I enjoyed reading the following article yesterday. Then again, it’s fun to read someone else’s impressions of National, a conference that leaves me (and 2300 other attendees,) exhausted but motivated every year!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2008/09/02/onthejob.DTL
Drea Rousseau was contemplating her creamy white silk lounge outfit while Rafael Salinas conducted business with the assassin he’d hired. She should have gone with shell pink, she thought. The assassin made an indecent proposal and looked at her with that cold, unblinking gaze. Icy fingers of sheer panic laced around her spine and –
At this point I closed the book and shook hands with its author, the sweet and unfathomably bestselling romance novelist Linda Howard. One feels dirty immediately reducing an author to numbers, but Howard’s are remarkable. Her books, which she spends eight weeks writing, bring her as much as $2 million apiece, according to other authors I spoke with. By my count, that’s about $35,000 a day, if she worked continuously during those eight weeks. I wanted to know what being a romance writer in America was like.
I was in luck. Howard was one of a great many women — plus a handful of men — who’d descended on San Francisco for the annual Romance Writers of America conference. Like, say, NASCAR, the industry is roundly dismissed as low-brow, and like NASCAR, the romance industry cries its way to a very large bank. Last year its 8,000 or so new titles constituted the largest share of the consumer book market, with revenue estimated to be $1.375 billion. By comparison, classic literary fiction brought in $466 million. If you read a book in 2007, there’s a 20 percent chance it was a romance novel.
I have two thoughts on this: First of all, I met Linda Howard two years ago at the author signing benefiting literacy that starts every National. I stood in line for forty-five minutes because one of my girlfriends back home asked if I could possibly get one of Linda’s books autographed for her. Linda not only remembered me, she remembered my name, and greeted me again this year. She’s a sweetie, tremendously modest, and yeah, I read like she does. <G>
Romance authors laugh together about the stuff people say to us: “When are you going to write a “real” book?”, (it takes just as much work to write a good romance novel as literary fiction or any other genre,) “Does your husband/family/friends know you write these things?”, (yes, my whole family knows, and my husband is very proud and supportive,) and our all-time favorite, “How do you do your research?” (my favorite comeback, delivered with an innocent smile: “My husband is tired, but happy.”)
Yes, we’re laughing our way to the bank, some of us more than others. At the same time, I would never do this if I didn’t enjoy it. I like happy endings. I like chronicling my characters’ falling in love. It’s the most transformative thing that’s ever happened to me; why wouldn’t I want to write about it?
I’m halfway through the first draft of “Love and Football” as of yesterday, and the scenes are popping into my head faster than I can write them down. It must be finished by October 1, so I’ll be writing more than usual this month. I’ll meet up with lots more romance authors at Greater Seattle RWA’s conference in October, too.
Have a great weekend!
-S
