00:00:16.300It's full of people who want the best for the world.
00:00:20.740It's also a place where imagination can help us envision the world that we want.
00:00:29.060Yeah, like it's a place where utopia is imaginable. That's always what I have loved about thinking about the purposes of romance and of entertainment more broadly, but like the idea that, oh, there could be a world in which women's pleasure is taken seriously.
00:00:54.440This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
00:00:57.840And I'm Christine Larson, professor at University of Colorado Boulder and author of Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, How Romance Writers Change the Rules of Publishing and Success.
00:01:09.700As you know, each week we take a piece of the culture that surrounds us and we really look into it from as many angles as possible and we're trying to figure out what it says about the world we live in.
00:01:19.580and today is part two of a conversation about romance novels. Back in June, we talked to romance
00:01:25.340novelist Nisha Sharma about tropes, about diversity and representation on the page,
00:01:30.400about whether you should be concerned when reading romance novels makes you question your love life,
00:01:35.140so many things. Part three of this series will be out next month, and it'll be all about the
00:01:40.860business of selling romance. But today, we're looking specifically at the readers and writers
00:01:46.420and the publishing industry itself. So I am so excited to talk to you, Chris, about the work
00:01:51.740that you have done analyzing this industry, the larger romance community, the ethos of care and
00:01:57.080of work that is all around romance writing. And then also because you are a cultural scholar as
00:02:02.820well, we can think about the purposes of romance and why romance is the way that it is, and some
00:02:07.600of these larger questions that our readers and listeners have posed for us. So let's start with
00:02:12.380your book, Love in the Time of Self-Publishing. Tell me how it came about, because I really love
00:02:17.260this story. Oh, yeah, the origin story. So I was a journalist for a long time. And then I wanted to
00:02:23.580study how digital technology, social media was changing journalism and the messages that we
00:02:30.640heard in the world. So like many other women in their 40s, I had little kids, but I wanted a life
00:02:39.640change. And I started going to grad school to study these things and get my PhD. And during
00:02:47.100that time, my second year of grad school, I was blindsided by a divorce that I did not want or
00:02:55.380expect. And I found myself after I got everybody stable, I was I had two little kids, I have twin
00:03:05.060boys. They were eight at the time. I finally sat down one day to do my research, which I had put
00:03:12.480aside for a few months, and I couldn't write. I never had writer's block before, and I just
00:03:20.320couldn't get excited about what I was studying with journalism. And that day, sitting and staring
00:03:29.180at this blank screen, I remembered that an author I had interviewed told me that only romance
00:03:36.540writers were making money in the new world of digital publishing. This was around 2012, 2014.
00:03:45.620And I thought, well, that's interesting. I'm going to dive into that. Maybe that's a project
00:03:50.380that will get me going again. And I was so fortunate. I began to just cold call romance
00:03:57.740writers who were self-publishing, they were unbelievably generous. They were excited to
00:04:04.580help explore why romance had become more popular than ever. And the women I met really,
00:04:12.500in some ways, they don't know this, but they kind of helped me rebuild my life
00:04:16.120because they were so inspiring. And they had been through so much themselves and they were still
00:04:25.160writing and raising families in some cases. And they were just so strong and smart and helpful
00:04:32.140that I could not stop studying them. And so let's see, you did, was it like 70,
00:04:39.82080 in-depth interviews with authors, right? Yes, I talked to 80 authors and 20 or more editors and
00:04:49.140other publishing executives and experts. And you sent out a survey that got more than 4,000
00:04:55.140responses. Is that right? The survey is a testimony to how interested romance writers are in their
00:05:02.860own business. I sent it to 10,000 people, every member of RWA at the time, Romance Writers of
00:05:09.960America. And I got a 42% response rate, which is unheard of. It's wild. Yeah. I bet you brag about
00:05:17.440that at conferences, right? You know what, I'm kind of scared about it, because I will never
00:05:22.800be able to get that kind of response again. But it really is a testimony, yeah, to the authors
00:05:28.580themselves. You know, to me, it also speaks to the fact that so many writers were so eager to
00:05:34.920talk to you and generous with their time. And that extends to the survey as well, that I think
00:05:40.060people want to talk about it. They want this work to be taken. You know, it's not just like taken
00:05:45.440seriously by men, but also like, it's interesting how you make a living by writing books. It's
00:05:53.000really interesting. And I think that it's understudied. And so having a chance to talk
00:05:57.700shop, essentially, is really fun. And when I was a scholar, there wasn't as much acknowledgement
00:06:04.620about how eager people actually were to talk about these kind of nitty gritty components of
00:06:09.840the way that they do their work? Well, I have to confess that romance writers are an especially
00:06:16.200easy group to study because they have 40 years of tradition of helping each other and helping
00:06:25.220other women writers and also sharing openly information about their business, about how much
00:06:33.200they earn, about their secrets of writing a great story. They're used to sharing all this. And so0.96
00:06:39.820they were very interested and responsive, which is great for a researcher, as you know.
00:06:45.940Yeah. When I was rereading the intro this morning, there was this part of it
00:06:49.980where you talk about how supportive and how eager different romance writers were to share
00:06:56.280the tricks of the trade with each other, particularly navigating going independent.
00:07:02.400it. And I sent a quote from you to my text thread that I share with a bunch of other
00:07:09.300independent sub stack writing journalists, because we and the reason we have this text
00:07:14.760thread, like I've never met any of the women on this thread in person. But we talk every
00:07:19.460single day. And even though, like, we're writing kind of in the same sphere, like you could
00:07:24.760think of us as in competition, but I don't think we think of each other as in competition.
00:07:29.640but we help each other and have always been eager to help each other because it's a way forward
00:07:35.580that feels sustainable when the rest of the industry feels so incredibly precarious.
00:07:42.080And so I really, like, I just saw so many parallels between what you were seeing. And it
00:07:46.380makes sense since you were originally thinking about what was happening with the freelancification
00:07:51.280of the journalism industry that led you to this work. Yeah. And what I found in my own freelance
00:07:57.820career was that social networks were unbelievably important. It was through a writer's group where
00:08:05.600people were incredibly generous with contacts with editors that I began writing for places like
00:08:11.380the New York Times and US News and World Report, just because other writers were really generous
00:08:16.640in sharing their contacts. And those were maybe not coincidentally, almost entirely women
00:08:23.340who helped me. So I was seeing the same thing that you're seeing in your networks
00:08:29.640and the same thing that we see with romance writers. For people who don't read romance,
00:08:36.620why are these findings, like why do they matter for our society? Why is this important? Even for
00:08:43.120people who are like, don't necessarily like denigrate romance, but are like, why should I
00:08:48.700care about romance? People should care about romance because romance writers teach us a lot
00:08:55.780about how we can work and survive and thrive in this gig economy. So on the one hand, this is a
00:09:03.580book about how romance writers found each other and succeeded over 40 years. But at a deeper level,
00:09:11.300it's really a book about labor networks and self-organization and mutual aid. So if you're
00:09:18.640an independent creator of any type, whether that's a writer, a musician, an influencer,
00:09:23.500a streamer, an independently employed lawyer, and if you want to be treated fairly as an
00:09:32.480independent worker, you really need to build the kind of community that romance writers developed.
00:09:38.460Is it just that it's feminized? It's a feminized form of labor that this different mode of work developed? You know, I really appreciated in the book how you talk about like the way that we organize work, the way that we have organized work historically doesn't have to be that we the way that we organize work.0.97
00:09:58.920like there are other ways that we could have figured out as our status quo of how we think
00:10:04.880about and organize labor in our lives and even just like how we reward it and that that's just
00:10:11.760that's happening it has happened perhaps out of necessity but also maybe because of other factors
00:10:17.980in the romance community is that like is it just because it's an undervalued form of labor what's
00:10:25.000going on, do you think? Yeah, a lot of things were going on. And just like romance novels are a world
00:10:33.020where we can imagine how things might be different. Romance writing labor is a world where people did0.79
00:10:40.300imagine how things can be different. Yeah. And I found that the social networks of romance writers
00:10:46.220were very open, and that people who had succeeded, bestselling authors are happy to chit chat with
00:10:53.780up and coming authors. And I think that reflects the way women's work has operated for decades.
00:11:04.420And I should pause and say, when I say women's work, we have to remember that white women,0.94
00:11:10.280white middle-class women worked in very different ways from Black women or other minoritized0.89
00:11:16.520communities. So there's a lot of subtleties there that I go into in the book. But for most of these,
00:11:23.160almost for all of these communities, women have always worked in a piecemeal fashion,0.99
00:11:29.220literally done piecework, taking in work while they're raising their children, and they've
00:11:35.180always helped each other. We think about quilting bees, or we think about women caring for each
00:11:41.680other's children so people could work. And that kind of cooperation and openness is reflected
00:11:49.860in the way that romance writers work. And I often say that the gig economy should really be called
00:11:56.280the women's economy, because we have always worked without health benefits, without0.99
00:12:04.060employment security. And as you pointed out, the way that we still envision work is really based0.99
00:12:14.540on a particular model that was started at the turn of the century, the idea of working 40 hours a0.75
00:12:22.040week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years with someone at home that is a wife who's taking care of
00:12:29.960everything else. That model has been reimagined more broadly, but also especially by women.0.94
00:12:37.680Well, and then one thing that you didn't mention is that like, but that is implicit,
00:12:42.220is that in these scenarios, you know, part of the reason that you want to help other women who are
00:12:47.540writing romances is that you think of the sphere of the publishing industry as a place where there
00:12:54.960are not just one winner, right, that we are not all in competition. And that if one person wins,
00:13:00.980everyone else is a loser. It's like, there's a lot of space for all of us to win and to create,
00:13:07.320you know material to create narratives that people want to consume like there it's not a
00:13:13.080winner-take-all scenario well that's interesting that's exactly how romance writers have always
00:13:18.680approached the industry that there's enough room for everyone yes which is contrary to how
00:13:25.060a lot of writers and how the actual the the traditional publishing industry actually works
00:13:29.820yes like the traditional publishing industry operates on a superstar model they would much
00:13:36.440rather sell 1 million copies of one book than a few copies of a million books. So romance writers
00:13:46.620have really worked against that trend for a long time. And we especially saw that in the rise of
00:13:51.740self-publishing. Right. And because self-publishing says, if I create material, there will be an
00:13:57.660audience for it, essentially, right? There is enough audience to go around to all of these
00:14:03.000different places instead of the publishing companies decide who is worthy which you know
00:14:11.260and we can get into this in our later questions but like who is worthy for so long was exclusively
00:14:17.140white authors writing white narratives right with straight protagonists yep exactly so the way that
00:14:26.940the work is organized also has all of these other trickle-down effects that we're going to talk a
00:14:32.080thought about. Right? So we put out a call to our listeners for questions. And we kept it really
00:14:37.860general. And I mean, I knew this before we have so many listeners, readers of Culture Study who
00:14:44.980are very well versed and very interested in romance. So we got a ton of submissions. And
00:14:51.040they really ran the gamut. But we figured out some questions that I think are particularly
00:14:55.280well suited to you. So let's get to them. This first one is from Hannah.
00:14:59.400i have always loved romance novels but when the pandemic hit i became fully addicted to all books
00:15:06.280with a romantic focus i am a cisgendered single woman in my late 20s and my other female friends
00:15:12.100have also admitted to romance novel obsessions no matter their relationship status or sexual
00:15:17.120orientation yet as far as i know none of my male friends are reading romance at all i think they're
00:15:22.940just all playing video games why aren't men reading romance at the same rate as women has
00:15:27.800it always been this way? To what extent is the boom in romance novels tied to how women are
00:15:32.780taught about heteronormativity and the patriarchy, which often contrasts with the
00:15:37.260reality of being a woman living in the 21st century? All right. So can you give us like
00:15:43.240a little bit of a taste of the answer to the first part of this question? I know there have
00:15:46.860been like many books written on this. So like who has been reading romantic narratives we'll use as
00:15:55.760like a larger umbrella historically? And how has that changed? So I'll back up a bit and I'll say
00:16:02.680that the publishing industry has always devalued women's writing from as long as American publishing
00:16:11.260has been an industrial endeavor. Women's writing has always been super popular and devalued as
00:16:19.280less important than male writing. And that is still true today. So women's, actually,1.00
00:16:27.320romance has been very popular for more than 100 years. And it has always been women who read it0.98
00:16:33.160more. And part of that is because culturally, emotions and emotional life have been devalued0.63
00:16:41.580by male culture and been considered part of the women's sphere. So men are socialized to put their
00:16:52.280time and attention to other kinds of important endeavors and important reading. That is still
00:16:58.880true today. And we see this in the fact that men read much less fiction than women. They read in
00:17:05.580general, less than women do. That's especially true in romance. 82% of romance readers are women.1.00
00:17:14.160About 18% are men. More men are reading romance now, though. And I think that's in part because
00:17:21.580young adult literature, YA literature, had a boom about 15 years ago. And both young men and young
00:17:30.040women became more interested in reading in general. Yeah. And it connects to me with like,
00:17:35.120that even the way that they very simply identified a lot of weepies back in like the 1930s 40s 50s
00:17:44.520as women's pictures right because the emotional world the access to the emotional world in these
00:17:49.540pictures and coming out of hollywood was like specifically identified as women's films even0.81
00:17:56.700though what was more of what we think of as like the rom-com which was then called the screwball
00:18:01.680was universally appealing but I also think too and this is so broadly sketching but like
00:18:09.300so much of what is imagined in the romance novel is a different way that things could be right
00:18:16.400it's a it's a world where again as we talked about before where women's pleasure is taking
00:18:21.960seriously, where women are able to reconcile desires for family and sex and a partnership
00:18:53.960Well, one of the pioneering scholars of romance, Janice Radway, wrote a book called Reading the Romance in 1980.
00:19:04.000And she did come to the conclusion that one of the reasons that romance was so popular with women readers is because it did give them this space of resistance.
00:19:17.240And this is coming out of the women's movement.
00:19:19.920And the women's movement was portrayed as big protests and people burning their bras and stuff like that.
00:19:27.060But there was a massive number of readers and just women who that wasn't accessible.1.00
00:19:34.740That wasn't a way that they could work on changing the culture because they're embedded in families.1.00
00:19:49.380Yeah, and that always reminds me too of like the phrase that often comes up in scholarship of melodrama of women's pictures and weepies in the 20s, 30s, 40s is that they were wasted wet afternoons, right? Like the idea that a woman could go waste an afternoon crying at the movie theater in her own sphere, right? Like that felt like revolution, like or what you could carve out for yourself.
00:20:16.940and I loved reading it when I was in grad school reading Janice Radway's reading the romance because
00:20:21.940for me you know this was 10 years ago this is before this current what I think of as this
00:20:27.980current romance boom and I still had a lot of hang-ups about like oh like I associated romance
00:20:34.020very strongly with like Harlequin romance and had class stuff going on there and then also some like0.61
00:20:38.600pretty basic feminist politics that were like oh these novels are retrograde in some way and thus
00:20:46.020like they're not worthwhile and what Radway is able to recover there in those interviews is that
00:20:52.540even if the like the narratives themselves might seem retrograde and patriarchal in all these
00:20:58.180different ways the act of reading itself is doing something different and I think that's
00:21:03.340there's an element of that going on even today right right but also that way of viewing reading
00:21:10.920like oh oh well we we can't read romance novels because they are retrograde yeah stort hall the
00:21:17.800cultural theorist uh from england argued that there are different ways to read so there's the
00:21:23.240dominant reading there's the dominant story and there's the resistant way of reading and so as
00:21:30.400readers we get to interpret this however we want and yeah maybe they get married and there's a happy
00:21:34.940ending but also the woman gets a job or she gets to buck some cultural trends and change the system
00:21:44.700while keeping sex and love and imagining that as a positive thing yeah and this this resistant
00:21:52.200way of reading was has been especially important for black readers because there were so few
00:21:58.080romances that featured Black protagonists. The publishing industry really did not imagine
00:22:07.140happy endings for Black women until quite recently. So they've always been doing this1.00
00:22:13.980resistant sort of reading. Would you say that these resistant modes, or what you could
00:22:22.860uncover in the text through a resistant reading that it's become more explicit in a lot of
00:22:30.900the more recent romance because I see that in a lot of like queer romances historical queer
00:22:36.840romances much more sex forward historical romances where before you could like imagine
00:22:42.300that maybe they were having sex like but now like you just know that they are that sort of thing
00:22:47.780yeah what do you think so i'm not sure i would say that the resistant reading or the liberation
00:22:55.520reading is totally dominant because at the end of the day a romance is a story about two people
00:23:03.700who meet who are attracted to each other they encounter difficulties and they end up together
00:23:11.740so that is a very heteronormative story yeah so you will we will always be able to criticize
00:23:19.020romance narratives for that and we should but at the same time the liberation reading is there and
00:23:27.580and probably more dominant than than it was actually now I'm contradicting myself but you've
00:23:32.000made me think so that's a good conversation and and you know because I am not as well versed you
00:23:38.720You know, I, Melody, the producer of our show has given me a beginning syllabus that she
00:23:44.320calls like, not even like putting your toe in the ocean.
00:24:03.700yeah and for me i don't know how representative that is when there's so much out there does that
00:24:10.780make sense yeah well you know like they say you've read one romance you've read one romance and and
00:24:17.220it's like yeah and there's there's gonna be a lot of romance using the same trope or the same
00:24:23.500settings but then there's completely different a completely different world that uses totally
00:24:29.140different tropes and so if you're a sci-fi lover you could just read romance sci-fi if you are a
00:24:38.020fantasy lover you can you know just read romanticy it's very hard to dip your toe in because there's
00:24:46.380just so much so this is a great segue to another question which comes from marie it's been awesome
00:24:52.900to see more diversity in mainstream romance publishing, more lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
00:24:59.680neurodivergent characters, and more mental health representation, for example. What can the romance
00:25:05.240industry tell us about our society based on who is and is not represented in the genre?
00:25:11.580Okay, so Marie specifies mainstream romance publishing, but is it safe to assume that the
00:25:17.080roots of this representation comes from more marginalized writers who are making waves in
00:25:22.580self-publishing? That is absolutely true. Actually, as far back as the 50s, Zora Neale Hurston
00:25:28.080was saying, well, publishers will publish anything that they think they can make money off of.
00:25:34.320But publishers also assume that the reader, they imagined, the reader only wanted to read
00:25:42.100sad minority stories. They only wanted to read about the Black struggle. And therefore,
00:25:48.720she wrote, traditional publishers are not interested in publishing Black romance. Or at
00:25:56.360the time, she also said Jewish romance or any romance of a group that's just supposed to be0.91
00:26:02.900oppressed and miserable all the time. We should only publish books about that sad struggle story.
00:26:09.460Self-publishing completely broke through that, completely got rid of those narratives because
00:26:17.500traditional publishers still they were very locked into this idea of who their reader was
00:26:25.480and what their reader wanted and romance writers said no i've got this these manuscripts that i
00:26:33.360haven't been able to get published um because i have two black characters or because i have
00:26:39.460queer characters or just because the gatekeepers didn't think it would sell and they sold like
00:26:46.660crazy. So much so that many romance writers today don't even want to have a traditional publisher
00:26:54.180because they're doing so well in self-publishing. And that really eventually has pushed traditional
00:27:00.760publishers to change. Yeah. Because they're like, oh, these people are making money. What if we do
00:27:05.900this as well? Right. Well, and it strikes me, the publishing industry is so conservative. And by
00:27:12.520conservative I don't mean necessarily like politically conservative although there is that
00:27:17.940as well but I meaning conservative as in they have such a limited idea of what a reader would like
00:27:23.980when this entire genre is based on people imagining worlds that aren't their own right like there is
00:27:32.560so much space to be pushed into right and so someone who like me who's like I'm not interested
00:27:39.060in fairies and then reads all like spends a whole week of my life just reading about fairy romances
00:27:46.220right like there's just so much room to grow if you're just pushed in slightly a different
00:27:52.180direction and it's hilarious to me that the people who hold the purse strings who take risks all the
00:27:58.640time on other types of writers as long as it's a dude usually right they wouldn't understand that
00:28:05.980there's a lot of room for experimentation in the genre. Yeah. And traditional publishers haven't
00:28:12.200really understood the readers the way that romance writers understand their readers.
00:28:17.480And that made a huge difference. Will you say more about that? Yeah. So in the book,
00:28:24.060I write a lot about Romancelandia, which is the fandom, the vast and sprawling romance
00:28:29.940fandom. And that fandom includes all romance writers, because every romance writer started
00:28:35.240out as a romance fan. And Janice Radway pointed this out too, like 40 years ago, that romance
00:28:42.020writers and readers have a uniquely close bond. If you go to a romance conference,
00:28:49.540you will stand in line at Starbucks behind a bestselling author, and they will be happy to
00:28:55.800chat with you. If you go to Comic-Con, you wait in a long line and pay to get somebody to sign
00:29:01.800your book. And this bond between readers and writers is one of the several factors that made
00:29:09.180self-publishing so successful for romance writers. I once interviewed Marie Force, who is a very well
00:29:15.520established self-published romance writer, and she said, publishers didn't want my books. The
00:29:20.520only people who wanted my books were my readers. It works out that way, doesn't it? Exactly, exactly.
00:29:28.580so our next question is pretty foundational to this episode about whether or not there's
00:29:34.620even a boom in the first place this comes from moth and melody is going to read it are more
00:29:39.720romance novels actually being published or is the audience for them just more visible due to them
00:29:45.380being online like book talk and booktube if more books are being published does this correlate
00:29:50.440with the lack of widely distributed mid-tier romantic comedy movies all right so i'd love
00:29:56.000to hear your thoughts on this because I think as with all of the publishing industry it is
00:30:01.580notoriously difficult to know how many books are being published or sold or bought because of
00:30:06.700the differences in physical books audiobooks kindle books self-publishing people ask me all
00:30:15.240the time how like for books that I've published how is it selling I was like I have no freaking
00:30:19.280idea like literally no idea um and so we have some sales numbers to show that at least with
00:30:26.640what we're able to get that there has been an increase in the last few years but what about
00:30:33.520the proportion of romance published compared to other genres like what is your thinking about
00:30:37.120tracking here i cannot tell you the answer to how many books are published because romance books are
00:30:44.480publish because nobody can. And one of the reasons, no, nobody can. And I've tried. I've
00:30:50.780been studying romance writers for seven years. So there are reasons why I can't answer that
00:30:57.780question. One is the publishing industry is less interested in how many titles they publish
00:31:02.980than how many books they sell. So, and again, as I said, they would rather sell more copies
00:31:11.320of fewer books. So it's actually hard to even get from traditional publishers the numbers of how
00:31:18.320many books they publish this year versus last year. And you can get those figures, but I don't
00:31:24.800have them in front of me. But a vast number of romances are self-published now. Because as I
00:31:32.020mentioned earlier, a lot of really big authors are not that interested in traditional publishing.
00:31:37.680so there is no way to count the number of self-published romance again believe me i have
00:31:46.680tried but amazon uh sells the vast majority of self-published books and they really they're very
00:31:53.860very stingy about releasing any figures at all yeah so like the individual authors might have
00:32:00.160some insight into how much they have sold vis-a-vis amazon but you as someone studying
00:32:06.860would have to reach out to all those authors in order to get a larger picture. And that's just
00:32:11.860impossible. It's impossible. People have tried. But what I can tell you is about sales. And we do
00:32:18.820know that from traditional publishers, these figures are tracked, we have seen massive growth
00:32:26.320year over year since the pandemic. So at a time when book sales in general are shrinking,
00:32:34.700we're seeing 20 growth sometimes as much as 50 growth in sales and some of that is driven by
00:32:43.440huge bestsellers like colleen hoover yeah and some of it is just that there's so much romance
00:32:50.240out there that once people get hooked they stick with it and they read there's a whole c there's
00:32:56.960a whole c what do you think about moth's theory that this increase in romance novels correlates
00:33:03.240the lack of new rom-com movies. Yeah, that's such a great, I really want to have a long conversation
00:33:08.180with Moth someday, because this is a fantastic question. I would, first of all, I think that's
00:33:13.400a question well worthy of more academic study. I only study the publishing industry. And I know
00:33:22.240that from my much more superficial work in other cultural industries, different forces drive the
00:33:31.080publishing industry than drive the movie industry. And there's been a massive, massive change in the
00:33:37.740way that we watch movies and who's funding movies. And while there may be contraction in the number
00:33:44.520of like rom-coms that have mass distribution to movie theaters, we see it, we're seeing an
00:33:49.680explosion on Netflix and Amazon and Bridgerton. Huge. Yeah. That's a romance. Could have been
00:33:58.720several movies right so yeah yeah no i i agree with you and i think that as the film industry
00:34:08.040what we think of as like movies that go to theaters has stratified into like super cheap
00:34:14.480micro production that then make a lot of money and then these massive 10-pole blockbusters
00:34:19.460that then we have this impulse like all of the the energy around rom-coms doesn't go away
00:34:25.460goes into moves somewhere else yes it goes into series cable straight to vod
00:34:33.640movies hallmark movies which there's more than ever before and other
00:34:39.100other networks have tried to emulate the hallmark movie formula and then i i do think that there's
00:34:46.680probably some spillover you're like oh i can't like you know when i was growing up some of my
00:34:51.940rom-com energy or like my romance energy was really firmly directed towards like watching
00:34:57.520whether it was like I don't know my best friend's wedding on repeat right like there was some of
00:35:03.460that that was going on um and I think if that's not available to you and you do find it in books
00:35:09.760then maybe it stays in books and drives that market a little bit more but it's I don't think
00:35:13.880it's as simple as yeah okay so we got a lot of questions about book talks involvement
00:35:21.200For people who don't know, BookTok refers to the community of readers and reviewers on TikTok, which can often make or break a book by word of mouth. It can just lead to an explosion of interest in a book. Let's hear this question from Mary.
00:35:36.720Do you think that the existence of BookTok is actually helping to de-stigmatize the genre of romance for the broader public? And is that something that we actually need? Or is it enough to feel safe and seen by other members of the romance reading community?
00:35:52.380Fascinating question. So how would you chart if we had to, like, stigma, chart the stigma of reading romance over the years?
00:35:59.140Yeah. Oh, well, charting the stigma, that's a big question. But what's interesting is that this stigma of romance, which was huge in the 80s, romance is the world's most stigmatized genre.
00:36:16.880Everyone loves to make fun of romance and romance writers.
00:36:46.880But then through TikTok, they've been exposed to, oh, romance is not what I thought it was.
00:36:55.120Romance is like smart, funny, witty characters.
00:37:01.100And BookTok has been huge in the rise of LGBTQ plus romance because suddenly all these young readers who thought romance is just for, you know.1.00
00:37:14.860trying to think of a nicer way to say that, but why? Yeah, they're like, Oh, I see. It's really
00:37:22.240different than I thought it was. And then that creates this virtuous cycle, where younger readers
00:37:27.860want things, and they they want more of these great books, and they're actually willing to go
00:37:33.720out and buy them. And so publishers are totally responding to what's happening on book talk.
00:37:41.480Do you think that people just generally, not just younger people, but even older people are more open about reading romance now than they used to be?
00:37:49.020I think they are. One, because there has been so much coverage in the media about how romance has changed, about the fact that it is this rich play space to imagine happily ever afters for almost anybody. And it's fun.
00:38:08.440So yes, I think that has spilled over.
00:38:11.120But the growth in romance readers that we've seen in the last five years, really since
00:38:16.600the pandemic, has largely been in the 20-something age group.
00:38:21.800Previously, romance was most read by women in their late 30s, 40s.
00:45:23.100They will not return a phone call from most authors.
00:45:27.580And RWA and organized romance authors have been influential in making some small but important changes at Amazon, like making it easier for authors who, for some reason, their books aren't appearing, for those books to appear.
00:45:46.440Amazon's algorithms do not show Black authors nearly as often as they show white authors, even when they should.
00:45:55.280RWA has worked really hard on that.0.73
00:45:57.580The Authors Guild has also been really instrumental in standing up to Amazon's monopoly power.
00:46:05.120Yeah, I think that it's one of those cases, too, where, and I deal with this all the time,
00:46:09.160honestly, with Substack, which is where this podcast is published, like,
00:46:12.840you have these tools that make it easier to wrest back control from the industry at large.
00:46:18.800But sometimes you have to push back against the maker of those tools.