S04, trailblazers, full-length episode Jennifer Prokop S04, trailblazers, full-length episode Jennifer Prokop

S04:32: EE Ottoman: Trailblazer

Trailblazer episodes continue this week with EE Ottoman, the first out trans author of romance novels. EE joins us to talk about his journey into romance, about the evolution of trans romance novels, and about the importance of representation in romance. This is a fascinating conversation, and we’re so grateful to EE for joining us to tell his story, and the story of trans romance to date.

An important note: While books by LGBTQ+ authors have been targeted by book bans across the country for decades, the recent bans on books and language around queerness in schools and public spaces make this issue even more pressing. This episode was recorded in the fall of 2021, which is why this specific issue is not a part of our discussion.

Thanks to Kelly Cain, author of An Acquired Taste, and Ava Wixx, author of Virtual Reality Bites, for sponsoring the episode.

Our next read along is Julie James’s Something About You. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local bookstore.

Show Notes

Welcome EE Ottoman, a romance trailblazer for being the first trans writer to write romance with trans characters. You can watch the RWA video of romance firsts here.

People and publishers mentioned: Less Than 3 Press; We discussed the shifting landscape of LGBTQ bookstores during our trailblazer interview with Radclyffe and Oprah daily has an extensive list of LGBTQ bookstores searchable by state. The zine bookstore in Chicago is called Quimby’s.

EE Ottoman mentioned authors KJ Charles and May Peterson as being especially supportive on his journey through romance, and notes that Carina Press has been several trans romance titles.

Books with queer characters continue to be the target of book banning across the country, and books with trans characters are the most likely to be targeted.

Books Mentioned This Episode

Sponsors

This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:

Kelly Cain, author of An Acquired Taste,
available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or wherever you get your ebooks.

Visit kellycainauthor.com

and

Ava Wixx, author of Virtual Reality Bites,
available at Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, and B&N.

Visit avawixx.com and follow her at @avawixx on Twitter.

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full-length episode, trailblazers Jennifer Prokop full-length episode, trailblazers Jennifer Prokop

S04.05: Radclyffe: Trailblazer

This week, we’re continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Radclyffe—author of lesbian romances and founder of the LGBTQIA+ publisher, Bold Strokes Books. We talk about her path to romance as a reader and an author, and a publisher, about the early days of queer romance, about the importance of independent booksellers to the queer community, and about how readers find themselves in books.

Thank you to Radclyffe for taking the time to talk to us, and share her story.

Transcript available

Our next read along is Uzma Jalaluddin’s Hana Kahn Carries On. Find it at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie.

Show Notes

TRANSCRIPT

Radclyffe 00:00:00 / #: What we're seeing in romance fiction has changed unbelievably from 50 years ago in terms of sexual content, gender diversity, the issues that are dealt with, the power of romance that most people do not appreciate is that you can write about anything. You can write about all the challenges of human life in a way that readers will find approachable, that they will relate to, they will think about, there's nothing else that does that. I'm a little prejudiced, but still it's an incredibly powerful genre.

Sarah MacLean 00:00:38 / #: That was Radclyffe the next in our Trailblazers series. Welcome everyone to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels and I write them.

Jennifer Prokop 00:00:49 / #: And I'm Jennifer Prokop. I am a romance reader and critic.

Sarah MacLean 00:00:54 / #: And Radclyffe is the founder of Bold Strokes Books, which is an important LGBTQ publisher. She is a writer and one of the important and long-time voices for lesbian and queer romance.

Jennifer Prokop 00:01:12 / #: Today we'll be talking about her journey to romance, the founding of Bold Strokes Books, why it is important for LGBTQ publishers to exist, and how the romance landscape for queer literature, queer bookstores and queer romance has changed in the many years that she has been reading, writing, and publishing.

Sarah MacLean 00:01:33 / #: Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us, Radclyffe. We're thrilled to have you.

Radclyffe 00:01:41 / #: Well, thank you for asking me. I'm really glad to be here.

Sarah MacLean 00:01:44 / #: So we're really interested in journeys and we've talked so much over the years about our journeys as romance readers and writers. So could we start there? Let's start with how you came to write and write romance.

Radclyffe 00:02:01 / #: I think that part of my story, I'm sure you've heard many times before, which is almost and probably experienced yourself, which is anyone who writes has always written things. For me as a small girl growing up, I will say this, in the '50s, there were very few things that I saw in the world around me that reflected what I wished I could do on television or the books that I read, the games that people played. Although I was fortunate to have an older brother, so I learned to play a lot of sports.

00:02:39 / #: So I started writing things when I was really young, putting girls and then women in the scenarios that I didn't get to see anywhere, including in the books that I read. But I didn't really think about writing anything, "Big," quote, unquote, until I was actually a surgery resident, and I was really, really busy and pressured. And it was a world where I also felt like a little bit of an outsider because I was a woman in surgery when there weren't a lot of women in surgery either. So I started writing just to kind of express the parts of myself that weren't being expressed.

00:03:19 / #: So I wrote my first full-length, what I would now call my first lesbian novel in 1980, with absolutely no anticipation that it would ever become anything except this thing that I had written that pleased me. No one ever read it, no one ever saw it. And I just put it in a drawer. And as the years went by, I did that again and again when I had free time, often on my vacations, I would write another one of those until I had eight of them in my drawer. Maybe my girlfriends of the time would read them or one of my best friends, but no one else ever read them and I never anticipated that I would be a, quote, unquote, "Author."

Jennifer Prokop 00:04:00 / #: The difference between growing up in the '50s and the '80s, did you still feel that there was this dearth of stories that you wanted to read? Even then, there was no little change between growing up and then being a doctor?

Radclyffe 00:04:14 / #: That's a great question. And the answer is there was a change, but it wasn't enough of a change or a big enough of a change. And that's another part of my story, a cool part of my story, actually, when I was 12, I used to read everything I could find. And mostly they were paperbacks that came out of the drug stores and supermarkets and whatever my mom was reading.

Sarah MacLean 00:04:34 / #: Same.

Radclyffe 00:04:34 / #: And I somehow-

Jennifer Prokop 00:04:37 / #: One of us.

Radclyffe 00:04:37 / #: Yeah, I somehow, I don't know how, found this book written by Ann Bannon called Beebo Brinker, and I was 12, and it's the first time I ever read anything that had two women involved in it. And I was 12, and I was starting to realize that I wasn't like everyone else. And this book really made a huge impression on me, but I also knew it was probably something that I wasn't supposed to show anybody else. And I kept it behind the other books in my bookcase.

00:05:10 / #: And I didn't hear the word lesbian until I was 18 years old. So it wasn't that, it was a sense in the world around me that what I was feeling was probably not what I ought to be feeling. But that book made a huge impression on me. And I went to school in Philadelphia where one of the country's oldest gay and lesbian bookstores was established, Giovanni's Room.

00:05:35 / #: And in 1973, I discovered in this bookstore that had two shelves and about 10 books, the first lesbian romance that Naiad Press ever published called The Latecomer by Sarah Aldridge. And it was the first lesbian romance I had ever read, although interestingly from a historical point of view, they did not call them romances. They called them lesbian novels at the time for about another eight years. And I read that book like a million times.

Sarah MacLean 00:06:08 / #: Can you ground us with a date for this?

Radclyffe 00:06:11 / #: 1973?

Jennifer Prokop 00:06:12 / #: Now that's when you found it. Was that also when it was published?

Radclyffe 00:06:15 / #: That's when it was published, 1973. Naiad Press was established in 1972 by Barbara Grier and two other women.

Sarah MacLean 00:06:24 / #: Was Naiad exclusively publishing lesbian novels?

Radclyffe 00:06:27 / #: Yes, Barbara Grier and Sarah Aldridge and Muriel Crawford were the three women who established it. And that went on to be the premier lesbian press until the late '90s when Barbara sold it and it changed names. So I would go there every week looking for another book, and there was never another book. They published one nine months later, and then maybe another nine months, and then eventually they would do three or four a year and then two a month, which was like, but that took years to get there. So I started writing my own and I didn't really think about publishing them.

Sarah MacLean 00:07:05 / #: Can you tell us what kind of stories were these?

Radclyffe 00:07:08 / #: My very first one was a western, of course, because when I grew up, I wanted to be a cowboy. I had a little star and I had six shooters, and I played soldiers a lot too, which actually when I tell you about what I write, you'll probably understand exactly why I write what I write. But I was the girl on the block with all boys, and I had an older brother, so I had six shooters and rifles and badges, and I wanted to be a cowboy. So I wrote a western, and it's called Innocent Hearts. And it's the first one I wrote, it's not the first one that was published. I think it was published probably fourth, and it took place in the west around the 1860s or so.

Sarah MacLean 00:07:57 / #: So like historical western?

Jennifer Prokop 00:07:58 / #: Yeah.

Radclyffe 00:07:59 / #: Yeah. It features an 18-year-old rancher. No, she's about 20. And the young woman she gets involved with came from Boston with her family, and her father was going to start a newspaper there. They're both very innocent. When you write in that era with two young women in particular, you really can't use the language we use today. So anyways, that's the first one I wrote because I wanted to be the one with the horse, the guns and the girl.

Sarah MacLean 00:08:30 / #: Nice.

Jennifer Prokop 00:08:33 / #: And so at the time, you said you started with Ann Bannon, and was there a sense of romance as a genre? Did you know you were writing something called a romance?

Radclyffe 00:08:45 / #: I knew I was writing a love story. I didn't really think of it as a genre because I wasn't really thinking about writing and publishing at all. I was just thinking about writing the stories that really moved me and with the kind of characters and the kind of situations that really touched me and I was writing the characters that I wanted to be. One of the next book I wrote was a police officer, which is Safe Harbor, which was the first book that was published. And so that's the next one I wrote. Then I did a police procedural stories, the Justice series with cops.

00:09:28 / #: So throughout the '80s I was writing these books. And I'll tell you a story, which I have told a couple times. In 1988, I decided I would try publishing one of them. So I sent it to Naiad Press, and the submission procedures was a lot different then. You had to send them a little query and tell them about your book and your writing experience and all that sort of thing. And my only writing experience was medical papers. But the publisher at the time would then call you and say, "I would like to read your manuscript." So she called me on a Sunday morning at 7:30 in the morning.

00:10:03 / #: And I should preface the story by saying that I have a tremendous amount of respect for this person. And without her, many of us would not be here. So she called me 7:30, and I told her I had read every book that they'd ever published. And she said, "Well, send your manuscript and let's see if you've been washed in the blood of Naiad." So, "Okay." And I sent it, right?

Jennifer Prokop 00:10:30 / #: Wow. I'm going to start using that phrase with people, "Have you been washed in the blood of Fated Mates?" "Fine."

Radclyffe 00:10:36 / #: Yeah. So I waited and waited and waited, and I'm doing my office hours one afternoon at the hospital, and my secretary gives me this message and it says, "Barbara Grier called." And I'm like, "Oh." So I run to my office and I call her back and she says, "Well, we're interested in publishing this book." She said, "But it's really not very good." And she said, "You're kind of a mediocre author and you'll probably never be anything more than a mediocre author." And I thought-

Jennifer Prokop 00:11:07 / #: My face right now. I know. I'm like, "Ah."

Radclyffe 00:11:11 / #: Please remember what I said about Barbara Grier.

Jennifer Prokop 00:11:13 / #: No.

Sarah MacLean 00:11:13 / #: Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 00:11:13 / #: Sure, of course, of course.

Radclyffe 00:11:13 / #: She's one of my heroes, okay? And they didn't like the fact that I opened the book with a scene where the major character is at a party and she is drinking a little too much and has a history of using drugs. Now, this was 1980, right?

Jennifer Prokop 00:11:31 / #: Right.

Radclyffe 00:11:32 / #: Because me, I write dark heroes who are wounded and because eventually the process of falling in love allows them to heal those wounds, they have to start there. She wanted me to change that. And I thought about it, and I didn't want to do that. And I said, "I am really honored that you called me, but I don't think I want to do this." And there was complete and total silence on the line for like 30 seconds. I don't think anybody had ever said, "No."

Sarah MacLean 00:12:06 / #: "Barbara, hello?"

Radclyffe 00:12:07 / #: And so that was that. And I was so mad.

Jennifer Prokop 00:12:08 / #: Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 00:12:08 / #: Of course you were.

Radclyffe 00:12:10 / #: I was so mad that I went home and I wrote another book, so that was really inspiring.

Sarah MacLean 00:12:19 / #: Yeah. Well, but I think this is really interesting. I think for a lot of romance writers, often this story is told, this kind of, "I gave it to a gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper said, 'No, no, you can't come in here with this.'" And I mean, it happens with, "You can't have a character who has a history with drugs." It happens with, "You can't have characters who look, love, et cetera, the way that these characters do." And these gatekeepers often say, "Well that, it just doesn't sell or that's just not what romance is."

Jennifer Prokop 00:12:55 / #: There's no market for it.

Sarah MacLean 00:12:56 / #: It doesn't follow the rules. And those of us who have succeeded, many of us have succeeded because we've said, "No, that's not a good rule. I don't want to be gate kept in that way."

Radclyffe 00:13:08 / #: I think the other thing is if you really believe in what you've written and you've written it because you have something to say in a particular way, then that's not the right place for your book. I think in 1988, maybe it wouldn't have sold. Maybe it wouldn't have appealed. She certainly felt that way, and Barbara was very successful. And in later years we were good friends and she was kind enough to tell me once that I was a mistake on her part. So that was really nice of her.

Sarah MacLean 00:13:39 / #: That's nice.

Jennifer Prokop 00:13:40 / #: Yeah, that is nice. You're the one that got away.

Sarah MacLean 00:13:43 / #: Vindication.

Jennifer Prokop 00:13:44 / #: Yeah.

Radclyffe 00:13:47 / #: So I began sharing the things that I had written through fan fiction which is a roundabout way to answer your question. And that was the first time I had really started sharing the things that I had written with people I didn't know with people that I had no idea how they were going to respond to the things that I wrote. But it was a really energizing kind of exhilarating experience to put the things I had written out there and have people comment on them and like them and I became enthusiastic and developed a big fan fiction following. I was writing X-Files fan fiction.

Jennifer Prokop 00:14:23 / #: Oh, right on. Yeah, sure.

Sarah MacLean 00:14:25 / #: Perfect. A good fandom too to be a part of.

Jennifer Prokop 00:14:30 / #: Sure, right.

Radclyffe 00:14:30 / #: Yeah, it was great. It suited me really well. And I had created fan fiction with an original character called Marshall Black who became Scully's lover. And people afterwards have said, "I started reading watching the X-Files, but I couldn't find Marsh in the stories," because they were looking for her. So I started a website and I put the original fiction that I had written all those years ago on my website.

Sarah MacLean 00:14:56 / #: Does this still exist?

Radclyffe 00:14:58 / #: Yes, it does, on my RedFic.com website. It's still there. Three publishers contacted me and wanted to publish my original fiction just out of the blue. And I really, well, naively number one, I said yes to everybody, which was a bad mistake. And number two, I had to think really hard about whether I wanted to do that. Whether I wanted to hand it over. Whether I wanted to sort of give away ownership of this work because I understood that being published, that's what happens and that is what happens.

00:15:32 / #: And I think that as authors, we have to understand that, that we enter into a partnership that isn't always a partnership because we have similar goals, but not always the same goals. But I said yes, and I loved the process. As soon as I started publishing, I wanted to understand everything about it, and that's what led to me eventually starting my own company.

Sarah MacLean 00:15:55 / #: Yeah. So talk a little bit about Bold Strokes Books and how that came to be?

Radclyffe 00:16:02 / #: It pretty much grew out of my experience with publishing with these small publishers. And I call them small publishers, mostly because of the model, and it's not in a negative way at all, but they were POD publishers, relatively small.

Jennifer Prokop 00:16:16 / #: So that, everybody, means print-on-demand.

Radclyffe 00:16:18 / #: Which is not what it is today. Today print-on-demand pretty much rolls right over into all of the pretty much normal distribution, but at that time it didn't.

Jennifer Prokop 00:16:27 / #: What year do you think this was?

Radclyffe 00:16:31 / #: About 2000. Yeah, and Safe Harbor was published in 2001.

Sarah MacLean 00:16:34 / #: Do the publishers still exist?

Radclyffe 00:16:36 / #: One of them does. That was Regal Crest Enterprises, and it's just this past year changed hands and I believe changed names, but some of the same authors. But the other two, one went out of business very quickly and the other one went out of business after she failed to pay anyone royalties.

Jennifer Prokop 00:16:54 / #: Well, some things-

Radclyffe 00:16:56 / #: That happens.

Jennifer Prokop 00:16:56 / #: That will happen [inaudible 00:16:57 / #], yeah.

Radclyffe 00:16:58 / #: That does happen. So I very quickly realized that the model wasn't going to work because it limited distribution and it limited exposure of the titles. And I learned that from going to some bookstores, particularly in Provincetown. And one of my first books was set in Provincetown, it's Safe Harbors, the first in the Provincetown Tales, and they wouldn't order it or couldn't order it because of the way it was being produced. And I thought, this is not right.

Jennifer Prokop 00:17:27 / #: And it's worth saying Provincetown is like a premier vacation destination in the summer for many gay and lesbian Americans.

Radclyffe 00:17:37 / #: That is true.

Jennifer Prokop 00:17:37 / #: This is like my brother and his partner were there this summer. It's ground zero.

Radclyffe 00:17:41 / #: So was I, everybody went back as soon as we could get out.

Jennifer Prokop 00:17:44 / #: And that's it. So what I'm saying, this is what I want people to understand, if Provincetown couldn't get their hands on this book. So I just think it's really important to place that in-

Radclyffe 00:17:53 / #: Yeah, the context. And that said to me that this model is not going to work. And it wasn't just about my books, it was about all of our books because if queer authors didn't have access to the same kind of distribution and exposure and marketing that everyone else got, we would not reach our readership. And that to me has always been critical.

Sarah MacLean 00:18:17 / #: To that end, can we talk about what we would call traditional publishing today? The kind of big five, at the time there were many more than five, but the big houses.

Radclyffe 00:18:27 / #: Now there's like four and a half or something.

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:27 / #: Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 00:18:30 / #: Right, it's just the numbers are dwindling. What did romance look like there?

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:36 / #: Or queer fiction even?

Sarah MacLean 00:18:37 / #: Or, yeah-

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:38 / #: I mean maybe-

Sarah MacLean 00:18:38 / #: ... I mean-

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:38 / #: ... queer romances and even-

Radclyffe 00:18:40 / #: In the mainstream?

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:40 / #: Yeah.

Sarah MacLean 00:18:41 / #: Yeah.

Jennifer Prokop 00:18:41 / #: Or did it exist at all?

Radclyffe 00:18:43 / #: Not much. I mean, if I think back to that time, I will say this, in the late '60s and early '70s, mainstream publishers were publishing mostly in paperback. And there were a lot of works featuring both lesbians and gay men for a brief period of time. Fawcett and the paperbacks, that's where Anne Bannon's books were published. One of the very first lesbian romances, a Place of our Own was actually published, and I don't remember which mainstream publishers, but then it disappeared and I'm not sure why.

Jennifer Prokop 00:19:22 / #: When was Sarah Waters writing? When was Tipping the Velvet?

Radclyffe 00:19:26 / #: I would say in the '90s. Remember, it's also British and-

Jennifer Prokop 00:19:31 / #: Not short.

Radclyffe 00:19:32 / #: ... not traditionally romance. Her books are historical works, and that's how they were marketed well.

Jennifer Prokop 00:19:38 / #: That's how they kind of... okay.

Sarah MacLean 00:19:38 / #: And then Anne Allen Shockley was writing for Avon before Avon was HarperCollins, but when Avon was a pulp fiction house?

Radclyffe 00:19:47 / #: Yes. And that was 1971, I think.

Sarah MacLean 00:19:51 / #: The early '70s. Yeah.

Radclyffe 00:19:52 / #: Right, so it was a very small window. And I don't know what actually happened culturally, socially, at around that time to basically say to publishers, "We're not going to sell enough of them." Maybe they just didn't sell enough of those books. I do know that over the years when there were several very, very, very popular lesbian authors, for example, particularly writing mysteries, and they got picked up by mainstream publishers, they didn't make it. They didn't sell enough to continue to publish with them. And I think part of it is audience size, and I just think it's a smaller audience.

Sarah MacLean 00:20:35 / #: Okay. So we have these small publishers in the early thousands, early 2000s that are trying to make a go of it, but they can't get the print on demand books into stores. And then you think to yourself, what?

Radclyffe 00:20:50 / #: I think we need the same model that everybody else has. So I very naively, since I don't know anything about publishing except what I've been doing, decide I'm going to start a publishing company, but the very first thing I did was figure out how to get distribution. And I was very fortunate that at just about the same time, another lesbian publisher of size had decided that she wanted to start a distribution company. So she said-

Sarah MacLean 00:21:17 / #: And who is that?

Radclyffe 00:21:18 / #: Bella Books, Linda Hill. And I'm just a small fry. So Linda said, "If you're interested, I'm going to start this distribution company and we can, essentially, umbrella your books into our distribution system." And I said, "Yes," which from the get-go gave me mainstream distribution.

00:21:37 / #: So all of our print books have always been distributed like everybody else's. And then the challenge became getting the people at the other end to actually buy them. That's a different story.

00:21:50 / #: So we've had mainstream distribution from the beginning and that gave the authors that I signed I think, the best chance for international exposure and to get into bookstores and libraries and places that they couldn't at the time.

Sarah MacLean 00:22:04 / #: So how were you finding authors at this point? Because obviously there's no shortage of authors to find, but what's the vision at this point for you?

Radclyffe 00:22:14 / #: I'll tell you the mission statement. There were two things that I wanted to do. I wanted to publish quality queer fiction, and I did not want to only publish lesbian fiction. So my goal was always to publish queer fiction. That was good stuff, and I wanted to create a platform to support authors and help them with their careers. So those were my two goals, and that's what we've worked on since the company has started.

00:22:47 / #: Early on, most of the authors that I signed were people that I had met at conventions and FanFic places, so a lot of them came out of fan fiction that first year. I think every single one of the authors I signed had been writing fan fiction.

00:23:03 / #: And then as we began to create a profile and our books were out there and we were going to events and people were getting to know us, we began to expand. And it's been years since and some of the authors still write fan fiction, because they really like it, but they're not coming out of the fan fiction community anymore. Not in any large numbers at all for at least a decade, probably more.

Jennifer Prokop 00:23:27 / #: I think one of the things that's really changed is if you had asked me in 2000 if a lesbian romance was for me, I probably would've said like, "No." But now I do feel like that romance readers who love romance read all kinds of romance as those times have changed. Or maybe you feel like they haven't. Do you still think there's the perception that the queer fiction and romances that you are publishing are only for queer readers? Do you see that that's changed on your end or is that just me being like pie in the sky?

Radclyffe 00:24:00 / #: It's hard because as you know, from a demographic point of view, you can't pinpoint who is buying a book. But I think overall, there's not very much crossover. I know that there is some, there's certainly, when I was writing fan fiction, I know that there were people who would write and say, "I'm straight," so that I would know that and say, "But I love it."

00:24:21 / #: People tell me that they give their books, my authors tell me they give their books to people in the office, and some of them really like it. But I don't know that those are people who are seeking out these works. But it's very much like if you look at how do people find books, it's very often word of mouth or personal recommendation. And I think that you're probably far more aware of what's out there. I think the average reader would still think, "This is not for me. I won't to understand it, or I won't relate to it, or it's not my life."

Jennifer Prokop 00:24:56 / #: And I just want to say, I don't want to suggest that you should be writing for the straight gaze, but I just was curious if in the 20 years you have seen a difference. So I just wanted to not sound like a [inaudible 00:25:09 / #].

Radclyffe 00:25:09 / #: I mean, I can tell from our reading community because we have a really vibrant web store and we sell a lot online, and we've really pushed for direct to customer sales, that it's mostly still queer. But again, I don't know, but I think it's probably a tiny percentage. I would love it if it wasn't, I mean, people have often said, "Oh, well, probably it's men buying your books." Hallelujah. I would love for men to buy my books. Please buy my books. But it isn't, it's lesbians and other queers.

Sarah MacLean 00:25:44 / #: We're sponsored this week by Radish, Romance that Feels You. Radish is a comprehensive romance fiction library penned by talented, popular writers, bottomless content, one cute app. So what I think is interesting about Radish is that aside from being a kind of huge catalog based on many, many, many tropes, it's really, really well-structured.

Jennifer Prokop 00:26:06 / #: Oh, it is a romance reader's dream. I mean, honestly, if you haven't played around with it, it has everything so clearly organized and really easy to understand. And I feel like at Radish, they really have the finger on the pulse of what a romance reader wants to read and the most popular tropes.

Sarah MacLean 00:26:27 / #: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of conversation right now in romance, in the romance ether about tropes and why we love them so much and why we're also compulsively brought to them. And I think Radish gets that, but also I think it's a pretty cool system. So the way that Radish works is you pay per episode, which is a little bit like a chapter, but you don't actually pay for the whole book. You just pay for usually about the first 10 or 15 chapters or 10 or 15 episodes are free. And then there are coins to pay for the rest of the book if you want them to go quickly or you can just wait.

Jennifer Prokop 00:27:06 / #: Right, or you can just wait because the new episode will release every hour. And that's really great. I think I found that I really love Radish when I'm running errands, I'm waiting for the car wash, things where I can just, I only have a minute or two to read something and I can get to the end of the chapter. But oh, then I'm home and the next chapter is available for me.

Sarah MacLean 00:27:26 / #: Yeah, and if you are a chaotic reader like me and you read lots of books at the same time, this is actually pretty great because Radish will remind you when a new chapter is available of any of the 25 stories that you're reading. So anyway, if you're a romance reader and we know you all are and you've never tried Radish or you've been thinking about Radish, give it a try.

00:27:49 / #: Our friends there are offering 24 free coins when you sign up through the special link radish.social/fatedmates, you can use those coins to read a book that we've recommended here on another episode, or you can try one of their exclusive episodic series that just go on and on like soap operas. Either way, we think it's something any enthusiastic romance fan will want to check out.

Jennifer Prokop 00:28:15 / #: Thanks again to Radish for sponsoring our show.

Sarah MacLean 00:28:21 / #: At this point, you're really starting to leave a mark, right? I mean, this is your one of Bold Strokes becomes a premier queer publisher, one of the ones that people in the industry have heard of and know and trust. And so I'm curious at this point, who's your community here? Who are the authors who you are feeling are your family here? Who are the other people in publishing who are supporting you?

Radclyffe 00:28:53 / #: There are. When I started, there was a lot of support. I think there was when I started Bold Strokes Books, it was 2004. So queer publishing was still very fragmented and small. There was one big gay male publisher, Alyson, and then there was Naiad out here, and then Bella was Naiad's. Naiad became Bella when Linda bought it, and little here and little there.

00:29:18 / #: So everybody kind of felt like more of a community than we do today in a different way. It was fragmented then because we were geographically separated and probably financially separated, and we didn't have the avenues of marketing that we have today. So there was a fair amount of support from other publishers. Most of the authors came out of the reading community, they were reading these books, they wanted to write these books, and that's where they came from.

00:29:47 / #: Now they're coming, I think, primarily, again, they're all readers, but they're coming internationally, not people that I have individually met early on. Many of the authors I met at events and conferences and could talk to them and they would pitch to me. So there was a much more one-on-one very early. But now we're bigger and we get lots more submissions. So I don't personally know everyone. Our authors are super tight.

00:30:14 / #: When we have a newbie, all of our authors contact them, we put them in contact right away. It's really important, as I'm sure you know, when you write, it's a very solitary experience and we really try to create a community. I want them to know that this is a real company. It doesn't exist out there in the ether somewhere. This is a real entity. There are people behind it that work to help them publish their works, help them better their craft. We introduce them to everyone.

00:30:48 / #: For me personally, my wife, who basically when I said, "Well, I think I'm going to retire from medicine and start this company, and I have no idea if it's going to do anything." And she was just finishing her postdoc. And so we had to move. So we sold our car and we sold our house, and I didn't make any money from the company for almost three years. Just put money in because you got to put money in to publish those books and nobody pays you for a long time.

00:31:18 / #: And I was really fortunate, the people that are with me now have been with me from the beginning. Many of them, my editors, my graphic artists, the authors, we have a very low attrition rate. People do not leave. Thank you. I mean, people stop writing, their life moves on, or they find that maybe the model doesn't suit them, but not many. I mean, I looked at our attrition rate and it's really low.

Jennifer Prokop 00:31:46 / #: So you've talked about the authors, but what do Bold Strokes' readers tell you about what it feels like to have this space for them?

Radclyffe 00:31:55 / #: I know that they're very devoted. All of the authors and myself have really active social media platforms, so we hear from them all the time. But more importantly, we try to do as many in-person events as we can so that we can meet the readers. And it's really important to do that. And for example, every Women's Week, which is a week in Provincetown, starting with Columbus Day, we do a book event for five days.

00:32:23 / #: And we have many readers who come back year after year after year. It's all free. We do readings, we do panels, we do signings, we do chats, whatever we can do that they enjoy, it's for them. So we get a lot of positive feedback. And for me personally as an author, I've received countless emails from people of all ages who've said how important it is for them to see in fiction the life they wish they had or the life they do have that others don't know about.

00:33:03 / #: It's tremendously important for marginalized communities to be able to see themselves in a positive way. Probably one of the earliest and neatest experiences I ever had was I was in Saints and Sinners, which is an event in New Orleans, and it was one of the first erotica readings I did in public, and it was okay. It was a mixed group too. So, "Okay, I'm reading to the guys and I'm reading to women."

00:33:25 / #: And afterwards this young woman who was probably 15, came up to me with her mother to tell me how much she loved my books. And she said, "Oh, Above All, Honor, is one of my favorites." And I'm thinking, "Oh man, it starts with this graphic sex scene in chapter one." And it was awesome. I mean, it was so incredibly gratifying to know that this young person was there with her mom and had found this book and it meant something to her. And all of us, all the authors that I publish have experiences like that.

Sarah MacLean 00:34:03 / #: So let's talk about challenges though. So it's not easy to start a business. It's not easy to start a publishing business, that is for sure. And then you have on top of it, starting a romance business in a romance world that can be very gatekeep-y and conservative, I think we would say, in a lot of ways. So can you talk a little bit about how it is to be Radclyffe in the world of romance?

Radclyffe 00:34:34 / #: Well, first of all, I was nobody to start. I think that almost everyone has to adjust their expectations. And I didn't have any. I didn't set out to be a bestselling author. What I wanted to be was a good author. I wanted to get the books to people who wanted to read them. That was my goal. My goal was not to sell 50,000 books or 500,000 books or to make a lot of money, because I honestly did not think that I would.

00:35:05 / #: So I didn't have the expectations that I think sometimes other authors do, particularly today. I think that a lot of authors think they're going to sell a whole lot of books and make a whole lot of money, and generally that doesn't happen. I wanted my company and my authors, and I'm being a little possessive here, to have everything that everybody else had. So I thought, well, I should be part of the RWA. So that's one of the first things that I did.

00:35:33 / #: One of the very first things that I did to get exposure was join the RWA and go to the RWA, which was terrifying because I didn't know anybody. I didn't look like everybody else for the most part. I didn't write what everybody else was writing. Nobody was talking about what I was writing. And this was just another one of those experiences where you don't fit.

00:35:58 / #: But it was also exhilarating because I went to the classes and the seminars and this is the stuff that I needed to know. So it was amazing. And so then I went through all the hoops so that the RWA would recognize Bold Strokes as a legitimate publisher because we ticked all their boxes. And I made sure that we ticked all their boxes so that we could begin to build a profile as a legitimate, significant publisher of queer fiction.

00:36:31 / #: And every chance I got, every venue that I could go to, I fronted the company. I went there and I said, "This is who we are. This is what we do. We're really good at it." And I think that's my job. My job is to create a profile for this company so that the authors who sign here will have that benefit.

Jennifer Prokop 00:36:54 / #: So looking forward then, do you feel like we're on the precipice of anything? What are your hopes for what romance will look like in five or 10 years? I mean, have you seen positive change that you think will continue?

Radclyffe 00:37:09 / #: Oh, I think romance has changed tremendously. I mean, and as historians, if we're looking at the history of romance fiction, we can go back to Jane Austen, but really it's very compressed in terms of what we as contemporary readers are looking at 50 years maybe. I mean certainly for queer romances, we're looking at 50 years. That's just a little tiny piece of time. And yet so much has been crammed in there.

00:37:36 / #: And for us, for queer romance writers and queer authors in particular, our entire industry really parallels social change. I mean, the more visibility, the more exposure, the more authors, the more work, the more things we're writing about that are relevant to the community. So I think that what we're seeing in romance fiction has changed unbelievably from 50 years ago in terms of sexual content, gender diversity, the issues that are dealt with.

00:38:08 / #: The power of romance that most people do not appreciate is that you can write about anything. You can write about all the challenges of human life in a way that readers will find approachable, that they will relate to, they will think about, there's nothing else that does that. I'm a little prejudiced, but still it's an incredibly powerful genre.

00:38:35 / #: And that's been very true in terms of queer romances where initially we were dealing with the challenges of coming out. What it meant professionally for someone to be queer, to have a queer relationship that wasn't hidden. How do you deal with families? How do you deal with religious prejudices? And then that began to change, and you don't see as many coming out stories. We still do. We still write them because people are still coming out and people are still coming out in places where it's not safe.

00:39:07 / #: But romance has expanded and now we deal with gender diversity and challenges for YA, queer youth. And I think that's only going to continue. I mean, nothing is ever going to stop the romance genre because it deals with human relationships. It deals with what's most critical in our experience are the relationships in our lives. So it's never going to stop, but I think it will continue to transform as the issues that we face as a community, as a civilization change too.

Jennifer Prokop 00:39:44 / #: We say all the time, that romance really iterates on the time that it's in. When it was the AIDS crisis, was queer romance responsive to... I mean, again, did queer romance even exist in the same way? Especially as a doctor, did you see the way that there was fear about HIV? Did that play out in queer romance?

Radclyffe 00:40:12 / #: It played out in queer fiction, but I think that if you look at queer romance, it's just like romance in the mainstream. It's predominantly female oriented. Predominantly written by women with the expectation that the readers will be women. So that the men were writing about it, but that you were seeing it more in the context of the mysteries that they were writing or the general fiction that they were writing.

00:40:38 / #: And I'm not going to say that I didn't see a lot of it in lesbian fiction. Certainly I think in the non-fiction, in the essays and the other works. But in the fiction per se, I would say, it was secondary. And there is that divide, but there's that divide always in romance, what women are writing about and what men are writing about or what women are writing for men to read.

Sarah MacLean 00:41:05 / #: So you said earlier that, "I didn't have expectations," but I'm curious because at some point you did become a name that people know in the world of romance. And I wonder if there's a moment or at what point did you realize like, "Oh, I'm Radclyffe, I'm doing a thing and people know who I am?" And I asked this, and I've asked this of several of the people who we're interviewing for this series, when did you know you were amazing? Because we are, right? You are.

Radclyffe 00:41:42 / #: Okay. I don't know that I'm amazing. People tell me that I am one of the most determined and self-directed people that they know. And I think that that is true. I also have a sense of my own worth, which I think is probably why I said no to Barbara Grier back in the 1980s. But I didn't know what I would become as an author or a publisher. I only knew that I would do my best to do it right and that if anyone could do it, then I could do it.

00:42:14 / #: I mean, that's like we have a saying in surgery, "There's always room at the top," and I believe that. It's hard for someone who didn't train to be a writer, who doesn't either have no background in writing or literature or any of those things to believe. You kind of have that imposter syndrome a little bit at the beginning because I came out of a totally different world. So external recognition of my work for me personally was important and it bothered me. Now, do you know what the Lammy's are?

Sarah MacLean 00:42:55 / #: The Lambda Literary Awards?

Radclyffe 00:42:58 / #: The Lambda Literary Awards are like The RITAs. And it really bothered me the first few years that I was publishing that I didn't get nominated, really bothered me.

Sarah MacLean 00:43:06 / #: So can you explain how does the Lambda work? Because we of course in romance know how The RITA works and it has a lot of problems along the way. But how do you get nominated?

Radclyffe 00:43:18 / #: Well, you can submit your book just like you do to The RITAs, which are now the Vivians. And then basically, if you nominate it, they'll review it pretty much the same way.

Jennifer Prokop 00:43:31 / #: Was there always a romance category? Because that was my question, if this is a category they had to add?

Radclyffe 00:43:37 / #: There wasn't at the very beginning, there were only a few categories, but there has been for many years. And there's always been a little bit more of a literary event, a literary bent as opposed to genre fiction bent in those awards. But they do have genre categories. So if you send your books in, they will review it and then you become a finalist and then you win.

00:44:06 / #: And so I never got to be a finalist, and I couldn't figure out why that was. And it wasn't until really the company got bigger and the company had some recognition and more of my titles were out there and they knew who we were that I won a Lammy. I can't remember the first year, 2005, 2006. That meant a lot to me. Now, some people say those things, you know what they say about awards.

Jennifer Prokop 00:44:36 / #: They are great. That's what they say about them.

Sarah MacLean 00:44:38 / #: It's fun to put them on your shelf.

Radclyffe 00:44:40 / #: It meant something to me because it said to me, at least the people who are looking at similar works see this, they see me. I became visible. So that was important.

Sarah MacLean 00:44:51 / #: And I also have to say that I think that there is a massive difference between the Lambda Literary Award and The RITA or the Vivian in that the discoverability of queer, if I'm looking for great queer romance, I'm going to go to the Lambda Award and look at the winners there. I don't really feel like romance readers feel like, "I'm looking for great historical romance, I'm going to go check out the Vivians." Not because those books aren't maybe great, but-

Jennifer Prokop 00:45:21 / #: Right. They're going to go to the bookstore and look at the table. Right.

Radclyffe 00:45:25 / #: Well, I will tell you that one of the things that made the biggest impression on me was winning The PRISM because that's not my audience. That made a difference to me. They didn't know me at all, I'm a name on a book that they would not recognize. So I knew that when I won that, that said that my work was a good work. And that meant a lot to me as an author.

00:45:54 / #: In terms of, I guess, the thing that makes me feel like I've made an impression in the publishing and the world of queer fiction is all the authors that I've published and how well they've all done. They have surpassed me on every level hundreds of times. And when people say, "What's your legacy?" That's my legacy. They are. And so it doesn't matter if I'm forgotten, they won't be, because there's too many of them.

Jennifer Prokop 00:46:28 / #: When we do think about your books though, do you think there's a hallmark of what makes a Radclyffe romance?

Radclyffe 00:46:35 / #: I've thought about that because we talk about branding a lot, and I think so. I remember that I read at the York Lesbian Arts Festival in the UK or in the mid-2000s I guess, and I read, and the person who was moderating said, "Oh, it's all about the characters for you, isn't it?" And I looked at her and I said, "Of course," because I think that is, to me, what it's all about is the characters. And I think that that's what pulls the reader in and holds the reader.

00:47:11 / #: So I think that they remember. I know that readers remember my characters because they write to me and they talk about them by name, like they're real people. I think that when I think of my work, then I don't know that readers will actually recognize it, but I write archetypes. I specifically write hero archetypes, and I always have. And that gets back to the little kid who wanted to be the sheriff and who wanted to be the one.

00:47:39 / #: I wanted to put women in positions of authority and power. So I write about positions of responsibility more than power. I like to write about people who are responsible for others at cost to themselves. To me, that makes a hero. So many of my works, and they're not all military or law enforcement, but they're people who have assumed responsibility and they're generally wounded. So I write wounded heroes who are saved by love.

Sarah MacLean 00:48:10 / #: I love it.

Radclyffe 00:48:11 / #: Because that to me is a romance. That's what I wrote, read as a kid, and that's what I write. I mean, is there anything better than that?

Jennifer Prokop 00:48:18 / #: No.

Radclyffe 00:48:19 / #: No?

Jennifer Prokop 00:48:20 / #: I'm a simple woman.

Radclyffe 00:48:21 / #: Yeah, totally.

Jennifer Prokop 00:48:22 / #: No, is the answer.

Sarah MacLean 00:48:24 / #: So do you have a book that is the most popular with your readers? You have one that is a fan favorite?

Radclyffe 00:48:33 / #: I totally do. I totally do. I mean, they always-

Jennifer Prokop 00:48:36 / #: And we all do. We all make that face.

Radclyffe 00:48:39 / #: And is it like one of the first ones you ever wrote?

Jennifer Prokop 00:48:40 / #: It's the first one.

Radclyffe 00:48:43 / #: Because mine is, yeah. And it's like, "What happened after that? You just fell apart?"

Jennifer Prokop 00:48:48 / #: This makes me feel better.

Radclyffe 00:48:50 / #: Mine is Fated Love. I wrote it. It was one of the first ones that was really widely disseminated, so that may be part of it, but it was published in 2004 and absolutely almost everybody picks that book.

Jennifer Prokop 00:49:07 / #: I'm going to tell you two why you all are crazy. It's because when a person who has been reading for a long time decides to finally write a romance what they are doing, and every single person who has gone on to write many books after that first one has said, "I wrote in this book the things I wanted to see."

Radclyffe 00:49:30 / #: It's true.

Jennifer Prokop 00:49:32 / #: And I am going to tell you right now, that is why they resonate with readers, not because it's the best book you've ever written, because it is the book of your heart. And our hearts are all looking for a lot of similar things. So it's not that we don't think you've grown and changed and written great books. It's that first book is often so steeped in the kind of longing for the story that you desperately wanted to read. That is why we love them.

Sarah MacLean 00:50:02 / #: It is, it's a love letter.

Radclyffe 00:50:03 / #: So why can't we do it again?

Jennifer Prokop 00:50:04 / #: I know, "What have you done for me lately, Jen?"

Radclyffe 00:50:06 / #: Why aren't we doing that every time?

Jennifer Prokop 00:50:07 / #: Well, because, look, then you all are like, "Okay, but now there's a market and now there's the possibility of disappointing readers. And now I have to find new readers." It's, right-

Radclyffe 00:50:16 / #: And I have to write better sentences.

Jennifer Prokop 00:50:18 / #: Yes.

Sarah MacLean 00:50:20 / #: That's nonsensical.

Radclyffe 00:50:20 / #: And I have to pay attention to my point of view.

Sarah MacLean 00:50:22 / #: Exactly.

Jennifer Prokop 00:50:23 / #: Sorry.

Sarah MacLean 00:50:23 / #: Head hopping, what's that?

Jennifer Prokop 00:50:24 / #: Sorry for explaining the world to you two. I don't know what is even going on.

Radclyffe 00:50:30 / #: It's the first book I wrote with a kid, and I think that it was one of my earliest books, but I didn't want to write children because I was absolutely certain that I couldn't write children, but I decided that I would. Not a young child, but I think when I started, she was nine. I've written five in this universe since then because these characters are so popular.

00:50:51 / #: And it was a book about family, and I think that that's what people really loved. I mean, it was a romance, a really emotional romance, but it was also about family and community. So it hit a lot of buttons. That's the one that people like the most. I think one of your questions was, if I could pick one book to be remembered by, I think it would be one of the ones I wrote most recently, because I think it's better written. So I'd rather be remembered by that. And it also kind of comes full circle for me. It's my take on du Maurier's Rebecca, which is one of the most formative books of my life. I read a lot of gothic romance when I was young.

Sarah MacLean 00:51:38 / #: That's why you love a wounded hero, Radclyffe.

Radclyffe 00:51:40 / #: Totally.

Jennifer Prokop 00:51:41 / #: Serious, hello?

Sarah MacLean 00:51:41 / #: Right there. That's imprinted on you.

Jennifer Prokop 00:51:46 / #: Okay, is the cover a woman running away from a house? Because-

Radclyffe 00:51:47 / #: It should be.

Jennifer Prokop 00:51:47 / #: ... that is my paragram.

Radclyffe 00:51:47 / #: No, it isn't. As a matter of fact, it's this one right here. It's this one.

Jennifer Prokop 00:51:56 / #: Unrivaled, yeah.

Radclyffe 00:51:56 / #: It's a medical romance, but it has many of the themes of Rebecca. Actually, the other one is Jane Eyre. And one of the first books I wrote is called Love's Melody Lost. So one of the very first ones I wrote is based on Jane Eyre, and this one is du Maurier, 66 books just there in between. But yeah, I really like gothic romances.

Sarah MacLean 00:52:22 / #: Well, the book is Unrivaled. Because you feel like Bold Strokes is such a part of your legacy, I wonder if you could talk... I have the same question about Bold Strokes that I did about your own books. Is there one moment of Bold Strokes that you can point to as, "This is the time when we knew we would succeed at this, we knew that we could make this work. This is the book that we knew or the author?" Is there some sort of turning point for you that you can point to? The answer may be no, but-

Radclyffe 00:52:57 / #: I think the answer is no. Really. It's an organic sort of body of people and work that simply has grown and never stopped. But from the very beginning when there were just five of us and then there were 10 of us, and then 25 of us, we were connected. And I think that that's what made me realize and our books were really good and people really liked them. And I think the success of our early titles sort of confirmed for me that we were on the right road.

00:53:36 / #: And we've continued to really push and have a lot of the most popular authors that are publishing, writing queer stuff today. And we're expanding all the time, and we have many more diverse authors and diverse stories. So we're growing. We never have stagnated.

Jennifer Prokop 00:53:54 / #: So you talked about the discoverability problem and print on demand. And so when the Kindle came online, when eBooks really became a thing, and for those of you who are five years old or whatever, I'm sorry, I don't mean that I'm old. I remember for years they were like, "There's going to be digital books one day," and we were all like, "Whatever." And then boom there were. Did that help with discoverability? Did that change your business model when books became available directly to people?

Radclyffe 00:54:25 / #: Yeah, totally. Actually, I'm a big numbers person. I believe in the numbers. And so I've looked at a lot of these things and presented some of these things. And when the Kindle came out, and then the iPad shortly after, it became very apparent to me that we needed this platform. And I asked our eBook tech, who at the time was just making PDFs that we were selling from a web store. So I got a contract with both Amazon and iTunes right away, and I said, "Tony," I said, "We need to convert our catalog." Well, we had 800 titles then, and she did it in six weeks.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:06 / #: What?

Jennifer Prokop 00:55:07 / #: Oh, wow.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:08 / #: That's unbelievable.

Jennifer Prokop 00:55:09 / #: And there you go, right? There you go.

Radclyffe 00:55:13 / #: And see, when you're an independent publisher, you can move.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:15 / #: So nimble. Yeah.

Radclyffe 00:55:15 / #: The next year, we saw a 30% increase in our backlist sales, in our backlist title sales.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:21 / #: Now what year do you feel like this was?

Radclyffe 00:55:25 / #: 2010, 2011.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:26 / #: Yeah, it was right. I mean, that felt like that it was electric that time.

Jennifer Prokop 00:55:30 / #: It was electric.

Sarah MacLean 00:55:30 / #: And it was the Wild West in a lot of ways in that if you had a Kindle or if you had a Sony eReader, which is what I had to start, you were just reading whatever there was. I mean, I think people who now come to romance and come to independent publishing have no frame of reference for how little there was at the beginning, which is why so many of these authors and publishers who were on the early crest of this wave-

Jennifer Prokop 00:56:02 / #: Early adopters.

Sarah MacLean 00:56:03 / #: ... were making so much money. I mean, because we would read everything.

Radclyffe 00:56:09 / #: The thing that was so important for us is that we could reach the community that didn't have access to us before. It's been both a blessing and a curse for queer publishing because I think that digital publishing has destroyed the network of queer bookstores. In the '70s and '80s and '90s, there were probably 1,200 feminist and queer bookstores in the United States, and now there's probably less than 10. I mean, they just cannot survive because there's not enough concentration of readers.

00:56:48 / #: Womencrafts in Provincetown is one of the oldest still existing, and I mean, they're still going strong, but Giovanni's is gone. I mean, in all the major cities, they're gone. Because there's not enough in that one place to buy print. So we're reaching more readers, but it's flipped the paradigm. So eBooks are selling much more than print, which is true for genre fiction and romance in particular, which everybody knows. And that's a loss. That's a tremendous loss for us not to have those bookstores anymore.

Sarah MacLean 00:57:23 / #: Where is the community finding books?

Radclyffe 00:57:26 / #: Well, they find them online like most readers, but very fortunately for us, they find them with us because we have our own web store. We send out all our new release newsletters, we discount our titles so that they can find them. We do daily bargains. We do every possible thing we can to get our books to our readers. But interestingly enough, the vast majority of readers are still getting them outside of our direct connections. They're still getting them. They're looking on the internet. They're hopefully going to bookstores and finding them there, because we still do release all of our titles in print and libraries. We have a pretty good library distribution, both eBook and paperback. So they find them the way everybody else finds them.

Sarah MacLean 00:58:19 / #: Yeah, but it is sad to lose the community of booksellers.

Radclyffe 00:58:23 / #: It's very tough.

Sarah MacLean 00:58:25 / #: And also, we didn't talk about this, but you have one of the largest collections of lesbian romance in the world, in your house, behind you.

Jennifer Prokop 00:58:35 / #: [inaudible 00:58:35 / #] behind you.

Radclyffe 00:58:35 / #: There's 2,000 books right there behind me.

Sarah MacLean 00:58:38 / #: I feel like we should take a picture of this. I'm going to take a picture of you. Let's take this, yeah.

Radclyffe 00:58:42 / #: This is a little tiny piece of the set, eight bookcases, that I started collecting every single one that I could find throughout the country after that first book in 1972. And then I went back and found some of the older ones. And then very honestly, probably eight or nine years ago, one, I ran out of space. Number two, very happily, there were so many coming out that I couldn't read them all at once.

Jennifer Prokop 00:59:08 / #: You couldn't do it anymore, yeah.

Radclyffe 00:59:08 / #: And so a lot of them now, I just read on Kindle or I read on the iPad, but I have them, they're 40 years old now, some of them. But this is the lifeblood behind me. This is what, for our community-

Sarah MacLean 00:59:28 / #: This is what you've bathed in the blood of?

Radclyffe 00:59:29 / #: ... this is life giving. That's I am bathed in the blood.

Sarah MacLean 00:59:31 / #: I love that.

Jennifer Prokop 00:59:35 / #: Well done. What a way to end.

Sarah MacLean 00:59:38 / #: Radclyffe, this was amazing. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jennifer Prokop 00:59:38 / #: It was amazing.

Sarah MacLean 00:59:41 / #: Thanks for telling us your stories.

Radclyffe 00:59:43 / #: I hope it was enjoyable for everybody who's listening too.

Jennifer Prokop 00:59:48 / #: If people aren't interested in this, then they just aren't us because I can't get enough of it.

Radclyffe 00:59:53 / #: I know, I could talk about it forever.

Jennifer Prokop 00:59:53 / #: Forever. Forever.

Sarah MacLean 00:59:56 / #: Yeah, yeah. I have a feeling that every one of these interviews is just going to be-

Jennifer Prokop 01:00:03 / #: They're amazing.

Sarah MacLean 01:00:04 / #: ... better than the next. It's crazy how great they all are.

Jennifer Prokop 01:00:07 / #: It really is amazing. I think one of the things that really struck me, there are so many about this conversation is once again, the real importance of representation.

Sarah MacLean 01:00:18 / #: Yeah, and also the idea of how she thinks about her own books and the archetypes that she writes, reflecting herself and other people. And talk about somebody who understands why she's sitting down every day. And I think that is a struggle for some of us, but it's not for her. And interestingly, I mean not to spoil who else we have coming and what else we have planned, but I think one of the things that I'm already seeing just so early in the conversations that we're having is these people all know why they sit down every day, and that is a huge piece of the puzzle, I think.

01:00:56 / #: I do just want to shout out, also, we talked about this during the Sandra Brown episode or after the Sandra Brown episode, but again, this sense of community. This idea that the work for so many of these trailblazers is to lift up other voices and to help other people come to the table. And that's really cool.

Jennifer Prokop 01:01:15 / #: This question of the losing of queer bookstores, we talk a lot about, okay, the Kindle revolution has meant that your reading can be private, but that in this particular case, it has also taken away a space that has been so powerful in the queer community.

01:01:37 / #: And when she talked about not being able to put books on the shelves in P-Town, right? And so that whole question of books on the shelves is one, I think, that you and I offline talk about all the time, "Where are people finding romance on the shelves?" And that is something that is even more urgent. And I think really is so interesting to hear that perspective from Radclyffe.

Sarah MacLean 01:02:04 / #: Well, and this idea of losing queer bookstores being scary in a lot of ways. Like this idea that these bookstores, and we all know this intuitively as readers, that bookstores, libraries, these are usually safe spaces for us to do our exploration around identity. But for queer kids, for LGBTQIA+ kids, these are spaces that when they're lost, they are a loss, a more powerful loss.

Jennifer Prokop 01:02:36 / #: This is also one of our first Trailblazer episodes where someone had a really different full-time job and was writing on the side. So you don't know who else we've interviewed or those people didn't talk about their other job. But being a doctor and then becoming a romance writer is sort of just for-

Sarah MacLean 01:02:58 / #: And publisher.

Jennifer Prokop 01:02:59 / #: And publisher, right? And so that journey, I think also just goes to show that romance is so powerful for so many people that it's a way of really expressing something that's deep in our hearts. And I was just really interested in hearing that, I really liked that.

Sarah MacLean 01:03:21 / #: Can I also say Radclyffe was the first writer we've had who we've talked across all four seasons where we talked about writing, and she spoke about it as something that she did to relax that she never expected anybody to look at?

Jennifer Prokop 01:03:40 / #: Right, right.

Sarah MacLean 01:03:41 / #: And I'm really charmed by that. And I know that she's not the only one out there, but often we fall into this mythology of like, well, people write in order for other people to read. But Radclyffe was really writing for herself first. And I think that also gets back to this question of representation and identity and experience. But I think that's really fabulous. And I think if you're out there and you're just writing for yourself, that's fine too.

Jennifer Prokop 01:04:08 / #: Yeah, and I think one of the things, and we have had Christina and Lauren on to talk about FanFic. We have talked with Adriana and Alexis who are also big FanFic people. And Adriana especially has talked really explicitly about how fan fiction, these are spaces where marginalized characters can get the full treatment of their humanity.

01:04:33 / #: And so it was also really interesting to think about the ways in which those are avenues where we are going to have so many amazing writers coming up through as, "I wrote this for me, because I wanted to see these characters have a happily ever after, or I wanted to see them experience love the way I feel love." So just really, I think, that was not a surprise to me at all to hear that she'd had a little dabbling in FanFic also in her story.

Sarah MacLean 01:04:59 / #: Yeah, those cowboy books. I love it, I want them. Anyway, everyone, this is Fated Mates. You have been listening to a Trailblazer episode. We're doing those in addition to our regular read-alongs and interstitial episodes over the course of season four and maybe beyond.

01:05:16 / #: We're trying very hard to add to the romance history here, along with other podcasts that are doing the same thing. You should head over, speaking of other podcasts that are doing the same thing, to Julie Moody-Freeman's Black Romance podcast where she has been doing this for several seasons with Black romance writers.

01:05:34 / #: And you can otherwise hang out with us, FatedMates.net. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at FatedMates and at FatedMatesPod respectively. You can find gear and stickers and links to other cool stuff at the website. And otherwise, head over to your pod catching app, your favorite one, and like and follow us there. And you will never miss an episode of us in your ear holes.

Jennifer Prokop 01:06:02 / #: Have a great week, everybody.

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