Samantha's comments are accurate (and here's another shout-out to Doppler Press!). My own experience is that very few top agents will even consider a novel with a transgender character -- remember, even at this late date, Amazon doesn't even have a "transgender" category, yet they have "Yaoi". I'm not equating those or denigrating that, but it is even more of a niche market. So legitimate novels (by BCTS authors!) get lumped in with erotica and porn -- just look at the "suggestions" Amazon puts at the bottom of a page.

Many agents and publishers seem to have the same mindset, making it difficult to get representation. But even with a nibble, their first question isn't "Will this book sell?" but "How many followers do you have on social media?". I follow many author blogs and bulletin boards (like Absolute Write) and even mainstream novelists get hit with the social media demands -- the burdens and costs of publicity now fall on the author, and having a major presence on several platforms seems to be a requirement before a manuscript is considered!

One other concern raised by some "trans-lit" authors that I've been in correspondence with? If you're signed, if you're published, you will be exposed to the world. That means that everyone will know if you're transgender, or not -- one told me the agent considering her manuscript said it was required; that he wouldn't publish and have it be discovered the author was a pseudonym and was cis. And that's because of the social media bit again, and might cause problems or even danger for some authors.

A final note: Traditional publishing -- author receives an advance against future royalties, etc. -- is almost a thing of the past, as are the brick-and-mortar bookstores. Ebooks now outsell all physical books except in self-help and textbook categories. Publishers love ebooks because there are no printing, shipping, warehousing costs, or remainders to deal with. That being said, mainstream hardcover and paperback books typically deliver royalties of 8-15% of cover price -- minus the advance, minus "ancillary expenses", etc. Yes, the Kings and Grishams make big money (bear in mind that Danielle Steel and JK Rowling, for example, have sold between 500-800 million books!) but many, many mainstream authors have to keep their day jobs ...

So we self-publish (hoping that Amazon will give us our own damn category!). We get 70% of our sales at Amazon with no upfront costs, or 100% at a pay-to-publish site like Bookbaby after paying several hundred upfront. Money comes in and maybe the mortgage gets paid ... or at least a month's Visa bill ...

And we hope for that one reader who stumbles onto a book of ours, who maybe tells somebody who maybe knows somebody in publishing who will "discover" us ... and then maybe we're the next Fifty Shades of Grey -- 150 million copies of a poorly-written niche book, self-published.

Karin

In the 1980s I submitted my post Apocalyptic novel to 50 publishers, or that was my goal. I can't remember if I achieved that. I got responses from a half dozen of them. None of them offered to publish my Novel, but a few of them had advice for me about how I could make it more publishable. That Manuscript was done on an Electric Typewriter, and I think I used a high end photocopier to make the copies.

The other day, I found one of my old Manuscripts that was done on a Dot Matrix Printer, so it must have come off a primitive computer. I think that first Novel could be stored on one of the old time 360 Kb floppies.

Sometimes, you just have to write for your own pleasure, but you'll never be published. I've accepted that.