Authors of BL present themselves as "fellow fans" by using dust jacket notes and postscripts to chat to the readers "as if they were her girlfriends" and talk about the creative process in making the manga, and what she discovered she liked about the story she wrote [REF].
In the mid-1990s, estimates of the size of the Japanese yaoi fandom were at 100,000-500,000 people;[REF] at around that time, the long-running yaoi anthology June had a circulation of between 80,000 and 100,000, twice the circulation of the "best-selling" gay lifestyle magazine Badi [REF].