I know I’m supposed to talk about book series but I wasn’t particularly motivated to do that. Or perhaps I was too motivated and didn’t want to rant. Either way, I think the topic of blurbs on books is more interesting.

Blurbs are essential to book buying and selling. Beyond the title and cover, they are the single most essential part to whether someone will buy a book or not. After that comes excerpts which I’ll get to in another post.

Will the blurb entice the reader enough to overlook perhaps a bad cover? Or will the blurb ruin a great cover? Is the blurb too lengthy? Too short? Contain typos? Mistakes?

All of these are considerations when writing a blurb but as a reader, what do you look for in a blurb?

In my opinion, a great blurb should contain a few of the key themes to the book. I always look for the core of the book in a quick skim. Is it a comedy? Romance? Parody? Drama? Thriller? Who are the main characters and what is the essential focus. One’s closeted or one’s straight or one is a witness on the run or so on. I want to know the basic facts but without needing to know the entire story and ruin why I should read the book. A great blurb should also omit any random facts or characters that aren’t important.

If the book is about two men falling in love while getting over the death of a lover, it’s not important to name the dead lover and may confuse the reader who skims the blurb looking for the main names only to encounter three names. If the token character is named in a romance, readers may confuse the book with a ménage even if the blurb says the two people are sleeping together and one is just a friend. Similarly if several are named in a blurb for a book this could leave readers confused who the main character is/are.

Additionally there is always talk amongst authors about ending a blurb with a question. This seems to be universally shunned as horrible but do readers really care. Do you really think is a stupid, vapid convention? I mean on the one hand, the question is redundant. You know the couple will live happily ever after if it’s a romance and if it’s a thriller, no one is too worried the main character will die. There are a few common safety nets that allow readers to disregard the questions on blurbs since most readers already know the answer. So why ask the question in a blurb?

More importantly, how do readers feel about a blurb ending in a question? Does it even matter or simply ignorable?

And finally… readers, what do you want in your blurbs? What are the key things you look for when reading a blurb for a book you’re considering buying?

We all know the acronym GLBT, some of us use GLBTQ, and it’s pretty common knowledge what all the letters stand for. This site was created to focus on books from all spectrums of GLBTQ but when it comes to the B…there’s some frustration.

A large percentage of the GLBTQ books being published these days are gay male stories, but what about readers like me who are looking for quality fiction from the other areas of the rainbow? Quality lesbian fiction may not be as popular in the ebook community, but there is a plethora of fiction out there if you know where to look. Transgender fiction is even harder to find, but there’re stories out there. So what about bisexual stories? I’ve identified as bisexual for over 15 years now, and after years of reading books I’ve come to the conclusion that finding quality fiction with bisexual characters is much harder than it seems.

A 2002 survey in the US by the National Center for Health Statistics found that of people ages 18-44, 1.8% of men and 2.8% of women consider themselves bisexual. That’s compared to 2.3% of men and 1.3% of women that consider themselves homosexual. That’s just one survey and there are numerous studies with other numbers but the common conclusion is that there is a solid percentage of the population that identifies as bisexual. So why is it so hard to find bisexual fiction?

Being bisexual means that you are attracted to both men and women. A bisexual male might be in a relationship with a female, or he might be in a relationship with a male. Both are love in every sense of the word, but on the surface what do those relationships appear to be? When with a female, the man appears to be in a heterosexual relationship. When with a male, the man appears to be in a homosexual relationship. When a book is written based on one of these relationships, the gut reaction for most publishers, and readers, is to categorize the book based on what the relationship “looks” like. The fact that one of the characters is bisexual gets lost in the shuffle.

Many publishers have what are presented as bisexual selections, and the vast majority of the time these are ménage stories. Typically, you’ll have a bisexual male in a relationship with both a male and a female. This is definitely one way to find bisexual characters, where bisexuality and polyamory are joined together, but what about readers who are looking for bisexual characters in monogamous relationships? Where do we go to find characters that reflect our own lives?

On the one hand, readers that identify as bisexual are at a great advantage as we have a wider array of fiction that we can read and enjoy since we love and are attracted to people of both genders. Yet on the other hand, we end up reading either heterosexual or homosexual characters and not often getting a character we can truly identify with. Of course, books usually focus on one relationship so a character’s bisexuality doesn’t really come up except through details of past relationships. Rock? Meet hard place.

After reading for years and years, I’ve only found a small handful of fiction books that feature bisexual characters in monogamous relationships. A search of “bisexual” on Amazon returns 87 romance titles, with 75 labeled Erotica and 18 labeled contemporary. The majority of those titles appear to involve polyamory. There are 841 books returned under Gay & Lesbian, and glancing through the beginning of the list are numerous non-fiction books with real life tales from bisexuals. Many are phenomenal books, yet still not fiction.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to this one. I will just continue to search for fiction with bisexual characters.  If you have any recommendations please share them!