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Good morning, Novelspotters. My name is Josh Lanyon. I write M/M erotic mystery and romance (also known as GLBT genre fiction). I’ve been writing it for over a decade, and I’m pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. In fact, I have a book coming out on how to write M/M fiction in March. Man, Oh Man: Writing M/M Fiction for Kinks and Ca$h walks the aspiring M/M writer through the entire creative process from coming up with terrific commercial ideas to submitting your book proposal.

But I’m not here to talk about the now legendary writing book – or even give you pointers on writing M/M fiction. Instead, I thought I would tell you about how I managed to resurrect my own dead-as-a-doornail writing career – to such a healthy state that I’m now penning writing books and writing full-time.

Before I start spilling my tale of woe, I want to share a couple of thoughts with you aspiring – perspiring? – writers out there. The first is that writing is an art, but publishing is a business. And secondly, in order to have a successful writing career, you have to take a long-term approach. You must develop a “big picture” view of yourself and your work. You’ll see how those two things play out throughout this week’s blogging.

Okay, once upon a time – about 1997, if you want to get specific – I was a very young and very naïve aspiring writer. I wanted to write a mystery novel about a gay man who was just an ordinary guy. I was very tired of reading amateur sleuth novels where the gay characters were either flamboyant campy queens or muscle-bound sex machines; I didn’t know anybody like that. So I created Adrien English, who was thirty-two, very good-looking, owned a cool mystery bookstore in Los Angeles, and had a pathetic excuse for a love life. I also saddled him with a mild heart condition – and that was probably my first mistake because while gay mysteries were selling quite well back in 1997, guys with heart conditions, mild or otherwise, were not considered terribly commercial.

But anyway, that’s how Adrien came to me, and I wasn’t willing to change that about him – or almost anything about him. I liked him. He felt real and he felt right. So I wrote Fatal Shadows, and I began sending it around to publishers. It took about a year to find a publisher – and when I did find one it was a small, though prestigious, press in Great Britain called The Gay Men’s Press. GMP bought Fatal Shadows and they bought the next book in the series as well, which was titled A Dangerous Thing.

The books did all right – not as well as they might have done thanks to a really horrendous cover and catalog blurb, which went something like this: “Adrien English, middle-aged with a heart tremor, runs a small bookstore in Pasadena with the largest collection of gay and gothic whodunits in Los Angeles,” blah, blah, blah. It’s funny now, but at the time I was horrified. Who the hell would want to read that? But as I said, the competition for gay mystery was not terribly fierce, and the books sold and I picked up a small but loyal, mostly male readership.

Every six months I got a little royalty check, and depending on how the dollar was shaping up against the pound, I was happy or really happy – but it was quite clear I was never going to make a living at this. Not with one or two books, anyway. And, while the publisher liked my work and wanted the next book in the series, their backlog was such that they really didn’t want more than one book every other year from me.

Even as inexperienced as I was, I knew this was not a typical publishing paradigm. By then my original editor was gone and GMP had been bought up by another publishing house Millivres, which then merged or was bought up by a still larger company, Prowler. With the acquisition by Prowler, the company seemed to focus mostly on gay porn, and while by book two Adrien had picked up a hunky, handsome LAPD homicide detective boyfriend – and they did have sex – by no stretch of the imagination were these books fitting into the porn category.

That’s kind of an important point: the books were not sexy enough for porn, but Adrien’s sexuality was too integral to the plot and characters for mainstream mystery. In short: these were not commercial books. They could not be easily marketed to a large enough demographic.

By 2003 there were other ominous signs. Communication with my editor was increasingly erratic, the house had closed to new submissions, royalty checks were late, statements were wrong, book distribution was bad, and rumors were flying. I knew it was time to start the third book, and I knew that it would be an important book for the series – a turning point. I was hesitant to turn this book, The Hell You Say over to a publisher who might be going under, and knowing that I might not have a publisher made me reluctant to buckle down and really get writing. Instead I contacted the publisher and tried to get information. None was forthcoming, so then I asked if it would be all right to market the third book to other publishers.

I finally received permission to do so, and I started the book – and I began researching publishers. But the market for gay mystery had changed a lot since 1997 – in fact, publishing in general had changed. Many GLBT publishers were gone, and many of the ones remaining had severely cut their lists. No one was interested in picking up the third book in a series where the first two books were out of print and the rights were still held by the original publisher. The sales, though respectable for a small niche press, were not such to tempt a new publisher into taking a chance with an orphan book.

So basically I had three chapters of the third book in a series that was now out of play. I couldn’t find a new publisher, and my old publisher was closing its doors. My writing career seemed over.