lgbtq+ WRITING

Part 1

I’m working on my second novel, and there’s something nobody tells you about the second time round: you know just enough to be dangerous. With my first book, I simply wrote it, thought it was great, and published it. This time, I understand there are actual steps between “The End” and “upload to Amazon”. The problem is figuring out which steps matter and which are just procrastination dressed up as professionalism.

The self-publishing journey really does begin before you’ve finished writing. This series of blogs sets out what I’ve learned: and the decisions you make early on will save you headaches later.

Market research isn’t as boring as it sounds

When people say “market research”, I immediately think of spreadsheets and data analysis and falling asleep at my desk. But for fiction writers, market research is actually quite fun. It’s basically permission to spend hours scrolling through Amazon looking at books in your genre whilst telling yourself you’re working.

Here’s what I actually do. I go to Amazon or Audible, find my genre (for me, that’s LGBTQ+ contemporary fiction), and look at the top books in that category. I’m not reading them all. I’m looking at three things: covers, titles, and blurbs. What do the successful books look like? What promises are they making to readers? What do the covers communicate at thumbnail size?

Then comes the really valuable bit, and this genuinely surprised me. Read the negative reviews. Not the one-star rants from people who are angry the book contained too much/not enough smut. I mean the thoughtful three-star reviews from readers who wanted to love the book but something didn’t quite work. These reviews are pure gold because they tell you what readers in your niche actually expect and what disappoints them.

For LGBTQ+ British fiction specifically, the market has grown enormously. LGBTQ+ fiction sales have increased in recent years, while overall fiction sales declined. Romance accounts for 30% of that growth, but every genre has seen expansion: fantasy, science fiction, thriller, literary fiction. The readers are out there, actively searching. The question is whether your book will find them. And self-publishing and finding them is hard.

Writing without second-guessing yourself into paralysis

This is where I’m supposed to tell you to write every day, set word count goals, and maintain unwavering discipline. But honestly? That’s not realistic for most of us. Life happens. Day jobs happen. Some days you write 3,000 words in a caffeine- or red wine-fuelled burst, and some weeks you don’t write at all because you’re staring at the screen wondering if anyone will actually care about these characters. Including you.

What I’ve found more useful is thinking about completion rather than perfection. Your first draft is not supposed to be good. It’s supposed to exist. Anne Lamott calls them “shitty first drafts” for a reason. The goal is getting all the scenes down, all the character arcs mapped out, all the plot threads introduced even if they’re tangled and messy.

For LGBTQ+ fiction, there’s an additional pressure: representation matters, which means getting it wrong feels higher stakes. I’m writing from my own experience as a gay British man, but even then I worry about authenticity. Am I reinforcing stereotypes? Am I making my characters too flawless in an attempt to provide “positive representation”? Am I unconsciously centring my own experience whilst marginalising others? How am I writing about women?

Here’s what helps me: write the messy first draft where you’re primarily figuring out the story. The authenticity questions can be addressed in revision, ideally with feedback from beta readers and potentially sensitivity readers if you’re writing outside your own experience. But you can’t revise what doesn’t exist yet, so the priority in drafting is simply getting it down.

One practical thing that’s helped me: keep a running list of questions and concerns as you write. When I wrote a stuffy older straight man and wasn’t sure if I’d handled a particular scene well, I noted it. That note became a specific question for my beta readers later. Acknowledging uncertainty is better than either ignoring it or letting it stop you writing entirely.

The self-editing stage everyone rushes through

Once you type “The End”, every instinct screams to upload it immediately. I did this with my first book. Looking back at it now makes me want to curl into a ball of embarrassment. There were typos. And not subtle ones.

Self-editing isn’t about becoming a professional editor. It’s about catching the most obvious problems before anyone else sees them. Here’s my process now, learned the hard way:

Step one: wait. Put the manuscript away for a little while Work on something else. When you return to it, you’ll see it more clearly because you’ll have forgotten exactly what you meant to write and will instead see what you actually wrote.

Step two: read it through once without stopping to fix anything. Just read and note problems. This is surprisingly difficult because the urge to stop and correct things is overwhelming. But reading straight through helps you experience the book more like a reader would and spot pacing issues or inconsistencies you’d miss if you were stopping every paragraph to fiddle with word choices.

Step three: now do your line edits. Go through scene by scene, tightening prose, cutting unnecessary words, fixing clunky sentences. You won’t catch everything and you’ll make it worse in places, but this process finds my habit of overusing “just” and “really” and “actually”.

Step four: read it aloud. This is tedious and you’ll feel ridiculous, but it works. Your ears catch problems your eyes skip over. Awkward dialogue becomes immediately obvious. Sentences that looked fine on the page reveal themselves as disasters when you try to speak them.

For LGBTQ+ content specifically, this is also when I check for unintentional implications. Am I accidentally falling into “bury your gays” territory? Are my queer characters’ storylines as rich and complex as my straight characters’ would be? Do my gay characters exist only to educate others about being gay, or do they have their own goals and conflicts?

Finding beta readers who’ll actually help

Beta readers are ideally people who read in your genre, understand reader expectations, and can articulate what’s working and what isn’t. Finding them is tricky.

Where to look:

The most reliable source I’ve found is actually reciprocal arrangements with other authors. You read their manuscript, they read yours. This works because other authors understand what useful feedback looks like and have motivation to actually finish reading. The downside is it’s time-consuming and not everyone can commit to reading a full novel whilst working on their own.

Online communities offer another option. Reddit’s r/BetaReaders has over 100,000 members and is active daily. Scribophile is a writing community where you earn credits by critiquing others’ work, then spend those credits on feedback for your own. Goodreads has beta reader groups, though quality varies wildly. For LGBTQ+ fiction specifically, there’s a Write LGBTQ+ Beta Readers group with around 680 members who explicitly want to read queer stories.

The challenge with all of these is conversion rate. You might get twenty people expressing interest in reading your manuscript, and three will actually finish it. This isn’t personal. People are busy, they underestimate how long reading a full novel takes, life gets in the way, or they start reading and realize it’s not their cup of tea. All of this is normal.

How many beta readers do you need?

You want enough readers that patterns emerge in their feedback. If one person hates your ending, that might just be taste. If four people independently mention the ending feels rushed, that’s a problem you need to address.

What to ask them:

Don’t just say “tell me what you think”. That’s too vague and tends to produce either useless positivity or overwhelming negativity. Instead, give them specific questions. I asked mine:

• Did the pacing work? Were there sections where you felt bored or wanted to skim?
• Which character did you connect with most, and why?
• Did the romance feel believable? Did you root for them?
• Were there any moments that felt inauthentic or stereotypical?
• What questions did you have whilst reading that never got answered?
• If you were recommending this to a friend, what would you say it’s about?

That last question is crucial because it tells you what readers are actually taking away from your story, which might be different from what you think you wrote.

I also asked explicitly about representation. Did anything feel tokenistic? Were the queer characters as well-developed as they’d be if they were straight? Did I handle the coming out storyline in a way that felt fresh rather than recycled? My beta readers were a mix of queer and straight readers, which gave me different perspectives.

When beta feedback contradicts itself

This will happen, and it’s maddening. One reader will say your protagonist is too passive. Another will say they love how thoughtful and introspective she is. One reader wants more sex scenes. Another found the existing ones too explicit. One reader adores your quirky secondary character. Another thinks he’s annoying and distracting.

Here’s what I learned: you’re looking for patterns, not universal agreement. If one person mentions something, that’s a data point. If multiple people independently raise the same concern, that’s a pattern requiring attention. If feedback is contradictory, that often means the element in question is working for some readers and not others, which is fine. You cannot write a book that appeals to everyone.

The hardest part is knowing when to take feedback and when to ignore it. I’ve found that feedback about your execution is usually worth considering, whilst feedback about your premise is usually not. If a beta reader says “I don’t like books about musicians”, that tells you about their taste, not about problems with your book. If a beta reader says “I couldn’t tell what era this was set in until chapter five”, that’s actionable feedback about clarity.

For representation feedback, I weight comments from people within the community more heavily than those from outside it. This doesn’t mean only people from a specific identity can comment, but it does mean lived experience provides valuable insight that research alone might miss.

The long bore of revision

After beta feedback, you revise. This should be obvious, but I know authors who collect feedback and then do nothing with it because they’re overwhelmed or defensive or convinced their original vision was perfect. I understand this impulse. Reading criticism of something you poured your heart into is genuinely difficult.

What’s helped me is separating my ego from the manuscript. The book is not me. Criticism of the book is not criticism of my worth as a human. And if it is, red wine is a beautiful thing. And genuinely, the manuscript will be better after revision. Every time. Even when I initially resist a piece of feedback, when I eventually implement it, the book improves. You learn to find a better way through.

Revision based on beta feedback is about diagnosing the underlying issues. If three readers found the middle section dragging, that doesn’t necessarily mean cutting chapters. It might mean raising stakes, adding conflict, clarifying character motivations, or tightening the prose. The readers identified a problem; solving it is your job as the writer.

I’m planning for this second book to spend as long on revision as I did on the initial draft, sometimes longer. This isn’t procrastination. It’s the difference between a complete mess and something readers might actually enjoy. The first draft is figuring out the story. Revision is making the story work.

What comes next

At this point, you have a manuscript that’s been self-edited, beta read, and revised. It’s not perfect, but it’s ready for the next stage. What that stage is depends on your budget and goals, which I’ll cover in the next blog about editing options.

The main thing I’ve learned from working on my second book is that preparation matters. Not in a perfectionist, procrastination way where you never actually publish. But in a “do enough work upfront to avoid publishing something you’ll cringe at in six months” way. There’s a balance between “ready” and “perfect”, and figuring out where that balance is for you is part of the learning process.

For now, though, if you’ve written your manuscript, self-edited it, gathered beta feedback, and revised accordingly, you’ve already accomplished far more than most people who say they want to write a book. 97% of people who start writing never finish. You’re in the 3%. That’s worth acknowledging before you move on to worrying about everything else.