Yup.

I talk to other writers. We discuss this kind of thing sometimes. Even the bigger names sometimes cross into amateur spaces.

Paranormal romance, as a genre, is driven by the same markets as traditional romance. The stuff that sells is marketed to straight women because they’re the ones that spend on it reliably.

Hell, good luck finding men that write paranormal romance at all, much less in traditional publishing. They exist, but it’s not the norm.

Now, you get into some of the dedicated fan fiction, the blog level publishing, and the non commercial self publishing, you find more that’s geared to other audiences. But those spaces exist because you aren’t going to reliably sell things that don’t interest straight women. You’ll run into what is written with gay or bi characters in the mainstream, but it’s still being written for the straight women to buy. It’s a woefully underrepresented segment, but the truth is that the markets are marginal to begin with, and writing for them simply isn’t going to make enough money to be something traditional publishing invests in.

Yeah, you can argue whether or not fan fiction, and non commercial self publishing is or isn’t part of the overall “writing” population. But even if you include that, you’re looking at a tiny fragment of any given genre. It’s also a tiny fragment of readership.

I have a novella based around magical transition that’s out there, under a pen name. Decent story, and I get the occasional email about it. But compare that to the volume I get from anything else, and it’s barely a trickle (mind you, the total volume of everything is a trickle to begin with, we’re talking maybe a dozen a month at most).

Go look up some of the bigger names in paranormal romance. There’s usually going to be footage of them doing talks at cons, that kind of thing. The audiences are going to be damn near all women. The writers are almost all women. It’s not a closed market, all sides of it except publishers are more than welcoming of men and non hetero fans for sure. There’s all kinds of LGBTQ folks scattered through the crowds. But they are scattered.

If you aren’t a writer, and one that has some degree of presence that’s vettable, you aren’t getting into the private groups where things get discussed about the inside aspects of trying to write. But inside them, anyone that’s actively seeking readers, free or paid, is going to have their intended audience because it’s just a fact that genres exist, and that they tend to have demographics. So you have to keep that in mind, or not get read.

Which brings us back to the beginning. Yes, I’m sure of what I said. It wasn’t an offhand comment.