It's Pride Month, and that means everyone is putting together lists of LGBT books. Free sapphic books you can read. The best LGBT audiobooks. Top LGBT YA books. These lists of books are great...if you're on them. As every author knows, the absolute worst thing in the world is to see a list of "All the X-Genre LGBT Books Ever Written"...and your book isn't on it. That's the problem with more content being available in the world--the more books, the more cracks to fall through. It's both a good and bad problem to have. Great for readers, who have tons of choice. Bad for readers who might never know that the best book they never read was always just around the corner, excluded from lists and forgotten by the Internet.
But this Pride, these lists also remind me of a constant problem we have in the LGBT community: the clamor for more content drowns out the content that already exists. For example, the Twitter handle @readsrainbow recently noted it was tracking 241 books to be published between July and December with a sapphic main character. Not just a sapphic side character or subplot. The MAIN CHARACTER is queer. It's absolutely wild.
So how do we harness all this content creation in an efficient way? If you thought I was going to give you an answer, I don't have one. In fact, there isn't really one. Straight people haven't figured it out and they've had centuries to do it. All I can say is review, review, review. Go on Goodreads, Amazon, really any site that sells books and give a review to any LGBT book that you read. The more reviews, the more the profile of a book is raised, and the higher the likelihood other queer people will find out about it. Every drop in the bucket counts.
Meanwhile, I'll keep making fun little graphics in Canva like this one below. Look how gay it makes "The Lady Adventurers Club" look. It's not the only historical lesbian book. It's not the only action/adventure lesbian book. But is it the only historical action/adventure lesbian book set in 1920s Egypt? I hope so. Otherwise I really need to read the other books like it!
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