It feels rather futile to me to write a memoir because publishers tend only to be interested in publishing memoirs of well-known people.
I attended a nonfiction publishing presentation by a book agent who said that, although publishers, editors and agents generally deny that it is true, there's an unspoken "rule" that most publishers only will consider manuscripts by authors who have a minimum of 20,000 followers on any given social media platform. She said that this applies regardless of a person's writing ability, the value of their content or story, or their expertise. She suggested that before writing a memoir especially, any aspiring memoirist should focus first on building an online following, and she said that Instagram is the preferred platform for book publishers.
I found a community and a following of about 13,000 people on TikTok over the past year—and TikTok is going to be banned within five days, so there goes that.
While publishing is obviously a business with the goal of making profits, it's discouraging that the value of any author today is equivalent to their online celebrity status, and that online following generally has to be built on platforms owned by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom have weaponized their social media platforms against democratic values and against LGBT people.
It feels rather futile to me to write a memoir because publishers tend only to be interested in publishing memoirs of well-known people.
I attended a nonfiction publishing presentation by a book agent who said that, although publishers, editors and agents generally deny that it is true, there's an unspoken "rule" that most publishers only will consider manuscripts by authors who have a minimum of 20,000 followers on any given social media platform. She said that this applies regardless of a person's writing ability, the value of their content or story, or their expertise. She suggested that before writing a memoir especially, any aspiring memoirist should focus first on building an online following, and she said that Instagram is the preferred platform for book publishers.
I found a community and a following of about 13,000 people on TikTok over the past year—and TikTok is going to be banned within five days, so there goes that.
While publishing is obviously a business with the goal of making profits, it's discouraging that the value of any author today is equivalent to their online celebrity status, and that online following generally has to be built on platforms owned by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom have weaponized their social media platforms against democratic values and against LGBT people.
Where does this leave LGBT voices?