Patricia Harrelson

Electing to self-publish my book Between Two Women was not an easy decision. I wanted my book to be selected by a publisher for I believed that would be the ultimate acknowledgement that the work was worthy—both in terms of content and skillful writing.

I spent three years sending my manuscript to agents and publishers. I followed guidelines in books like

Into Print by Poets & Writers,

How To Get Happily Published by Judith Applebaum,

Putting Your Passion into Print by Arielle Eckstut & David Henry Sterry.

I carefully crafted query letters and developed a one-minute elevator pitch which I gave to multiple agents at the East of Eden Writers’ Conference. I sent my queries out and participated in the Maui Manuscript Marketplace.  I created a book proposal and sent it upon request to agents. Here is a sample of the responses I got:

You are a talented writer  [but] memoir has become a difficult genre to place.

We’ve just done a rash of lesbian memoirs so have to work on other things.

We found your memoir to be quiet well done . . . but feel it would be a very tough sell to commercial publishers.

I consistently got the message that since my book’s appeal was to a niche market, I should query small presses directly, particularly those who published books in my so-called niche. That’s when I learned that narrative non-fiction does not bode well as a calling card because fiction sells and therefore keeps small presses afloat. I got rejection letters from Alyson Press, Spinsters Ink, Cleis Press, and Firebrand. As Nickie Hastie says: “How can we buy the books they decide not to publish?”

After considerable rejection, I was thrilled when I friend helped me through the door of University of Wisconsin Press, introducing me and my manuscript to editor, Raphael Kadushin of the Living Out Series: Gay & Lesbian Autobiography. I got an email request from Kadushin to send the manuscript which I submitted immediately and then waited hopefully with only a tiny niggle of doubt.

I had studied the list of books published in the series. They had only published two books each in the previous two years and all four were about or by famous gay men, and the year my friend’s book was published, it was one of six books published and was the only lesbian book. Read what you will into these facts but note that after waiting for six weeks, I received a form letter (that was not signed) saying, “We have decided that your work does not coincide with our current publishing plans.”

A couple of months later I read an article in Writers’ Digest, Dec. 07 about gay and lesbian writing. Kadushin was interviewed and had this to say: “Coming out stories are no longer published unless they are wildly new or have a universal angle.”  He followed this remark with: “Writers [LGBT] have little aptitude to be truly dangerous or daring.”

That’s when I had a change of attitude. I knew my book contained essential stories about women in general and lesbians in particular, and therefore needed to find its way into print as a concrete historical record. It appeared that the only way to accomplish this was to self-publish.

The self-publishing journey is yet another interesting story.  More on that later.