Rock Stars

I’ve been publishing novels in the women’s fiction (which sometimes includes romance) genre since 2012. And that makes me a rock star. That’s right, romance authors are rock stars. Don’t believe me? Read on, gentle reader! (Thanks to author and friend Jeannie Moon at Five Harbors Literary for the awesome graphic!)

From MACLEANS, April 26, 2015, by Emma Teitel:

When American filmmaker Laurie Kahn set out to make Love Between the Covers, a documentary about the women who read and write romance novels, she was struck by how often she heard the same story. It wasn’t a tale of beefy bodice rippers or love at first sight; it was a story about snobs.  

“I can’t tell you how many people I interviewed,” says Kahn, “who told me that people will walk up to them on a beach and say, ‘Why do you read that trash?’”

One Man’s Trash

Apparently, where lovers of romance novels go, contempt follows. Sometimes it’s subtle contempt—a raised eyebrow from a colleague, or a snarky comment from a friend (usually the kind of person who claims to read Harper’s on a beach vacation). Other times it’s more overt, even potentially damaging.

When Mary Bly (pen name Eloisa James), an academic and New York Times bestselling author, began writing romance, she was advised to keep her fiction writing secret or risk not making tenure at the university where she worked.

Sexism in Publishing

For some reason, argues Kahn, perhaps because its subjects are female, romance novels are perceived as fundamentally silly, when other popular “genre fiction”—namely, fiction by and for men—is not.

“Nobody,” she says, would walk up to “a man reading Stephen King, or a mystery or sci-fi novel” and scoff. And she’s right: Stephen King is a prodigious talent… right up there with romance novelist Nora Roberts. Yet Roberts has been the butt of jokes—a universal default example of “bad writing,”—while male contemporaries with far less talent get a free pass.

Consider the Source

Perhaps, as the graphic says, it’s a woman thing. If the majority of these books are written by women and read by women, and the majority of people knocking these books haven’t read them… maybe it’s not about the books.

Maybe trashing romance novels is more about trashing women.

Read the full article at: Why romance novelists are the rock stars of the literary world.