The Economics of Writing Romance Novels

In the new issue of Harper’s Jesse Barron examines the romance genre, which has been little-loved by the literary world — a world that has had a tendency to embrace books by straight white male writers (recall David Gilmour telling Emily Keeler, “I’m not interested in teaching books by women”). The story is behind a paywall, but Barron has a really great post up you can read talking about how romance writers don’t care about how they are viewed because they’re making tons of money and inverting traditional models (see: 50 Shades):

In the annals of New York literary history, husbands who relied on their wives to be their scribes and editors are embarrassingly plentiful. Romance has inverted the model. Last year, the Novelists Inc. conference in Myrtle Beach featured a panel intended to teach the husbands of romance novelists how to be their wives’ assistants. “Five of the women there,” Brenda Hiatt, one of the panelists, said to me later, “their husbands have retired from their jobs.”

I should mention that most romance writers have very traditional marriages — at least until the wife starts writing. The man plies a middle- or upper-middle-class trade, and the woman works part-time or takes care of the kids. But a big royalty check has a way of altering a marriage contract.

You see a certain pattern: a husband who respects his wife’s success, knows he’s not her audience, and, not being a writer, evinces little anxiety about any of it. “Romance,” said Angela Knight, “is written by women, edited by women, sold by women, read by women.” The autonomy extends even into the marriage. Lynn Lorenz, who makes a good living writing gay erotica for women, told me that her family “loves the extra income; it’s bought us two cars, a new washer and dryer, dishwasher, microwaves, vacations.” Her husband, who works full-time, doesn’t read her books.

Barron also talks about how e-book publishing has made it easier for lesser-known authors to make a decent living:

A known author, rolling with Facebook and Goodreads promotion, can move more than a thousand units daily on Smashwords alone. A 60 percent cut of two thousand $5 e-books is $6,000. If your book sells well for a week, you’ve made $42,000. Publish two books a year, a not-unusual pace for an e-book author, and you’ve earned $84,000 before taxes. And that’s just from Smashwords — because contracts with most e-book distributors are nonexclusive, you can sell through other distributors, too, so you may have comparable revenue coming from Kobo, Amazon, and others.

Of course, it’s not that easy. Last year, John Fram wrote a piece for us detailing the difficulties he had selling his supernatural romance novel. He hasn’t given up yet.

Photo: Kate Haskell

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