How Romance Writers Rewrite Publishing’s Rules

Culture Study Podcast

Arts, Society & Culture

4.5 • 789 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How are romance writers — and the recent romance boom — chipping away at the norms of Big Publishing? Does self-publishing lead to more diverse authors and characters? How has Amazon both expanded and limited the market? That’s what we’re grappling with in today’s episode.Back in June, romance novelist Nisha Sharma broke down all the tropes and trends of contemporary romance. Next month, we’ll have the owners of a romance bookstore explaining the the big (and complicated) business of romance-only bookselling. And today, we have Christine Larson, author of Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, walking us through the labor dynamics of romance publishing. If you like thinking about different ways of organizing labor, you’ll find all of this fascinating — and if you’re a romance fan, it’ll make you think a lot about which books end up in front of you and why. You’re gonna love it.Show Notes:Find Love in the Time of Self-Publishing here and learn more about Christine’s work hereJanice Radway’s foundational scholarly work on romance: Reading the RomanceChris’s recent romance rec: We Could Be So Good by Cat SebastianA good summary from 2021 of what went down within the Romance Writers of America organizationSince we recorded this episode, RWA has filed for bankruptcyWe’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:WHAT’S GOING ON WITH PODCASTS! This is kinda meta, but we’re doing a whole episode about the current state of the podcast industry, so you can take that general theme in any direction you’d like.Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-houseFor our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCEArtificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)Contemporary ideas of self-careBuy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand marketAnything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segmentYou can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)For today’s discussion: Did this episode change your thinking on creative labor? What’d we miss? And if you have personal experience with self-publishing, we’d love to hear your perspective!

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's so much that we can learn by looking at both romance novels and the people who write them.
0:07.0	The community of romance writers is a microcosm of American society.
0:13.4	It's full of controversy.
0:16.1	It's full of people who want the best for the world.
0:20.7	It's also a place where imagination can help us envision
0:26.5	the world that we want. Yeah, like it's a place where utopia is imaginable. That's always what I
0:34.0	have loved about thinking about the purposes of romance and of entertainment more
0:40.8	broadly, but like the idea that, oh, there could be a world in which women's pleasure is
0:46.7	taken seriously. Exactly.
0:57.8	This is the Culture Study podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
1:04.5	And I'm Christine Larson, professor at University of Colorado Boulder, an author of Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, How Romance Writers Change the Rules of Publishing and Success.
1:09.9	As 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.
1:17.2	And we're trying to figure out what it says about the world we live in.
1:19.7	And today is part two of a conversation about romance novels.
1:23.9	Back in June, we talked to romance novelist Nisha Sharma about tropes, about diversity and representation on the page, about whether you should be concerned when reading romance novels makes you question your love life, so many things.
1:36.5	Part three of this series will be out next month, and it'll be all about the business of selling romance.
1:42.9	But today, we're looking specifically at the readers
1:45.6	and writers and the publishing industry itself. So I am so excited to talk to you, Chris, about the work
1:51.7	that you have done analyzing this industry, the larger romance community, the ethos of care and of work
1:57.5	that is all around romance writing. And then also because you are a cultural scholar
2:02.6	as well, we can think about the purposes of romance and why romance is the way that it is
2:06.9	and some of these larger questions that our readers and listeners have posed for us. So let's start
	...

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