It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time to reveal this week’s hot new sapphic books!
There’s a great mix of new lesfic books in so many subgenres this week including a handful of lesbian fiction love stories with popular tropes: angsty lesfic, queer workplace romances, sapphic first love, coming out, and more.
There are also some exciting new science fiction, suspense, and young adult brimming with excitement.
What a fantastic buffet for women loving women readers! There are some amazing lesfic audiobooks, too, for all you audiophiles. You don’t want to miss out on all these wonderful lesbian fiction books coming your way!
We’re doing our best to bring you all the best new releases in lesbian fiction every Tuesday.
Email whoopsie!
We’re in the process of migrating from Mailchimp to Mailerlite for our email service, and it’s been anything but smooth.
We’ve been meaning to make the move for a long time. Mailchimp keeps drastically raising their prices while reducing functionality. We will save hundreds of dollars each year, especially as our mailing list continues to grow. It’s a big incentive to switch, but TB has been dreading it. These things aren’t easy, and change scares her.
Turns out, her fear was justified.
Within minutes of importing our first lists, things went wrong. Some of you received a welcome email that wasn’t meant to be sent. Others received a message saying your email was inactive when that isn’t the case. We’re working out the kinks on our end. Our sincere apologies for the confusion.
TB has spent the past day screaming, “How did this happen?” Miranda stopped explaining how it happened after the first 36 times, and has started brewing calming tea. For herself. Nothing will calm TB when she’s this stressed. In TB’s defense, she’s been dealing with all the emails and some people are being extremely nasty. Again, this was an accident. For anyone impacted, please know it wasn’t intentional and we’re working on fixing the issue.
Saturday was the 6th Anniversary of IHS
Six years ago, (on her birthday so she wouldn’t forget the date) TB launched I Heart Lesfic. Last year at the five-year anniversary, we changed the name to I Heart SapphFic. To learn more about why we changed the name, click here.
Six years ago, TB was living in Dublin, Ireland. Since the site launched, she has had two major moves, first to the UK and then back to the US.
It’s not just her location that changed over these years. IHS has become a community of readers and authors. It’s been such a lovely journey and it warms TB’s heart to see so many people come together to celebrate sapphic fiction.
TB is old enough to remember when it wasn’t so easy to find books with lesbian, bisexual, and other women loving women characters and themes. She came out during a fraught time in Colorado. It was 1992 and her state was voting on Amendment Two. This was a law that sought to prevent municipalities (Denver, Boulder, and Aspen, for example) from enacting anti-discrimination laws protecting gay, lesbian, or bisexual people.
On her college campus, the quad was flooded with hateful people. Many held signs saying things like: God made Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve. Sometimes the signs had depictions of hell, and the people holding the signs would be screaming that TB was heading to fiery damnation. At the time, TB was 18 years old. For weeks she had to wade through these haters just to attend her college classes.
Much to her dismay, voters (including many people in TB’s own life) passed the amendment. For a while, Colorado became known as the “Hate State.” It was beyond deflating. Thankfully, in 1994, the Supreme Court ruled this amendment to be unconstitutional.
Several years later, TB stood at a candlelight vigil outside the hospital where Matthew Shepard was taken after he was attacked, and where he died from his injuries. With Amendment Two and Matthew Shepard, her home state was in the spotlight for LGBTQ+ rights in the 1990s. This had a profound impact on TB and she knew she could never look away from threats to those rights.
Sadly, three decades later, the LGBTQ community is still battling for basic human rights and hate is rising. Our rights, dignity, and safety are under threat again. Ask yourself, would today’s Supreme Court rule that Colorado’s Amendment 2 was unconstitutional?
This is why TB and Miranda work so hard on I Heart SapphFic. It’s our way to fight back and to ensure our community’s voices are not stifled. Back in 1992, neither TB nor Miranda had ever heard of a book with a sapphic character, let alone read one. Today, when someone is looking for a sapphic read, we can direct them to over 3,600 choices in the BookFinder!
Whether it’s seeing yourself in a favorite character or gaining an appreciation for someone who is different than you, books are a powerful weapon against hate. Why else would so many people be trying so hard right now to ban them? More than anything, we want to make it easy for readers to find the sapphic books they desire.
It’s our sincerest hope that when a new generation of sapphic readers looks back on our present times from thirty years in the future, they will do so from a place of true equality. We know that it will take relentless dedication from countless individuals to get there. All we can hope is to play some small part in shining a light and spreading love along the way so that hate won’t win.
We can’t thank all of you enough for supporting this website as we work toward that goal.
Do you have a new sapphic book to promote?
Authors and publishers, have a new release on the horizon? Please click on this link to discover how to submit your new sapphic books (ebook and audio) for a future edition of the I Heart SapphFic New Release newsletter. It’s completely free and a great way to reach readers who will love your books. Have an older book you’d like to promote? You can find out about all the ongoing promotional opportunities here.
Happy reading and listening!
Miranda & TB
