Arguably, "glass breaking" has become more frequent in this day and age than ever before. Men and women from around the world have been sharing and promoting genuinely ground-breaking and important ideologies and beliefs in various mediums. This can be especially felt in media platforms where it is easiest to connect with an audience. I think sometimes we underestimate the effectiveness of media and its capability to propagate messages especially when its something that's been long overdue. I can go on for a million years about the films, television shows, comic books, and songs that I feel deserve to be acknowledged for exceeding expectations, but for this collaboration with Lyka Cali, we agreed to focus on literature only. After thinking long and hard as to what to feature, I finally settled on a series: The Captive Prince Trilogy by C.S. Pacat.
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| (Photo from: www.sbs.com.au) |
Now to be fair, there are literally thousands of books that can be hailed as a glass breaker and be featured in this post. However at this point in time Captive Prince sticks out among the rest for me, not only with it's fantastic story and characters but as how it got made in the first place.
The story of Captive Prince's rise to popularity is actually pretty incredible. It all started with C.S. Pacat yearning to write books that she wanted to read. Books with love, fantasy, escapism, sex, and sexuality that's not exclusive to heterosexuality as a queer woman herself. I, as well as all of you, know books with those themes are extremely difficult to find, and is usually depicted with many contemporary social biases and discriminations that the LGBTQ community face. She did away with that trope and focused instead on crafting a story focused on the characters and personal stakes. She published first on her blog for free in a serialized manner, which encouraged interaction among her readers on the internet. Good word of mouth from across the online community made it possible for Captive Prince to have over 15 million hits. Towards the end of writing Prince's Gambit, she thought about publishing her books after overwhelming support from her online following and requests for physical copies. At first it was a challenge, no company wanted to publish Captive Prince with the belief that there is no existing market it. Eventually, she decided to self-publish on Amazon using her 10,000 dollar loan. Captive Prince proved to be a worthy investment because it shot to the top of Amazon's charts and in the end, Pacat was able to get a three-book deal from one of the biggest publishing houses in the world, Penguin.
There is no question that the odds were stacked against C. S. Pacat. As she said herself, what she wanted to write "did not exist" and publishers tend to really consider the popularity of a genre before contemplating about making a deal with the author. She had to deal with the stigma that comes with online publishing where there are actual people who believe it is not legitimate and finally, her characters and the world they live in are very open-minded and loose in regards to sexuality. Normally, you would expect this kind of project to fail considering the world we live in is very prejudiced and unfair place but it did not. It rose to the occasion, blew everyone's minds away for how good it was, and gave readers great joy to finally see a fantasy series that was thrilling, mind-blowing, and filled with representation.
This book series broke so many glass ceilings in one go and it deserves to be recognized for it. I feel fortunate that I managed to stumble upon the title of the first book while scrolling down my Tumblr dashboard on an ordinary Thursday night and decided it was a worth a look. I feel grateful for this series' early fan base for ensuring it's success and, of course, C.S. Pacat for writing the trilogy and for being an inspiration for readers and aspiring writers everywhere.
(Read Lyka Cali's version of books that broke glass ceilings here )
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