Notebook: 2. Isn’t it romantic?

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

(1) Editor Vivian Stephens transformed romance when she created the more explicit “Ecstacy” line for Dell and published Gentle Pirate, a contemporary story about a romance between a wounded Vietnam veteran and a soldier’s widow; (2) Harlequin has branches around the world tailored to local tastes, like their very popular manja series in Japan; (2) the blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey was first published serially and pseudonymously online as fanfiction of the Twilight series, was recast as an original novel called Master of the Universe, changing the names of the main characters, and published as an e-book and as a print-on-demand paperback by The Writers’ Coffee Shop, a virtual publisher based in Australia; all three volumes were on Amazon’s bestseller list when the rights were bought by Vintage in 2012; (4) Casey McQuiston discussed her new novel I Kissed Shara Wheeler as the first guest on Walmart’s live Book Club in July.

Read Part One of this post here!

The signal challenge of self-publishing is the challenge of “discovery”—the easier it becomes, technically, to publish yourself, the larger the pool of other self-published writers you must struggle to stand apart from, to be discovered by your readers. The embrace of self-publishing by romance novelists benefitted from a long history of writer-reader intermingling, like the Romance Writers Association, that connected writers directly with their readers and tapped the enthusiasm of would-be writers as an audience. (Contemporary publishing impresario Andy Hunter, inventor of the Bookshop.org website that allows independent publishers to compete online with Amazon, intuited the power of such reader-writer communities when he founded Catapult as a publisher for literary fiction as well as a hub for would-be writers, with workshops, consultancies, and community-building opportunities.) Romance also benefitted from a well-established tradition of sub-genres and what insiders call “tropes” (and others might call formulas)—historical romances, Christian romances, nursing romances, enemies-becoming-lovers romances, amnesia romances, Amish romances, the secret millionaire romance, BDSM romance (which famously got a huge boost out of a certain book originally published independently)—that pinpointed readers’ interests, making it easier for lone self-publishing writers to find their fan. These sub-genres and tropes were indeed part of what made romance so successful as a mass-market genre—readers needn’t look for individual books or authors so much as easily identified types of stories, what the industry called “category” marketing (as opposed to the inefficient “single title” marketing of trade publishing). Observers have noted that this micro-segmentation of romance has also contributed to its amenability to Tiktok, which directs users minutely in the direction of their known enthusiasms.