Dangerous Books For Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained Read online

  Whether the angle is favorable or scathing, there is at least a conversation about the genre, its values, and what it means about the everyday lives of real people. Finally.

  Romance novels: available wherever drugs are sold!

  A 2009 Time magazine featured an article on the genre. This is how it began:

  Romance novels, an inexpensive escape for women, are helping some publishers hide from the worst of the recession. Frequently an impulse purchase, mass-market paperback romances, often bought on the run at drugstores and supermarkets, cost $4.75 to $5.99—a bargain when hardcover editions are typically $25 or more.[31]

  The snark packed into the paragraph is marvelous—but presumably not done maliciously by author, as she is simply echoing popular perceptions. First, these novels are immediately and repeatedly classified as cheap—both in terms of price point and in comparison to other offerings on the market, like hardcover books and the sort of books that appear in hardcover (most often nonfiction or literary fiction).

  There is also the implication that they are substandard literature, not simply because of the low price but because frequently they are not even purchased from a bookstore. Where romances are sold may be part of the reason they are considered low-brow, crappy lit.

  Until recently, bookstores have been the largest source for romance buying, and the mass-market paperback was the format of choice. Though there is a long history of developments leading up to it, Robert DeGraff , a founder of Pocket Books, is credited with creating the widespread distribution of mass-market paperbacks, which contributed to the massive growth of the romance industry. He was “aware of a relative lack of bookstores in the United States and of the general population’s feeling that those establishments were intimidating and inhospitable, and concluded that books would have to be marketed somewhere else if they were to be sold on a grand scale.”[32] That somewhere else was drugstores and grocery stores, and DeGraff used magazine distributors to get the books out. They were priced at “a mere 25 cents.”[33] Not only were these books cheap and not sold in bookstores, but also the audience was (or perceived to be) intimidated by serious hardcovers and bookstores.

  Harlequin built on this to enormous success by putting their products into retail outlets where their customers, women, frequently shopped: grocery stores and drugstores. “Harlequin pioneered paperback sales in supermarkets across the continent...Once this started to take off, the growth of Harlequin became exponential.”[34] A woman could purchase a romance novel (or more) and disguise it as part of her grocery budget from a husband who presumably wouldn’t condone spending on such trashy books.

  In the 1970s, Harlequin built their business and readership by giving out free romance novels in Kotex boxes (yes, sales for the sanitary pads increased), Ajax cleanser, laundry detergent, and cosmetics and even at McDonald’s one Mother’s Day.[35] While these tactics built their brand, they also associated romance with things that are “shameful,” dirty, need to be covered up, or cheap, unhealthy junk food.

  In fact, cheap fiction and drugstores have an even longer history together. In his book, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, William St Clair writes about the rural English communities that relied on chapmen (also called walking stationers, peddlers, hawkers, and “mercuries”) to distribute books and supply “scissors, ribbons, perfumes, medicines, and other small manufactured goods which were not made locally,” all of which sounds like the stuff you’d find at a drugstore today. “Indeed, the alliance between books and pharmaceuticals, industries that shared many economic characteristics, operated continuously from the age of the manuscript to the twentieth century.”[36]

  Because these men carried their wares on their backs, they often offered small books such as ballads and chapbooks for purchase. St Clair points out that “the popular rural market was therefore concentrated on the lower tranches of print which included abridgments and books sold in parts or serially in ‘numbers.’” The link between lightweight, cheap books and less educated rural readers predates stereotypes about drugstore books in flyover states.

  The association of drugstores and grocery stores with romance novels helped create certain associations: These are addictive books (available wherever drugs are sold), purchased by love-starved women (of course a love-starved women would fill up with a love story from the supermarket). And by extension, it has driven unflattering stereotypes about the romance reader.

  One of the biggest retail outlets today for print romance novels are mass merchandise retailers like Walmart, Target, Costco, and so on. These stores are known for their massive quantities of cheaply made products; their whole mission is to have the lowest price and the cheapest stuff money can buy. Stores like these and how they advertize have fetishized cheap. The customers, whether in truth or not, also don’t have the best reputation (ahem, the cruel www.peopleofwalmart.com). And this is where romance novels are sold in huge quantities. It’s guilt by association (even if it’s not something to feel guilty about).

  As with drugstores, the mass merchandise retailers are also stores where people don’t deliberately go to buy books, which means that romances are likely to be impulse purchases, as the Time article describes. It’s true that 27 percent of romance novel purchases are impulse buys and 30 percent of purchasers planned to buy a book but not the specific one they walked out of the store with.[37]

  Romance readers and impulse seem to go hand in hand and that suggests a lack of forethought, planning, or anticipation on the part of the purchaser. The implication with all this “impulsive” reading is that the reader of romance cannot control their passions and desires—a long-held fear about women. The lack of thought and reason implied in an impulse purchase also drives home the association that these are not thought-provoking books; they’re dumb, cheap crap you buy in a hurry, read quickly, and throw away.

  By 2012, supermarkets and grocery stores accounted for just 3 percent of romance sales. Mass merchandisers accounted for 17 percent, bookstores for 9 percent, and a whopping 46 percent of romance novels were purchased online.[38]

  When romance novels are sold in bookstores, they are often found in chains like Barnes & Noble or the late Borders and Waldenbooks. These stores are commonly found in shopping malls and strip malls, places for the masses to shop. Now, of course, we all bemoan the disappearance of the bookstore, even if it was in the mall.

  When I asked nonromance readers where they saw romance novels for sale, independent bookstores ranked lowest. Way down low. Indeed, Bowker Market Research shows that in 2012, independent bookstores had only 2 percent of the romance market share.[39] Independent bookstores, of course, are where the smart, literary books are hand-sold by intellectual booksellers—or at least that is the perception. They are individual, unique, quirky; they are not mass. They are not where you expect romances to be sold, and often they aren’t.

  That’s not to say that all independent bookstores ignore a “low-brow” but lucrative fiction. WORD Brooklyn is an independent bookstore in hipster central, and they carry romance novels after working with a local romance author and publisher to develop and curate their selection. But for many buyers at independent bookstores, it’s not just a snobby attitude that keeps these books off the shelves: Some just don’t know where to start when it comes to stocking romance since it’s outside of their expertise or reading interest. At least, that’s the perception of Jenn Northington, the former event manager at WORD, whom I spoke to on the phone about independent bookstores and romance. “Some are being snooty. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. It’s very easy to feel lost and not know what on earth you should focus on,” she says. “It’s a specialized knowledge base most people don’t have access to.”

  Because WORD is a tiny shop, there is no dedicated romance section; instead romance novels are shelved with all the other fiction. Literary fiction, romance, mysteries, and sci-fi are all together on the shelf. “Once we started carrying romance and talking actively about it, we noticed a lo
t of women—usually professionals or grad students—would grab them in addition to picking up the new Meg Wolitzer or Donna Tartt,” Northington says. “They wanted reading that was going to engage them but also be entertaining and a break from their work. Once we made it acceptable inside the store confines to read all of those things at the same time, they did.” Placement plays a huge role in how romance is represented and what messages are sent about its quality and readership, and in this instance we see how simple placement can give “permission” to read the books without it being a disparaging statement on one’s intellect.

  Shelf placement can also have a profound impact on the visibility and success of a book or genre, as we see when it comes to romances featuring diverse characters. In a typical large bookstore, romance novels featuring, say, black characters might be shelved in the section devoted to African American Studies, even though its readers are more likely to be found browsing the romance section for a fun novel to take on vacation. For a reader craving a pirate romance, she might not care if the pirate is black, white, gay, straight, or whatever, as long as there’s a love story that ends happily. But if she can’t find it, she can’t buy it.

  Separate sections can give the impression that certain types of subgenres of romance “don’t sell” when in fact they just aren’t placed where their audience is looking for them. This can lead to a vicious cycle where authors avoid writing these books and publishers avoid bringing them to market, even though there’s a readership hungry for them. As a result, interested readers might be prevented from finding books easily that they might enjoy, whether it’s an interracial romance or just a romance novel at all—even if, or especially if, it’s not something they might deliberately seek out.

  It’s worth it for an independent bookseller to incorporate romance. Women are the biggest book buyers: They purchase 65 percent of books and account for 58 percent of dollars spent. A typical book buyer—a woman, with an average age of 41, a college degree, and income of 50,000 or higher—looks a lot like the demographics for the romance buyer.[40] Northington points out that they’ll sell more books at romance events than ones featuring books and authors of other genres. “People who come to a romance event come prepared to buy books.” In an age when independent bookstores are facing constant pressures to survive, WORD in Brooklyn has opened a second location.

  It’s impossible to talk about selling books without mentioning Amazon. While it started as an online bookstore, it is now, like Walmart, a place where you can buy diapers, tampons, drugs, and...a 99-cent romance novel. Between the company these books keep on the virtual shelves and with that oh-so-easy one-click purchase button, the association of romance novels as cheap, impulsively purchased commodities is only reinforced further.

  While it may not help romance’s reputation, there are some real bonuses to being sold in a wide variety of retailers. For one thing, they’re available in a wide variety of retailers. As we see stores come (Amazon, iBooks, Smashwords, Scribd, Oyster Books, etc.) and go (Borders, Walden Books, various independents), the romance industry has adapted to new vendors and largely kept up their stellar sales even when some outlets have gone bust. That’s not to say the publishing industry hasn’t taken some major hits to their sales and bottom lines by the loss of some traditional outlets, but having books available in many places means more books can be sold. For authors, having more books out there creates more chances to build a readership that will follow you from book to book...or retailer to retailer.

  One of the most profound effects of being so cheap and sold in a wide variety of retailers is that romance novels are readily available to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to a library or bookstore—or who cannot afford a $25 hardcover. This is a GREAT thing. Everyone deserves affordable and uplifting entertainment. Everyone deserves the opportunity to have access to books and the education they provide, even if it’s “just” improved language and reading skills (which are more likely to be developed if one has something entertaining and fun to read). But then again, that’s what they were afraid of, isn’t it?

  What does a girl have to do to get her book reviewed around here?

  Nora Roberts (and her alter ego J. D. Robb) has written more than 214 books and more than 191 them have been New York Times bestsellers. Nora’s books have spent a combined 198 weeks at the number one spot on the bestseller list (which adds up to 3.5 years) and 58 books debuted at #1. These numbers are the latest available as of this writing and the numbers are going higher by the minute.[41]

  She has had only two New York Times book reviews of her work.

  Jennifer Weiner, a bestselling author and advocate for the equal representation of women’s fiction, has noticed that this isn’t just limited to Nora Roberts; there is a lack of reviews in prestigious publications for authors of all types of women’s commercial fiction. Or even just writers who happen to have vaginas. Weiner makes a point to shed light on this discrepancy and advocate for more attention to women’s fiction. She also gets to the heart of why it matters: “Declining to cover the books that women read is another way of making women invisible—women writers, women readers. It silences voices, erases an audience, sends the message that women’s stories don’t matter (or matter only enough to show up in the Style section).”[42]

  An organization of women in literary arts, VIDA, keeps count of gender balance (or imbalances) at major media publications. In 2013 (the last year numbers are available), the New York Times reviewed 482 male authors and 332 female authors. But we shouldn’t just keep picking on the New York Times just because they happen to be the most visible and prestigious publication. The Atlantic, which has a robust “Sexes” section and has published some amazing articles on the women’s experience, reviewed 3 female authors and 17 male authors. VIDA has more data for a variety of publications available, and the numbers show that overall more men get their work reviewed as well as do the reviewing. And this isn’t just about romance; it’s about the uphill battles women authors face, even when they’re writing in more critically respectable genres. In this very competitive environment, romance doesn’t stand a chance.

  Even publications that seem to have an audience that would love to read reviews of romance novels shy away from it. Two come to mind: Oprah and People. Both cover mainstream women’s fiction, but it’s very rare to see a mass-market paperback get a review in either of these publications.

  In the absence of Respectable Reviews from Established Publications, there has been an explosion of blogs devoted to romance book reviews. There are big, established ones like Dear Author, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Heroes & Heartbreakers, or Happy Ever After, the blog from USA Today. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller blogs with their own communities.

  It makes sense for romance authors to promote their books and seek reviews from places that serve an audience of devoted romance readers. Why should an author even bother pitching to the big media that probably wouldn’t feature the book anyway? For example, it might not make sense for an individual romance author to pitch People magazine on the third novel in their six-book series, if it’s not already a bestseller. But the result of shying away from pitching to the biggies is that those editors aren’t receiving a significant number of pitches from romance authors that would make them sit up and say, “Hey, there’s a big audience here” or “Hey, I think I spot a trend!”

  And when romance authors talk just among ourselves, we’re not engaging with new-to-romance readers and bringing them into the fold or showing a different side of the genre than the tired stereotypes.

  It can be argued that if readers are able to find reviews of books they want to read, why does it matter where those reviews are posted? “I know there’s a part of the feminist world that is like, ‘Hey, screw ’em, we’ll do our own thing over here,’ and I can see there’s a value in that,” says Erin Belieu, cofounder of VIDA, in an interview with Mother Jones. “But a kind of nudgy part of me thinks: No. I want access, and I want my
daughters to have access to the exact same thing, because we all know there’s no such thing as separate but equal.”[43]

  When an independent bookstore puts romance on the shelf with all the other fiction, the association declares, “It’s all okay! Happy reading!” In contrast, a significant lack of regular reviews of an entire genre of fiction—and the largest segment of fiction, which is the largest segment of books sold—declares that these works and these readers are not worthy of participation in bigger cultural conversations. And these books should be included: “Genre fiction is a great way to comment on the world without being too on the nose,” points out Petra Mayer, an editor at NPR Books, who has championed coverage of romance there. Excluding women’s fiction suggests that women’s interests aren’t worthy of discussion and that women’s voices don’t deserve to be heard. “In terms of combating pervasive institutional bias around stories around women—that would be why I want to fight for romance to have a wider audience,” says Mayer.

  A lack of substantial reviews of women’s fiction also makes a subtle statement about who these publications think their audience is, which ends up reinforcing the stereotype of the stupid book, stupid reader. Jane Litte, founder of the blog Dear Author notes, “When you review, you’re starting a conversation about the book. When you publicly review, you’re starting a conversation about the book with people you perceive as your intended audience.” To be fair, perhaps romance readers aren’t the audience of the Paris Review or the New York Times. But is that because they don’t find coverage of books they’re interested in reading, so they don’t bother to read the New York Times? Mayer points out that NPR has done audience research that shows they do want to see reviews of science fiction, fantasy, and a little bit of romance.