I’ve got lots of questions this month 
Recently I visited my local indie/UBS and actually had enough time to chat for a few minutes instead of dashing in grabbing a couple of books and running out to pick the child up at school or get to work.
It seems her customers are complaining–there’s not enough historical romances to pick from. I know, if we’ve discussed this once, we’ve discussed it 1000 times, romance is cyclical. Historicals aren’t hot, now it’s paranormals and romantic suspense that people are gravitating to, but are they?
Not everyone reads across the entire romance genre and for those who prefer a good historical or contemporary what are they reading? Are there enough choices in these sub-genres to keep them satisfied. I’m not so sure. My sister is an avid historical romance reader, and she’s moved on to other things, tired of wallpaper historicals and Regency “Misses”. How many readers have moved on to “other things”?
Are paranormals, romantic suspense and wallpaper Regency historicals the only things getting written? Doubtful, or does it just seem that way because it’s what publishers are putting out? Have western or medieval romance authors simple lost interest in writing these time periods or have their agents and publishers pushed them in other directions in order to keep getting published? We’re told no, that authors are free to write what they want, but does that mean they’re getting published?
Pamela Morsi guest blogged with me last month and I was really surprised to hear she had to fight to get Simple Jess published. Simple Jess is one of my all time favorite historcal romances. It’s not a typical romance, but it’s still a beautiful story. Do books that are different, like Simple Jess, survive in today’s publishing environment?
This left me wondering how many great books never get published because they’re not what’s HOT right now. Where do these books go? Do they sit on some slush pile never read by the public? Do agents hold on to them waiting for the right time and place to push them, or are they in an aspiring author’s bottom draw in the hope that some publisher in the future is willing to take a chance with something different?
Are the books that don’t fit in the current mold lost to readers forever?
No related posts.
Could I be more sick of the “I can’t find anything normal to read” discussion? Dear Author just did a post on the numbers yesterday.
40% category/series romance
17% historical
16% contemporary
9% paranormal
7% romantic suspense
6% inspirational
5% other (includes chick lit, young adult, erotic romance, women’s fiction)
Anyone who can’t find historical or contemporary, of which there are approximately twice as many as paranormal or suspense, clearly isn’t looking in the right place.
Everybody has to fight to get a book published. There are millions that will never get published, many of which may be good books, simply because the individual going through the pile doesn’t get excited enough upon reading them to follow through, or because the author isn’t persistent enough to keep throwing the manuscript in front of people after the first few rejections. The first thing any editor says they’re looking for is something fresh, different, and groundbreaking, so they’re obviously not committed only to what’s “hot” at the moment, particularly since a year or two is going to elapse between seeing a manuscript and getting it into print, and who knows what will be “hot” by then? Writing what’s “hot” carries no more of a guarantee of publication than writing outside the box, and I don’t think that environment is any different than it’s ever been.
Trends come and go, subgenres become popular while others fall out of fashion. Historical romance had the lion’s share of the market for a very long time; from the seventies until well into the nineties, ever since Kathleen Woodiwiss, Laurie McBain and other vanguard authors made it a trend (I remember being unable to find anything in romance at the bookstore but historicals and Harlequins, that’s how old I am.) The paranormal romance trend will be fortunate to last half as long as initial wave of historical romance did.
Back in 1998, I was told I would never get my Darkyn series published. No one was buying vampire fiction, and the few authors who were publishing it were exceptions. Romantic suspense was all the rage, and that was all publishers wanted to see. Because I like to pay the bills, I shelved those proposals and tried pitching other ideas I had that I thought would fit better into the market. They did and I sold them. Most multi-genre authors don’t trash their unpopular ideas after they can’t find a market; we wait until the timing is better.
Publishing is an endurance game, and staying in the biz long enough to outlast a strong trend is tough. Many authors aren’t comfortable writing in multiple genres, and can’t afford to wait around until their specialty becomes popular again. Since reader purchases control what is popular and what isn’t, it’s out of our hands.
I can say that I’m primarily a historical romance reader, but my purchases have declined drastically (to like…not even purchasing a new historical and choosing to borrow it from the library) because of the wallpaperness and the obsession with jumping on trends and certain types of “characters”–period. I switched to contemporary romance and romantic suspense, while really just reading a lot of mainstream fiction and mysteries.
As for the statistics Kerry, sure 17% of the market is made up of historical romance, but flipping through the RT issues for this year, about 5% of what’s been reviewed has appealed to me and an even smaller amount intrigued me enough to actually purchase the book. Secondly the market is supported by the big dogs, the superleaders like Kleypas, James, Quinn, et al, so even taking other mid-list and buried treasure authors into consideration, how can we genuinely take a look at those statistics when that 17% could be made up of readers purchasing the very well-known authors?
As for the editor looking for something fresh and new, I believe that to an extent. If that wasn’t the case, J.R. Ward’s series wouldn’t have kicked the desire for huge, dramatic, alpha vampire series’ into overdrive. But can you say that Ward’s books would have been this big of a hit–or even acquired–before this craze for paranormals? What about the continued prevalence of Regency Historicals? Or even the sudden shift into the “Victorian” era? Something “fresh,different and groundbreaking” is also about timing, otherwise we would see a smaller percentage of books clustered around the current trends.
I don’t think that environment is any different than it’s ever been.
That’s not precisely true– at least with respect to traditional print houses. So many of the smaller independents who had a history of taking chances on the more “out of the box” manuscripts, have been bought and folded into the bigger corporate houses. (There are currently five major houses that have absorbed countless numbers of smaller houses and turned them into imprints.) Once that happens, the smaller houses often have combined editorial meetings where the decisions on manuscripts are made, so if your story has gone in front of and been rejected by Editor A at Small Imprint A and they share an editorial meeting with Editors B & C from their respective imprints, that makes it two more imprints you automatically have to cross off your submissions list because of the policy most houses have of not resubmitting to the same house. There are ways around it, of course, but by and large, that’s a rule that still holds.
And yes, the editors say they’re looking for fresh and different and that may well be, but when it comes down to it, the PTB at the houses are looking for what sells, so in the end, you’ll have more of the same being bought until the demand has died down or the quality of the product becomes so poor as to drive the readers to something else– yet readers are creatures of habit. If they get tired of vampires, they’re going to look for werewolves or ghosts or whatever else might feed their particular need.
Of course, I’m only talking by my own personal experience and what I’ve observed and learned in the last six years.
What’s fascinating to me is that two of the biggest buzz books of the last year were both out of the box novels published by small independent publishers: Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen and published by Algonquin and The Pirate’s Daughter by Margaret Cezaire- Thompson published by Unbridled Books.
Well, if you want different,
go to small/ePress.
That’s where my search to get my mutant business/romance novels published ended up
(and I couldn’t be happier).
As for historicals…
Margaret Moore is my favorite Medieval Romance author and she puts out a couple of high quality (and different, each one is different) novels a year.
Lisa Kleypas has finally told the story of Cam in Mine Til Midnight.
Michele Ann Young has her American Title final novel out No Regrets (with a plus sized heroine, hooray!).
First of all, I’d like to point out that it is not clear from my reading of the statistics from this month’s RWA magazine, where Harlequin Historicals fits in. Are they single title or are they in the category/series romance category. HH are single title in a series wrapper. So the percentages may vary slightly.
Second, I do think sometimes aspiring writers are not as aware they should about cycles in publishing. The figures the RWA gives are for what was published in 2006. My publishers (Harlequin) are currently looking at 2009 publishing slots. These may or may not reflect the same figures as the RWA stats. The mix in the romance genre is always changing. For example HH was the only historical series that Harlequin published in 2006 but there is now Steeple Hill Historical Inspired and I believe they are test marketing Historical Blazes (an outgrowth of their successful time travel books) as well as the Harlequin Historicals.
Third, certainly, I know at Harlequin Historical — the publishing slots in the North American market are divided up into Georgian/Regency/Victorian, American Western and Unusual Historicals. The UK market is slightly different. I don’t know the mix at Steeple Hill but think it is more heavily weighted towards Westerns. The back bone of the HH publishing programme remain Western and Regency but they do maintain a healthy stable of medieval writers (for example). They also publish a wide variety of styles and depending on your own ideas, you may find certain authors more wall paper history than others. The editors are always looking for strong manuscripts that fulfill the promise HH gives to its readers. And as far as I am aware, the competition is as tough as it has always been.
For more romantic Historicals, check out Michelle Moran’s blog-
historicalfictionauthorinterviews.blogspot.com
and Clean Reads which has a lot of Young Adult Historicals-
cleanreads.blogspot.com
I can tell you exactly what editors want — something that hasn’t been done a thousand times before that they know absolutely will sell like hotcakes.
And yes, that’s sarcasm.
While I honestly don’t think there are huge numbers of wonderful manuscripts going begging due to bad timing or whatever, I have no doubt there are quite a few. Apropos of Jordan’s wonderful post yesterday, not everyone who writes exactly what they want finds a home for that book (which makes Jordan’s success story all the sweeter — you go, girl!). And not all authors are comfortable with the small or e-press route, if that means too few readers will be able to easily find the book even after it’s published. Because how many of those lamenting readers have no clue that perhaps what they want *does* exist, but if it’s not right smack in their faces when they walk into a bookstore, it might as well not even exist? If they’re looking in a UBS, for instance, it’s highly unlikely they’re going to run across a copy of something that make have only seen a thousand copies in print. And they certainly won’t find e-books there!
I agree with Caridad, though — it’s definitely harder to place almost anything these days. Rejections are all over the map and completely contradictory. Write to trend and you run the risk of missing the wave; write outside it and you’re likely to get an “I have no idea what to do with this” rejection. It would seem that luck and timing have much more to do with selling than talent, which can be discouraging, if one lets it be.
The bad news is that, yes, there are perfectly good books that may never see the light of day for one reason or another. The good news is that there are always those stories about authors whose time (and book) finally does come; those who bucked current trends and were able to start new ones.
And, IMO, there’s still an awful lot to read out there, even if that means thinking outside the Big Box store.
According to one report more than 172,000 books were published in the U.S. in 2005. If romance accounts for even 10% of all books published (I think RWA says it accounts for 26.4% of all sales, but didn’t see any statistics for what percentage of total title output is categorized as romance) then 17,200 new romance books were published in a single year. There’s a huge quantity for a reader to choose from–they are there, but a reader has too look. Certainly not all of those new titles get equal shelf space in stores, and ebooks get none.
Perhaps it’s tougher to place mss because there’s simply more out there being shopped around than ever before? With the internet it’s easier than ever for writers to find information, support groups, associations, editors, and agents and try to sell there work.
As a reader, I firmly believe that the books I’m seeking are available, but I also believe I have to look a little harder to find them because simply going to my local bookstore isn’t always going to turn up exactly what I want. Many stores don’t carry a lot of backlist, so we only see what’s new and trendy on their shelves, and only a small percentage of the new stuff gets shelf space.
The books are out there, but readers have to look harder. If I want something new, fresh, different, or traditional and familiar, I look online on bookstore sites, blogs, google, and my local library’s web site. (IMO, B&N’s web site categorizes subgenres of romance books better than Amazon.com.) It’s there just waiting for me to find it.
My friend Karin Tabke has a medieval romance coming out next year.
I’ll admit, I don’t read a lot of historicals. I’m so behind on my TBR stack I can’t add a whole ‘nother genre. But I’ll be reading Karin’s . . . and I like westerns, though I’ve mostly read epics and non-romance westerns.
According to the Levy buyer, Historicals and Romantic suspense are their two top selling sub-genres. And Levy accounts for a LOT of mass merchandiser sales.
Ballantine had a new historical author come out in 2006 (and she won a Rita–Tracy Anne Warren) and another new historical author came out this year (Monica McCarty) and they just bought another (Tessa Dare) who will, I believe, be out in 2009.
Is it the same old same old? I don’t know because I don’t read a lot of it. But they’re publishing it.
I so loved SIMPLE JESS. I for one am so glad Pamela pushed for it to be published.
I can’t speak for everyone but maybe with the competitiveness for spots being what it is, there’s pressure not to risk rejection? I know when I proposed my series my agent warned me that we were talking a long shot and asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this. That can be a pretty daunting question and it would be logical if many authors rethought putting forth a risky proposal at this time.