Why I Self-Published My Book, And It's Not Why You Think - Undividing #6

Plus Nick Cave's Red Hand Files.

Hello everyone and welcome to Undividing #6. This week we’re going to get into our own prejudices.

Because let’s be honest, we’ve all got them. And I’m going to use the publishing of my book as a way to illustrate the most difficult kind of prejudice to spot in ourselves—what we expect and allow from other people because of who they are.

These unconscious biases create limiting thoughts, both of what we think others are capable of, and what we think we can learn from others who aren’t like us.

But sadly, we have these same limiting ideas about ourselves as well.

Publishing my book became a fascinating, often disappointing, but ultimately inspiring insight into how LGBTQ+ people are perceived in the world. But also how I perceived myself.

Which means this week we’re combining Undividing Our World and Ourselves into one section and looking at how these lurking, limiting ideas come from both outside and inside of us.

If you know anyone who’d be interested in Undividing and the topics we cover, share Undividing with them:

But first, an insight and a question from two readers in Undividing With You.

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Would you like to buy me a coffee?

Undividing is my gift to the world. The biggest way you can pay me, and everyone, is by putting things you learn here into action in yourself and in the world.

That said, I would also appreciate your financial support to keep it going. A paid subscription is like buying me a coffee a month. And you get four Undividing newsletters and four Emotions Diaries. It’s a deal, it’s a steal.

Or if you just want to help out with buying me a single coffee, that would be amazing too. I take mine black, no sugar.

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Undividing With You

1. Rachel O had a fantastic insight on friendship from last week’s Undividing. She, like me, is an ex-pat living in Germany, far from her home country.

“Friendship is underrated, especially in urban life and in our times where we think just keeping in touch in social media is enough; it's not. I appreciate my friendships, but alas we are all in long distance relationship...” — Rachel O

“Alas we are all in long distance relationships.” I loved that part of what she wrote, that any friendship kept alive only through social media is happening at a great distance from the two humans involved.

Do you have a friendship on social media that needs to be “short-distanced” with more real world attention from you?

2. And then George F asked me, “What’s the best dating advice you’ve ever received?”

Well George, it’s this.

Stay single.

Take all your profiles down.

If someone asks you on a date, say thanks, but I’m not dating at the moment.

And you do that until the loneliness goes away.

The point of it is to get so comfortable with yourself, and truly enjoy a solo life, that you will start dating again from the POV of not needing someone, but wanting them instead. It changes everything. And I’m going to dive into this more in next week’s newsletter.

I’ve been dating (often disastrously) for 35 years, been married and divorced, fell in love with myself, then fell in love with someone else again.

So please ask any questions you have about love and relationships and I’ll do my best to answer them all next week.

Onto undividing the world my friends…

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Undividing Our World And Ourselves: The Invisible Prejudice That Cursed And Saved My Book

This week when I was thinking about divisions in the world, I wanted to talk about the division that we are unconsciously taking with us everywhere—what we think another group of people are capable of. And therefore, what we think they can offer us, or we to them.

And we’re doing it to each other every day.

It’s the strangest kind of prejudice because of how it manifests. It’s not one that lurks for you around corners waiting to beat you up. It’s not the one that gets you fired from jobs. It’s not out in the streets with placards emblazoned with messages against your rights or existence.

It’s the prejudice that has become a belief that is all but invisible to the people holding it. The blinkers they can’t see.

These kinds of prejudices can even come from people who would consider themselves allies and fight on your behalf. And even come from yourself against yourself.

How I didn’t get discovered, but a truth did

Here’s a story about a conversation I had with a top literary agent in New York two years ago when I was desperately searching for anyone to give me and my book a chance. She represents two author friends of mine and they basically told her she had to take a call with me.

After a year and a half of frantically searching for an agent or a publisher, it was my first proper talk with someone who might take a chance on me. After pleasantries were exchanged, the agent jumped right in.

Agent: So, I read the first ten thousand words of your book, and I have to tell you I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that this was the first book you’ve ever written.

Me: In a good way?

Agent: Yes! You have an excellent voice on the page, I love your writing style, I can tell it’s going to be a great story…

As I was wondering if I needed to fly to New York to sign my contract she went on…

Agent: …but I’m not going to represent you. And anyone who says they will is probably not very good at their job. I’ll explain…

As I fell from the great heights I had just scaled in my brain, she offered a pretty solid case from a publishing industry point of view. She explained that LGBTQ+, Divorce, and memoirs by people who aren’t famous are the three hardest genres to sell.

And that I had combined all three in one book.

She also explained that agents make their income from book sales. My book on paper looks like it’s dead in the water, ie zero money to be made vs the effort it takes for her. The agent then qualified it by saying that therefore anyone who would rep me is probably not very good at their job.

Her advice: self-publish and hire a PR firm.

This advice was fantastic, it saved me probably another year or so of writing into the abyss of online book submission forms only to hear crickets for my efforts. I will be eternally grateful for her blunt advice and how she spent a kindness on me with this half hour of her time.

But I had to make a point.

Me: I hear what you’re saying, but I would counter with Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love—it’s a book about a woman who at the time wasn’t famous, who got a divorce, went on a journey to find herself, and ended up in a place of self-love. Which is the same story as my book.

To which she replied, “Yeah, but that’s different.”

And to which I responded, much to my own surprise, with, “Yeah, I know.”

She wished me well, and asked me to send her a copy of the book when it was done.

After that, I got busy getting How To Burn A Rainbow into the world.

What bothered me for months though, was that we had both agreed on something incredibly limiting for me that we hadn’t named. Something we both knew was true. But that I couldn’t put into words.

It sat in my stomach, undigested for months.

Here’s what the world thinks of you - and doesn’t know it

One day as I was researching my book, I was listening to a podcast called Man Enough—it deconstructs what it is to be a man in the world today, from a guy called Jason Baldoni who decided he was tired of being, “man enough.”

They had Alok Menon on the podcast (who I mentioned in last week’s Undividing). For me, this episode below is a masterclass on gender.

The lightbulb moment for me, was when Alok said of the LGBTQ+ community, “There is a perception out there in the world, that we are here for their entertainment, and not their education. They do not believe that they have anything to learn from us.”

I stopped typing. And I looked out the window at the mottled grey Berlin winter skies.

That’s what the agent and I had agreed on. That was the truth neither of us named. That’s why Eat Pray Love can exist in society’s mind in a way that How To Burn A Rainbow can’t.

And the worst part about this realisation was discovering that I’d agreed with this prejudice as a truth about my own people.

Off come the blinkers. And the gloves.

After that, I began to investigate where this belief had come from. I wanted to get to the root of why it was in me. And to dig it out.

The obvious starting point is that you spend your whole life being told that you are lesser than because you’re a minority. OK, but when I compared that to how I thought about the way our works were perceived in the world, we had produced entertainment and thinking that was on par with anyone else’s.

Or was it? Had it been given that chance? And this comes back to what we are willing to accept from a group based on what they think they are capable of.

I started listing every famous LGBTQ+ piece of pop culture I could conjure, that had made a dent in the heterosexual world.

Priscilla, Ru Paul’s, Queer Eye, Legendary - all of which I’ve adored. But all of them entertainment spectacles with Drag Queens, Make-Overs, Ballroom Dance. All of these including large chunks of us talking about the oppression that we’ve had to overcome. Or, from a more cynical POV, LGBTQ+ and heterosexuals watching shows about how queer folks have processed the oppression created for us by heterosexuals, and turned it into entertainment for them.

Is this is all the world thinks we’re capable of? Or will allow itself to think of?

I think this is shifting. On TV we’ve gone from sassy, characature-like sidekicks to fully fledged characters with inner worlds and storylines that aren’t about our sexuality: Heartstoppers and Billions come to mind.

Younger millenials and Gen-Z are changing this perception drastically with their own openness to their sexualities, and their normality of diversity.

But they don’t run the publishing industry.

Amazon does though—a global average of 66% of book sales are through them, and a whopping 83% of e-book sales in the US. However…

Amazon’s LGBTQ+ “Iconic Ghetto”

I borrowed this term from Elijah Anderson, the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale, that he used for the African American community. “Iconic Ghetto” a place where a group of people live in the minds of everyone else (and even themselves) based on how they have been treated throughout history.

Part of listing a book for sale on Amazon is specifying what category it belongs to. But here is a funny thing about Amazon… take a look at this category list.

LGBTQ+ is its own category. No other minority group has this. And if you click the LGBTQ+ tab, you’ll find almost every other book genre listed here, just the LGBTQ+ versions.

Which means that if you are LGBTQ+ and an author, your genre is LGBTQ+ before it’s anything else.

On one had you can say, that’s great for people to find books from our community. But it also says, these books are for those people. To educate ourselves, and people who seek us out.

But we aren’t considered normal or the go-to for information and education in general.

If all this is a surprise and a wake-up call to you, it was to me too.

What about the LGBTQ+ publishers?

Good question. While my ego wanted to get published by one of the Big 5 publishing houses, I figured the green light would probably come from one of the LGBTQ+ presses.

I lost count of how many I wrote to. And just like the Big 5, I never heard back from any. Except for one, which I won’t name.

The gist of the response was, they didn’t want to publish the “bad news” as they called it. In other words, the very community who I wrote a book about gay divorce for, didn’t want to know that a book about divorce could come from us.

As they said, since we had only recently been given the right to marry in the States, they didn’t want to publish a book so soon that told the story of a gay marriage ending.

A guy at the LA bar The Eagle put it succinctly one night in the early days of my separation from my ex-husband. When he asked me if I was single and I explained my situation, he exclaimed, “Jesus Christ! Are we getting divorced now?!”

Here’s the good news: we’re all smarter than this

Entertainment, not education. How did this prejudicial truth finally save the book?

Firstly, I stopped waiting for someone to come and pluck me out of obscurity. I plucked myself.

After two years of rewrites advised by the defamation attorneys I’d had to hire, the book was finally self-published in May this year.

And then people started writing to me. People who aren’t in the community. People who aren’t getting divorces. People from different walks of life, in different countries, and going through different life events wrote to tell me how the book helped them.

With the tragic death of an adult son.

With finally understanding what happened to an old relationship.

With end of life situations with parents.

With their entire life’s purpose.

With their inability to love themselves.

Which brings it back to the highest truth of all; we’re all humans going through it. We’re all having human experiences. And the wisdom from any human experience can help another person going through theirs.

So how do we find and fight our own prejudices?

It took me writing a book about my divorce to a man that opened my eyes to the invisible prejudices about me and my community that others carried as truths. And made me look hard at my own.

But since then, I’ve maintained a practice and it’s the only way I know to open my mind and my eyes:

• Read widely.

  • If you like a genre of books, ask at the bookstore for someone totally different to the dominant authorship. It’s how I discovered Octavia Butler, the African -American sci-fi writer who won the Nebula in the 70s.

  • Read different news sources. Pick one you never normally read for a week. You’ll discover a whole other perspective on others and the world.

• Listen widely.

  • Ask your Uber driver for some life advice.

  • Talk to people in stores half your age.

  • Strike up conversations with strangers.

• Note your prejudices.

  • When you have those moments of seeing someone doing something you don’t associate with them, stop for a moment and note it. Is it their age, ethnicity, gender, religion etc. Start to look for a pattern.

• Take an Unconscious Bias test

  • https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

  • The link above is for one conducted by Harvard University. It let’s you discover any lurking biases you have that you may not even be aware of.

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Undividing Extra: How I Underestimated Nick Cave

Nick Cave. Australian. Musician. World famous. Not my taste. Or so I thought.

I love it when Aussies do well. And Nick Cave has done that. He’s got a kind of global, underground, Bowie style level of cool and artistic output. I personally have never really gotten into his music. But I also haven’t given it much of a chance.

So when I heard he had a newsletter called The Red Hand Files where he answers fans questions, I thought, maybe that could be interesting. I signed up.

What I found was that his responses are thoughtful, long, revealing, human, touching, perceptive, and a celebration of this thing we are in called Life.

A brief quote from the question above:

“Despite various viral events, sprains, assorted injuries and temporary disablements, the band is fit, happy, and in good shape. The shows are outstanding, feel deeply musical, and we are enjoying them immensely. Those couple of hours on stage are intense and concentrated and there is a feeling of supreme metaphysical possibility where anything can happen, and frequently does. When performing, I experience an aliveness where I feel close to the living and to the dead.” - Nick Cave / Red Hand Files #301

What I hadn’t previously given any mind to is that Nick Cave, like all of us, is more than just his job. He’s a human with a wealth of life experience, and an eagerness to connect and share that with his written words.

I still don’t own a Nick Cave album. But I’m now a huge fan of him as a writer. Because I changed what I thought I could expect from him.

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The limiting ideas we have of others and ourselves - what are they, how to find them, and how to fight them. And the big, warm, human heart of Nick Cave.

Till the Emotions Diary on Thursday, big undividing hugs to you all,

Karl

P.S. Speaking of books, How To Burn A Rainbow just picked up two huge independent book awards—Reader’s Favourite and Best Indie Book Awards for LGBTQ+ Memoir!!!

You can pick one up from Jeff at the US Amazon store (where it’s still in the top 25 LGBTQ+ biographies in Germany!) or from Ru Paul’s Allstora who now ship internationally. Or order one at your local bookstore.