Mel Keegan's GLBT Bookshelf Raises The Bar

Mel Keegan's GLBT Bookshelf Is Raising The Bar

INSPIRING, INNOVATIVE, IN-SYNC! GLBT BOOKSHELF

Words from Mel Keegan . . . .

Even now I’m astonished by the public response to GLBT Bookshelf -- and the volume of traffic racing through the site, the sheer weight of top talent that has ‘come aboard’ in a couple of short months -- tells me the project fills a void that was screaming to be filled.

It all began in my mind with the AmazonFail situation. GLBT writers are already so marginalized, we struggle for recognition. We’re in a tough niche, where the “adult” nature of stories which are pre-categorized by the orientation of their sensuality, results in every conceivable kind of story -- science fiction to historical, thriller to Western -- being lumped together in the same catch-all. Gay books.

And that’s fair enough: we all understand about protecting minors and those folks whose “prude filters” are dialled out to MAX. Amazon.com would protest that it only had the welfare of its users in mind.

But from the perspective of most GLBT writers, we work in such isolation, our internet “presence” is often the only profile we show to the public. Worse, that web-visibility tends to pivot on services like Google and Amazon.

It’s a rather sad commentary that in this day and age, institutions as vast and powerful as those two are still so hidebound that any mention of the word “gay” can send up the purple flags.

It’s equally sad that gay websites are routinely filtered out by Google … so when Amazon’s own content filters were turned against “gay” as a genre -- well, suffice to say, some of us were angry, jittery, and even inspired.

For myself, I was inspired -- to do something to combat the isolation of GLBT writers, and to at least try to establish a beachhead for us, some defence against the bastion of the giant online booksellers and search engines, who could literally make us vanish, on their whim. We’re vulnerable. Too vulnerable. Something had to be done, without delay.

The challenge was to build a rival “engine” which didn’t depend on Google to win searches and find visitors -- and didn’t depend on Amazon’s in-house search “catalogs” for GLBT authors to attain the critical visibility which comes before any potential sale can take place. It had to be a Community in which people with a vested interest could build more content than any individual (even an individual business) would be able to construct in a year. It had to be genuinely free for all members to get in and work at their own pace. It had to highly visible; easily findable and searchable by the readers … the customers! … without whom none of us would be writing professionally in the first place.

The solution was a wiki, and GLBT Bookshelf was born. It’s still it’s in its infancy -- but it’s a baby blue whale. An infant brontosaurus. The Bookshelf is about two months old, and it’s tickling 300 members, and 1500+ pages online, with enviable traffic, and (which is even more important) by tracking the “exit links” we know how visitors leave the site, as well as how they arrive…

They leave us via Amazon checkout pages, and publishers’ “buy now” links; via shopping carts and PayPal and Payloadz links. 90% of readers find us via the social networking of a large and ever-growing community. We’re dependent on no search engine, and nor do readers need to discover new writers, new works, via the Amazon platform.

They come to the Bookshelf from hundreds, if not thousands, of links, banners, posts, tweets and reviews on sites, blogs, forums, chatrooms, scattered across the web; and they leave with virtual book bags in each hand.

All this in two months. You know what we can be doing by Christmas?! Come and join us at GLBT BOOKSHELF -- as our slogan says, “Find out what you’re missing!”