The Senior Set and Smut and Who IS Our Audience?

On Monday, Sybpress did its thing at the Santa Monica Book Fair. I do the official report here. It's an event for the literary and poetry set on the Westside of LA. It was interesting to get a good look at the other small presses in our area in an intimate setting. Our main competition in the literary prose and poetry arena was in that room. It's very difficult for small presses that publish prose and poetry to have a presence nationally or internationally save for Pushcart consideration. We sell our titles primarily at these kind of events or other sponsored readings. Our erotica is a different matter. Genre fiction has a lot of internet venues on which to advertise and in the care of male/male erotica, there are niche brick and mortar stores that will carry our product.



Places like this bookfair are where the two halves of Sybpress collide. Everyone who was checking out our newest literary author, Brenda Petrakos, also picked up our other new title, Connie Bailey's delicously naughty Bawdy Yarns. Most of the browsers had silver hair and well worn faces. I inwardly had a fit each time this happened. It was much the same reaction I have when my Mother-in-Law announces she's read something from our erotica line. I had a strong urge to leap across the table and snatch the tome from curious hands. But this crowd was unique. Many still wore some paisely or had some leather fringe in evidence. I realized that this silver haired crowd was likely a part of the Summer of Love. I doubt anything within the covers of our racier titles shocked them. Jon reasoned that they probably did much of what we write about. That they didn't throw the book aside like it burned flesh should have clued me in.

It was an interesting revelation and comes on the heels of some discussions I've had with our erotica authors recently. Who is the audience for Sybpress m/m erotica? Most of our authors assume that it is the same audience that reads fanfic and slash. That's reasonable since the authors come from there. We do get some buyers from that arena, especially when an author with a following first publishes. They are a small fraction over all. We get another small percentage from romance readers who frequent websites devoted to reviewing such titles. That's been sticky, because the majority of romance readers are really skittish about m/m. We really had an eye opener on that at the last Romatic Times Booklovers convention. We advertise on some romance sites, but very carefully. However, the majority of our sales are to gay men. It's about 90 percent of our buyers, according to our tracking service. The only bookstores that carry our titles right now are gay and lesbian bookstores. It's an interesting relationship, because they still can't quite wrap their minds around women writing this stuff. I and my fellow female m/m writers will be speaking at major gay conventions this year to talk about the phenomenon. While we court the fandom base and attend conventions and advertise with entities that are friendly to the works, our main ad bucks go to the guys.

I know I promised an excerpt from the Soldier's Choice sequel, but I'm too tired to input. It will be in the usually scheduled Sunday blog. And there definitely will be a third installment of the Surrender novels. More on the why of that and what it has to do with Richard Hatch later.