GRL goes bananas: an outsider's opinion

Minding my own business today, the gay romance world went bananas.  Misunderstandings abound, feelings were hurt.  It was petty and nasty and so not the inclusive world we dream this genre to be.  I wish I were surprised, but I'm not.  One of my core beliefs is that we are all insecure sixth graders at heart and act accordingly much of the time.  

As a writer and reader who has never been to GRL and probably won't attend any time soon, my opinion probably doesn't matter, but it's my blog so I get to say what I want.

As a reader, if I'm shelling out hard earned money for a gay romance conference, I want my favorite authors there. I would be thrilled to discover new and upstart authors once I'm there, but I want to see the superstars of the genre.  Who decides who the superstars are?  Readers do with their wallets. Big names attract more attention and more attention means more money for everyone selling at the conference... publishers, authors and other vendors. 

Conferences, especially those for an industry's customers (ie readers) are designed to funnel money into the pockets of the presenters & vendors.  In this case, directly or indirectly, they want attendees to buy more books.  If Philemena Fillibottom sells more books than anyone else in the genre, you can bet that her publisher and the organizers want her headlining the conference.  Publishers are the deep pockets here and seem to foot much of the bill for the conference. The only reason for them to participate is to have an opportunity sell more books at the conference and beyond. Don't ever be conned into believing it's not about the money.

Gay romance as a category is growing at an unsustainable rate, one day it will level off, but until that happens smaller conferences like GRL are going to suffer from lots of growing pains as they try and keep up. GRL isn't a public service.  Just because you want to present at a conference, doesn't mean you have a right to do so.  Maybe GRL should just have attendees and let writers put a special sticker on their nametags since I have yet to meet a writer who isn't an avid reader.  That would let the costs be spread across a broader pool of people and reduce the burden on the authors.  Presenters and featured authors should be selected by the publishers and/or organizers, like nearly every other conference in the universe.  

At the end of the day GRL is going to have to grow (a lot) or it will ultimately not be able to please anyone and it will fail.  Some corporately run conference will eventually step in to fill the gap when they smell the money and whoever that is will run right over GRL if they don't find a way to accomodate a bigger audience.

There.  I've said my completely irrelevant piece.  Moving on to some pretty eye candy... The socks kill me dead every time I look at it.

(Source: Straight until the lights go out)