In essence, they pursued growth over the speed at which the company
was able to develop their people, their products, and their organizational
structure. Toyota executives, like many at flourishing companies, lost sight of
the mission that paved the way for initial success.
As an avid reader, I have been
consuming lesbian fiction for the better part of my adult life.
However, as a reviewer, I have been focusing
on the finer technical and editorial points of lesfic for the last two years.
As much as I try, I can’t review every book that comes my way. Still, I read
plenty of books that are never in contention for reviews—these are books that
end up on my “readlist” for myriad reasons. On the one hand, I have
witnessed an exciting explosion of talented authors flooding the landscape while
the number of available and easily accessed titles has grown exponentially.
And, on the other hand, I have slogged my way through more scarcely conceived,
poorly written, barely edited pieces of flotsam than I can count.
That last line sounds pretty
harsh, doesn’t it?
It’s meant to be.
Regardless of which side you take in the great More Sex/Less Sex/No Sex Debate, story quality and readability
are suffering. Grammar has become an option, idioms are horribly mangled, em
and en dashes are used with reckless abandon, dangling participles have reached
epidemic proportions, comma splices are enthusiastically embraced, spell check
is nearing obsolescence, and perfectly good subjunctives are butchered for no
plausible reason. Conflict is grossly contrived. Milquetoast characters
populate a landscape that is far too often skewed toward unbalanced narrative,
and then littered with choppy dialogue. And authors randomly violate the logic
of their narrative points of view.
So it is perfectly clear, that this is (mostly) an industry-wide pandemic.
It affects not only self-published authors
and micropublishers, but also the lesfic industry leaders. Authors and
publishers who are too focused on swelling revenue, increased publicity, and
pressing production rates run the risk of overlooking what made the readers
flock to their books in the first place. And, as the novelty of the All
You Can Read Lesfic Bar phenomena begins to wear off for the readers,
it will be those few publishers and authors who have paid attention to detail,
adopted sustainable publishing and writing practices, and emphasized quality
that will survive.
Why?
Quality never goes out of style.
This is a cautionary tale.
