Matthew and Paul Castle: Why the Conversation About Pity Marketing and Misogyny Matters

It’s the worst time to be an author. This is not just a sentiment written in author group chats or the result of a bad day. Navigating the publishing landscape has gotten harder, and as a result, the desperation to be successful has gotten worse. A lot of authors are willing to cut corners, make false promises, or produce awfully half-assed written books to fill up their backlist because they need to make a lot of money fast. One of the worst methods is pity marketing, and sadly, it’s on the rise.

Using pity marketing to emotionally manipulate readers may seem like a simple, easy way to boost your book sales, but readers are more discerning than ever. And it’s a very quick way to lose the trust of your readers and do detrimental damage to your author brand.

What is pity marketing?

Pity marketing is a tactic that leverages vulnerability, hardship, or emotional distress to gain short-term attention, engagement, or sales. Think, “I only made one sale this month; please support my small business,” or “This is my last chance before I give up.” — lizziejward20

It’s very easy to conflate just sharing the day-to-day struggles of being an author with consciously manipulating your audience to boost your sales. A lot of authors think simply being honest about the obstacles, like writing in the current dumpster fire we are living in, the classism, and income disparities, is pity marketing.

It all boils down to a lack of trust in your readers, the product, or the content’s ability to sell itself. No, you have to tug on your reader’s heartstrings all the time to get a sale. It’s not being transparent about the back end of your author business while trying to use most people’s innate empathy for your own financial gain.

Why is it bad?

Let me be clear. Most authors do a little pity marketing from time to time. It might not be conscious, and most of the time it’s not malicious. You are just being honest, and you list the reason why the financial support of your audience is important. Especially if you are a marginalized author trying to navigate an industry that was literally built on white patriarchal supremacy.

My problem arises when this is the ONLY marketing strategy you use, and you deceive your readers into implementing it. Now, I know that this opinion is controversial, but I am self-aware enough to clock my behavior and hold myself accountable (unlike some other influencers). When your entire—or hell, even half of your marketing strategy is to constantly emotionally manipulate your readers to buy your books? Then you have a problem.

As a business owner, your primary responsibility is to produce the best product (aka your books) that you can and be confident about the quality. To me, when you use pity marketing, it is a signal that 1) you are not confident in the quality of your book and 2) you just want a quick cash grab.

And as a reader? It gives me the ick. Nothing will make me put you on my DNF list faster than seeing an author CONSTANTLY use pity marketing because, to me, that is an indicator that something is not right behind the scenes. It also shows me that you only see your readers as dollar signs, and no one likes that.

All of this together is a great recipe to lose the trust of your readers and do irrevocable damage to the longevity of your author brand.

Matthew and Paul Enter the Chat.

When I first stumbled on the Matthew and Paul situation, I had no idea who these two guys were. My first impression was that this was a sweet, white, disabled gay couple, and then I started to learn and realized the hard way that looks can be very deceiving. Matthew Castle is a talented violinist who escaped the IBLP church (which you probably recognize from the documentary Happy Shiny People). At fourteen, Matthew was offered a scholarship to Juilliard, but his parents refused to let him go. This led him to literally run away from home and escape what many people view as a cult.

He met his husband Paul in 2016 on a dating app, and then a few years later the couple got married.

Meanwhile, Paul is an illustrator and children’s author from Canada. Paul lost most of his sight shortly after he was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa. Together, Matthew and Paul Castle are best known for making prank videos that often make Paul’s blindness the punchline of the joke, Paul’s service dog Mr. Maple, and their journey to publish queer and inclusive children’s books.

You would think that as a queer disabled trans man, I would be jumping at the bit to support this gay couple. I have always made it my business to make sure to uplift queer men in the LGBTQ+ space because queer men, especially in M/M romance spaces, are often disrespected and erased. Then add that Paul is one of the few blind authors in this space. I should be their biggest fan, but I am, in fact, their biggest hater.

The Tiniest of Violins

Let’s start in 2024, shall we? In 2024, Matthew and Paul announced that Paul Castle was going to drop a book, The Secret Ingredient. It is a book about gay penguins delivering cakes to different types of families. But soon the other shoe dropped, and Paul tearfully announced that an indie bookstore returned a hundred books and very much implied that it was due to homophobia.

He made sure not to name the bookstore that did him dirty, but he made damn sure to name the female employee that initially set up the deal. A woman named Tanya had promised him that they were going to buy a hundred books and left him high and dry. And let me tell you, as an indie author? A hundred hardback books are not cheap to buy in bulk. This situation could have very possibly left poor Paul in debt and jeopardized the future of his career as an indie author.

And because parasocial relationships are a bitch, Paul’s fans rose up in pure outrage to tap that orange button on his post to buy his book from TikTok Shop. Now, normally I wouldn’t be pressed about it, but the problem is that Paul’s story was not adding up.

The thing is, if you don’t know anything about how the indie side of the publishing industry works, you could very easily believe Paul’s story. But the ones who spend day in and day out in the self-publishing trenches know damn well that there is no indie bookstore that is ever going to buy a hundred copies from a self-published author, especially not wholesale.

You see, an indie bookstore has to reasonably stock authors that will not only sell, but they can be reasonably sure that they will appeal to their customers. At most, even if the indie author is popular, an indie book seller would buy 3-5 books because if they buy more than that and they don’t sell those books, that means they are stuck with hundreds of books they can’t sell.

Let’s not get it twisted. This is a whole business.

So Paul is crying on screen about how a bookstore employee did him dirty by returning his books? Yeah, that was the first red flag for a lot of us, and then Paul tried to conflate a legitimate business decision with the rise of book banning and censorship because his book was gay. A lot of activists, such as Don Martin, were like, “Nah, something smells fishy.”

Come to find out that Tanya either quit or was fired from her job, and the person that replaced her canceled the order. But just when you thought Paul’s story couldn’t get even more shady? His fans were harassing every Tanya online that worked at a bookstore, and with their peak detective skills, they found a Black woman named Tanya that worked at a bookstore and made her life hell for weeks.

Did Paul or Matthew call off their mob? Nope, but they made damn sure to connect with Tanya and use her as his obligatory “Black woman friend” to cover their lack of accountability.

But it doesn’t stop there; no, instead of sitting in their consequences, Paul and Matthew (more Paul than Matthew) spent the last few years right around Christmas or Pride Month coming up with (allegedly and in my opinion) more drama, painting themselves as the poor, beguiled disabled gay men who just can’t catch a break.

June 2024- Matthew and Paul stated their book was banned from an indie bookstore.
Nov. 2024- Matthew and Paul said one of their books was being review bombed.
June 2025- Matthew and Paul d they had a deal canceled by a major bookstore bc they didn’t qualify for Ingram
Oct. 2025- Matthew and Paul they’ve made 9 videos across 2 platforms about Ingram & a specific employee

— Diana Rodriguez Wallach

At this point, this is a pattern that has become a sardonic inside joke among the LGBTQ+ book community. You can literally set your calendar to Matthew and Paul’s (allegedly and in my opinion) fabricated dramas. And every time Matthew and Paul manipulate their audience’s emotions to sell books.

The Elephant In The Room

What is not being talked about loudly enough, in my opinion, is that Matthew and Paul have a misogyny problem. If you are steeped in the queer community, you know that white gay men have always had a problem with racism and misogyny. White gay men love to take the style, the aesthetics, and the language that was created by Black women and then turn around crap on them. They love to use Black culture as a caricature of a sassy Black woman, but a lot of them only see Black women as tools to be used and discarded while profiting off the very thing that makes gay culture shine.

I have experienced that myself because I might be a Black trans man, I still present as a Black woman. I often get tone-policed, told I am doing too much, and disrespected by white gay men.

Then add on the misogyny component. The way that white gay men refuse to realize that they may be gay men, but at the end of the day they still have white male privilege. The way they talk about vaginas like it is a disease they may catch, the way a gay man will absolutely ignore a woman’s body autonomy and use the fact that they are gay as an acceptable excuse. How about how white gay men treat effeminate men or gender non-conforming men? I could go on and on, but I won’t.

To put it simply, Paul Castle is a very good example of a white gay man that hates women, especially women of color. It is no accident that the people that Matthew and Paul are women. If’s every poor Tanya in the book community, it’s Emily from Ingram Sparks, It’s the fact that Paul hired a Latinx woman to carry their entire operation on her back and use for content, or how he weaponized his fans against Laura Rae says when she laid out an evidence trail so good that fans who were not swimming in the Matthew and Paul’s parasocial Kool-Aid stop supporting them.

I am autistic, and I can spot a pattern a mile wide and 10 inches deep.

In my opinion, Paul Castle is not only a grifter who threw his credibility as a legitimate, talented artist and children’s author under the bus, but he is an example of the rampant misogyny in white gay men’s spaces. And it’s incredibly frustrating to see this piece of this discourse shoved under the rug.

In conclusion

Paul will probably read this article (because I know for a fact that he searches his name) and not learn a goddamn thing. He will take this clear call for accountability and get caught up in his feelings. Let me say this clearly for the folks in the back: Yes, Paul is disabled and gay. But being disabled and gay does not excuse horrible behavior or the harm that behavior causes.

And once again, I say this as a queer disabled trans man. Matthew and Paul Castle’s fans will tell you that we are only picking on them because they come from marginalized communities, but not holding them both (especially Paul Castle) accountable is infantilizing these two grown-ass men. It’s treating them like a child that cannot do any critical thinking or consent to the harm they cause. That, in and of itself, is its own type of discrimination.

Most disabled adults are still at the end of the day? Adults. Now let Matthew and Paul Castle act like the grown-ass men they are and do better.

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