WHAT IS THE MAIN AUDIENCE FOR LESBIAN FICTION?

Identifying the "main audience" may depend entirely on what your friend has in mind under the label "lesbian fiction". My own opinion is that a writer should first write books for themself. If you don't enjoy your own writing, how can you expect anyone else to enjoy it?

Having started from there, the question is identifying who are the people who enjoy the same things in a story that you do. But since there is no single monolithic "lesbian fiction" there's no single identifiable main audience. Are you writing fiction where the main characters just happen to be lesbians? What genre? With what topics? Are you writing stories that focus specifically around issues and themes of sexuality (whether erotic or not)? Are you writing stories intended to appeal specifically to lesbian readers? (Well, then there's your target audience.) It's really impossible to tell without having more sense of what your friend is interested in writing about.

I would say the first question to ask oneself is "why am I planning to write lesbian fiction?" Why that theme in the first place? That would provide some likely clues to the likely audience. For example, my reason for writing stories about lesbians is because there's a dearth of books out there in my preferred genres where I can identify with the protagonists on that axis and I'm trying to redress the lack. But I have a lot of enthusiastic fans who aren't lesbians but simply like the same genres I do and think I wrote an interesting "universal" story.

Most likely the genres where you're going to find the least overlap in potential audience, depending on the angle the story takes, are ones involving some degree of erotic content. But since "lesbian fiction" does not automatically equal "erotic fiction" this may not be at all relevant to your friend's concerns.

I'd say, write a gosh darn good story with interesting relatable characters who happen to be lesbians, and the entire world can be your main audience.

My experience has been that the vast majority of straight men do not read erotic fiction. Knowing that, I would speculate that the audience would be mostly lesbians and perhaps some women who are straight.

From the fanfic world I can tell you that there were few readers for f/f stories. There are far more readers for m/m, because many straight women enjoy those stories.

On a side note, thread titles in all caps make me feel that you are shouting at me. I almost didn't open the thread because of it.

JulianneQJohnson said:

My experience has been that the vast majority of straight men do not read erotic fiction.

Click to expand...

I think you're right. I don't know any guys who do (they'd rather look at pictures).

I tried to read Fifty Shades just to see what the big deal was and only read about ten pages before putting it aside.

The vast majority of straight women do not read erotica either and most of those who do stop with 50Shades. The majorityof people donot read very much at all. IMHO that is not really the question.

The readership currently will depend on the publisher. Literotica will be a mixed mainstream of erotica readers, lesbian presses cater mainly to lesbians, M/M focused epublisher will get 'femslash' readers etc.

I am a straight woman and I would read it!

I just like interesting characters and if there is romance,I want angst. Can't have a couple getting together too quickly,you know. I want to see drama and then a happy ending.

Unimportant said:

Lesbian fiction is largely published by lesbian publishers -- I think I can count on one hand the number of lesbian authors I know who write lesbian fiction and publish it with large mainstream presses. And lesbian publishers market almost exclusively to lesbian readers. There are a few straight women who read it, but I'd guess the readership is 90% lesbian women.

It doesn't sell like m/m does, so lesfic writers tend to make a lot less money than m/m writers.
.

Click to expand...

I think this has begun to change in the last year or so. I have seen calls for submission for lesbian fiction from mainstream erotic romance publishers who wouldn't have touched it a few years back.

I have noticed two books with lesbian protagonists hit the New Adult best seller list on Amazon. I think for ebook reading it's really taken off though I would known about print first publishers attitudes.

As far as digital first, it appears to me just from casual observation of what is going on, that the market is really growing.

I don't know if it's even worth trying to analyze who your market will be. It never occurred to me that men would buy my MMF novel Wicked Wonderland at all, but I have seen on goodreads that lots of young men have rated it.

I also see artists selling premade f/f covers for self publishers so they must see a market there too.

I think a lot of the question also depends on whether you (or rather, your friend) is assuming that "lesfic = erotic". Erotica (or simply erotic romance) tends to be a lot more narrowly focused in target audience, no matter what the target audience is. But there's a lot of lesbian fiction that doesn't fall in the erotic category and where there's no reason to expect the potential readership to be exclusively lesbian. For example, while I don't know what the overall numbers are for my first novel, in terms of the readership I've had direct contact with, I'd say only about half are lesbian and the rest are simply interested in historic fantasy with strong, interesting female characters.

It can be very hard to know how to give advice and feedback on a question like this without knowing what assumptions people are making about the intersection of lesbian fiction and erotica. I prefer to take the basic assumption that there's no more reason to assume that a novel with lesbian characters will be erotic than there would be to assume a novel with straight characters is.

hrj said:

But there's a lot of lesbian fiction that doesn't fall in the erotic category and where there's no reason to expect the potential readership to be exclusively lesbian. For example, while I don't know what the overall numbers are for my first novel, in terms of the readership I've had direct contact with, I'd say only about half are lesbian and the rest are simply interested in historic fantasy with strong, interesting female characters.

It can be very hard to know how to give advice and feedback on a question like this without knowing what assumptions people are making about the intersection of lesbian fiction and erotica. I prefer to take the basic assumption that there's no more reason to assume that a novel with lesbian characters will be erotic than there would be to assume a novel with straight characters is.

Click to expand...

---

This is a good post. I've found, based on the limited feedback I've received so far, that roughly half the people who have read my novel Lindsay Versus the Marauders are lesbians, while the other half are straight and/or male. It's not an erotic novel, by the way. It's a YA novel tailored for action with the romance as a sublplot, but from what people have told me, it works.

Whatever. Those who are interested in erotica, whether it's F/F, M/M, menage...what have you...will find what they wish to seek on the sites out there. Novels that have homosexual or lesbian characters as their MC's need not necessarily be erotic. In fact, without looking at the stats out there, I'd venture to say that most are not. The target or niche audience may be smaller--the default being a cisgender straight audience wishing to read about straight characters--but again, there's no reason to assume that the stories will be erotic in nature.

Sorry for the long post. Just woke up and my head's a bit fuzzy...