How to find lesbian literature and still support your favorite authors like me!
Amazon is not the only game in town, and there are many ways to read the books you love and support the authors who write them.
The lesbian literary community (and Sapphic and WLW and queer) has been a rough place over the past month. Besides the postings on Threads saying that Sapphic fiction isn’t as good as gay male fiction (bite me), authors have been complaining that Kindle Unlimited page reads and book sales are way down. Some readers say they don’t have the money to buy books and can’t in good conscience give the money they do have to Amazon.
If you’re a reader who’s short on cash and isn’t so keen on supporting Amazon but would love to continue to support Sapphic authors, what should you do?
Whatever you do, please don’t pirate books. There are other options. Here are four of them.
Kobo Plus
Kindle Unlimited (Amazon) costs $11.99 a month and is available in 12 countries (US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Brazil, Japan, India, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Australia). Kobo Plus costs $7.99 for text books and $7.99 for audiobooks or, good deal, $9.99 for both text and audio books. This is available in more countries (23!) than Kindle Unlimited including: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Here is a link to all their lesbian books and the lesbian romance books. My books on Kobo are here. There’s a 30-day free trial if you want to check it out.
Everand
Everand has a complicated pricing structure of $11.99 or $16.99 a month, and a 30-day trial period to test it out. Each pricing tier includes access to 20,000 ebooks and audiobooks along with a certain number of “locks” to access premium content, which includes 1.5 million books. Here’s a link to their lesbian book collection, and my books are here.
Libraries
Libraries are the best places on earth. I hope you have a good one near you, but if you don’t the Queer Liberation Library offers memberships to anyone in the United States and has over a thousand LGBTQ+ books on offer.
When I started looking into libraries for this article, I was fascinated by how expansive their coverage is. Even if you don’t live near a library with a good collection of Sapphic books, you might be able to access membership in one. For example, my book Learning to Kiss Girls is in the Toronto Public Library. Anyone who lives, works, goes to school, or owns property in the City of Toronto can get a card for this library. Membership is also available to anyone who lives on a First Nations reserve in Ontario. I have a bunch of titles available from the Dayton (Ohio) Metro Library. Anyone in the state of Ohio can get a membership card at this library.
Ask around. You may be surprised who is willing to give you a library card.
Direct from author
A lot of authors sell direct from their website, but if you’re tight on funds check out if your favorite authors have review teams or street teams. Become a member, and you could get free books and get to read them before anyone else. How cool is that?
If you want to learn more about writing and self-publishing a lesbian book that sells, check out my book Self-Publishing Lesbian Fiction available everywhere as an ebook and a paperback.
I’m biased but MM is something I can’t read. But yes- options are awesome!