Romance Writers of America—the trade organization of the romance genre—just wrapped up its 35th annual conference. 2,400 attendees, most of them women, descended upon the Marriott Marquis in Times Square for panels, networking, networking, drinking, and more networking.
Folks in the romance business often talk about how supportive it is. Which seems to be the case in many ways—every year big-name, bestselling writers teach workshops on craft to rooms packed with relative newbies, patiently answering any questions about tropes or plot twists or characterization. There was a lot of socializing happening in the hotel bar and at the Junior’s next door. And there’s a strong sense of comradeship against a world that’s all too willing to dismiss the genre.
But it’s not a simple lovefest, either. Don’t be fooled by all the abs; these women (and it is largely women) come ready to do business. The conference closed with a dressy ceremony for the RITA awards, romance publishing’s highest honor; waiting on every seat as the takeaway gift was a business card holder, emblazoned with the RWA logo. RWA is a professional organization, with annual dues of $95, and the hotel costs alone for the national conference ain’t cheap. Attendees line up for talks with titles like “The Skinny on Police Procedurals” and “Blog Your Way to Better Sales” and “Book Launches: From Zero to Wow! When You Have No Established Audience.” RWA has been pretty closely linked with traditional publishing, and so major imprints hold open houses on manuscripts they’d like to acquire and throw schmoozy parties for their authors. But after years of shifts in the business, there were also a number of panels on hybrid and self-publishing, which were, if possible, even more entrepreneurial. One two-hour workshop—”C-Level: Acting as the Executive”— featured a detailed Powerpoint Presentation and a six-page handout detailing how to draw up a business plan, market analysis, and marketing plan.
And yet, as the attendees gathered, an article appeared on a New York Times blog, considering the perspective of the authors who, frankly, get dumped upon:
“This community of authors is all about being egalitarian and inclusive,” Gregson said in a phone interview. “You see New York Times bestselling authors teaching brand-new authors how to write a query letter, how to get an agent.” Their group emails and listservs are peppered with “all kinds of smiley face emoticons.”
Yet for many of these women, “the most distinctive feature of their professional lives,” Gregson writes, is feeling “belittled.”
It’s true that romance is often depicted as fundamentally silly, with—of course—Fabio as the crowning absurdity. But why is this particular form of entertainment so consistently a punchline? Why are these women treated as a such a joke? Even thriller writers and Tom Clancy wannabes don’t get so much shit. It’s fairly obvious at a basic level why books written by women about such gendered topics as feelings and relationships wouldn’t be taken even remotely seriously—sexism—but to get a deeper understanding, it makes sense to start with the great romance publishing boom of the early 1980s.
Said boom kicked off with the 1972 publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s hugely successful The Flame and the Flower. It was the Fifty Shades of Gray of its time, easily matching E.L. James’s novel in sheer impact. The years that followed brought big sales, the growth in first historical then category romance, the creation of RWA for writers and Romantic Times magazine for fans, and the debut of American mainstays like Nora Roberts, arguably the genre’s biggest success story, with enough instant name recognition to appear in airport bookstores across America. Romance became a big business, which draws media attention. This corner of the publishing industry got coverage in places like the still-prestigious Life, complete with photos by Mary Ellen Mark. This 1979 Washington Post profile of Sweet Savage Love author Rosemary Rogers, who describes her writing process, gives you a good feel for the tone of a lot of that coverage:
“Well, that’s exactly what it’s like in my mind movies. I can see backgrounds, pick out tiny gestures, hear the characters breathing. When I’m having one, it can last the whole night, I can’t type fast enough. I make a lot of typos.”
All this is said in measured, faintly exotic cadences. The narrow, angular, olive-toned body — braless and clothed in a suit of pure milk-chocolate silk — falls along the sofa, one spiked heel tucked beneath the other, an arm slumming elegantly down her hip. The other hand plays with a lime drowning in a glass of Perrier: Cleopatra on a new burnished barge.
“I love the feel of silk on my skin,” she says, shivering with delight. “Oooh.”
To be fair, the whole piece reads like Rogers was playing the role of “Princess of Passion Pulp” to the hilt. But many journalists assigned to cover the trend played up the purple prose and threw a spotlight on the loudest characters. One popular trick was to parody (badly) the distinctive style of a Harlequin category romance. Reporters sent to cover RWA itself always seemed to emerge a little shocked at how businesslike the atmosphere was. For instance, here’s the lede for a 1997 Knight-Ridder News Service piece:
The Marriott World Center resort complex in Orlando rises up out of the Earth like a space colony in the cloudless night, its 28-story tower glowing with white lights and throbbing with air conditioners. The caressing air wafts past the balconies of this glittering monument to human leisure; fountains drip endlessly into azure pools while young men in wine-colored uniforms open limousine doors for women in black sheaths…. By the time their convention ended this week, more than 1,400 romance writers had gathered to exchange business cards bearing pansies, spend an allotted eight minutes pitching heroines to prospective agents, stay up until 3 a.m. like sorority sisters and nibble enough heart-shaped gingerbread cakes and chocolate mousse to send all of Miami into a coma.
The piece goes on to describe the atmosphere at the organization’s 17th annual convention—the year’s superstar Janet Dailey was accused of plagiarizing superstar Nora Roberts. “You see, even in the midst of drama, romance writers are hard-working and prolific, and more than a little interesting.”
All this coverage (plus years of aggressive advertising by Harlequin, of course) meant that by the mid 1980s, Americans were very well acquainted with the genre—or at least some depiction of it. And so it quickly surfaced in pop culture. For instance, this 1983 spoof commercial from HBO’s Not Necessarily the News: