The data we were asked to provide had to do with the sales volume of LGBT books over time. So we identified those books using their BISAC subject headings and looked at the last seven years of data.
While there are LGBT BISAC codes for Young Adult (YA) and Juvenile books, there aren’t any for adult Fiction or Non-Fiction. Fiction does, however, have Gay and Lesbian ones. Unfortunately, Non-Fiction tends to be it’s own thing with LGBT books likely ending up in a number of categories such as Health & Fitness / Sexuality, amongst others. For these reasons, we opted to stick with exploring the Fiction, YA Fiction and Juvenile Fiction categories.
Data, charts and analysis are provided in the following categories:
Number of LGBT Books
LGBT Book Sales
Bestselling LGBT Books
Here’s one of those sections and charts.
Number of Books
When looking at ISBN count (i.e., the number of distinct ISBNs with sales in each calendar year), we find the numbers for both YA and Juvenile LGBT books to be small but growing. When looking at Fiction / Gay and Fiction / Lesbian books, we find the numbers to be shrinking over the past seven years. (Note: “FICTION / Gay + Lesbian” is the total volume of sales for both the Fiction / Gay and Fiction / Lesbian categories.) Source: BookNet Canada (April 25, 2017)
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
