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Bella Books, which publishes and distributes lesbian romance, mystery, fiction and erotica, has found a way to reach out and touch readers – the Bella Y Tour. The format is simple… authors come to town and have a social event, do a community service project and wrap up with book readings and a Q&A session.
Lesbian book publishing has come a long way. It used to be that women looking for girl-on-girl books had to find a women’s bookstore or brave the checkout counter of the local library.
The Internet has changed how many readers get their books… often in brown boxes delivered to the front door or, in increasing numbers, instantly to electronic equipment. The problem now is that the books and the readers are getting lost in information overload.
Bella Books, which publishes and distributes lesbian romance, mystery, fiction and erotica, has found a way to reach out and touch readers – the Bella Y Tour. The format is simple… authors come to town and have a social event, do a community service project and wrap up with book readings and a Q&A session.
Bella Y (the ‘Y’ stands for ‘you’) kicked off last year in Denver and recently stopped at the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, Stonewall Library and Archives, which houses some 18,000 LGBT books and audio-visual materials. Both the community and the authors branded the event a rousing success.
Five lesbian writers were on the Florida swing. Three are well known to fans of lesbian fiction -- Katherine Forrest (15 books including Curious Wine), Karin Kallmaker (25 books, latest Stepping Stone) and KG MacGreggor (8 book, latest Photographs of Claudia)… and two are newcomers -- Amy Dawson Robertson (Miles to Go) and Dillon Watson (Keile’s Chance).
Friday night the authors joined readers for a drinks and snacks at the New Moon bar. Saturday, they did some landscaping outside and organized books inside the library. Sunday they read from their books and answered questions.
Ft. Lauderdale was Forrest’s first Bella Y Tour. “I am thrilled to be with Bella authors especially Karin and KG, who are two of the most popular lesbian authors in the world.”
Forest, who now spends most of her time as an editor, said the tour “… puts me in mind of back in the early days when I did publish with Naiad and we used to do this barn storming kind of stuff around the country and there was such a sense of community because we had the whole network of bookstores, we had our bars so it is a wonderful way of connecting.”
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MacGreggor, who lives in Miami part of the year, helped bring the tour to Ft. Lauderdale. “We did a Y tour last year in Denver…our goal was to take our books to our readers. It’s so hard to get people’s attention and we kept hearing people say, ‘I had no idea these books existed.’”
Kallmaker added. “We’re hoping to make contact with lesbians who have never heard of us, haven’t heard of books or any kind of genre fiction that is available for lesbians. With outreach and community events ... I think there is always a chance that you literally save someone’s life because someone decides not to strike a blow because the earthquake did not happen the day after the lesbians were here,” she added.
Book publishing and Bella Y were new experiences for both Dawson and Watson. “I think it is great to get people to come out,” Dawson said. “Just the face-to-face interaction... it’s wonderful meeting the reader and they seem to like to meet us, too.”
Watson agreed. “I think it is important... I get to meet readers and I get to recruit new readers, too, and they see us out in the community doing things... people are always curious about the authors …”
Bella hopes the tour can make four stops a year in cities where there is an active lesbian network to help set up the event and get the word out to the community.
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